'So Much the Worse for the Whites': Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution

by George Ciccariello-Maher

This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms.

Lewis Gordon - "Living Thought, Living Freedom: A Lecture in Black Existential Philosophy"

How Does the Subaltern Speak?

by Vivek Chibber, The Jacobin

Postcolonial theory discounts the enduring value of Enlightenment universalism at its own peril.

In recent decades, postcolonial theory has largely displaced Marxism as the dominant perspective among intellectuals engaged in the project of critically examining the relationship between the Western and non-Western worlds. Originating in the humanities, postcolonial theory has subse­quently become increasingly influential in history, anthropology, and the social sciences. Its rejection of the universalisms and meta-narratives associated with Enlightenment thought dovetailed with the broader turn of the intellectual left during the 1980s and 1990s.

An irrepressible openness to the universal:

I am speaking of the irrepressible presence in Fanon’s critical vision of an openness to the universal: its demand for the resumption by the colonized subject of the “universality inherent in the human condition”; its insistence that “there will be an authentic disalienation only to the degree to which things, in the most materialistic meaning of the word, will have been restored to their proper places; and, consequently, its proleptic narration of the story of the “colonial world” from the standpoint of a vision of “human things”.

-Ato Skeyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience, 1996