with C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall says of his anecdote: “I once met a Haitian intellectual who told the story of how astonished people were in Haiti to discover that Black Jacobins was written first by a black man, secondly by a West Indian. Because of course it had come back to them through London, through Paris” (qtd. in Farred, “Mapping” 227). Perhaps thanks to Toussaint, James’s work suffered another round of neglect. For instance, Paul Gilroy, whose ground-breaking conception of the “Black Atlantic” as an alternative to Western modernity charts the trajectories of the lives and works of a few monumental black figures, curiously relegates both James and Toussaint to nearly total oblivion. Though Gilroy acknowledges the importance of James, himself a diasporic intellectual, and refers to others’ writings on him (see, for example, xi, 221), his virtual omission of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution is quite puzzling: It is particularly so when one considers how the author attempts to, rightly, recuperate the significance of the memory of slavery and elegantly elevates it to the “slave sublime” (187–223); how the Haitian Revolution emerged as the first successful slave revolt in history;4 or the fact that Toussaint and the slaves, displaced by the Middle Passage and thrown into an unknown modern world, collectively constituted or participated in the prototypical diasporic experience, which Gilroy argues is the defining characteristic of the routed Black Atlantic (and we may add, of the “postcolonial condition”).
Remembering Toussaint, Rethinking Postcolonial
Why Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution? How do they tie into the context of our postcolonial inquiry? In my view, Toussaint’s Haitian Revolution, which has often been considered an imitation of its immediate historical precedent, the French Revolution, best exemplifies the inherent inconsistency/antagonism of the Western model nation-state and presents itself as a thought-provoking case of the potentialities and limits of (post)colonial mimicry, the question of postcolonial nationalisms, and the convoluted temporality of the postcolonial. It was the first successful, sustained decolonization movement against European colonialism in history, and, in some sense, the first “postcolonial” moment as well. Yet Toussaint’s Haitian Revolution further complicates the temporality of postcoloniality not only in the sense that it predated, and inspired, the mid-twentieth century anticolonial movements, against which certain paradigms of contemporary postcolonial criticism register their antagonism and identify themselves as “postcolonial”; but also that it presaged a certain “undead colonialism” after decolonization, mirroring the uncanny recurrence of violence, corruption, and dependency epitomized in the failures of the postcolonial nation-state in our historical juncture. It is, in other words, an instantiation of Édouard Glissant’s well-known notion of vision prophétique du passé (“the prophetic vision of the past”; 227). The displaced or disavowed memories of the colonial encounter and slavery, as well as the structural impossibility of revolutionary ideals, which I shall highlight in the analyses of the case of the Haitian Revolution, constitute the traumatic kernel of the postcolonial and engender or evoke what I call “the primal scene of postcoloniality” (see Chapter 2).
Still, such “institutional forgetting” of Toussaint, the Haitian Revolution, and colonial slavery persists in our allegedly “postcolonial” present, especially in the form of “spectacle.” To rehabilitate the significance of Toussaint, the exploration of which cannot be extricated from the memories of the Haitian Revolution and of colonial slavery, would require that we remember them beyond their various forms of spectacle. Years before Edward Said’s well-known argument that the Orient is literally the (discursive) creation of the West,5 Frantz Fanon had contended that it was Europe that could be considered “literally the creation of the Third World,” since it was the exploitation of the material resources and labor from the colonies, “the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races” that sustained the “opulence” of Europe (Wretched, 76, 81). Further back in history, colonial slavery, as Hardt and Negri argue, can be “perfectly compatible with capitalist production” (122; emphasis in original), even though it appears that the capitalist ideology of freedom “must be antithetical to slave labor” (121). “There is no contradiction here,” Hardt and Negri conclude wryly, “slave labor in the colonies made capitalism in Europe possible, and European capital had no interest in giving it up” (122). This uncovering of the material base of colonial/capitalist system at an increasingly global scale is not merely the reinstating of a materialist mode of analysis—which is important itself, or even a sort of economic determinism; rather, it seeks to probe, in light of a psychoanalytic approach, the traumatic effects of a colonialism that often starts with, but goes deeper than material devastation. Moreover, this book attempts to bring to the fore what has to be radically excluded from this system so that it can be constituted, or how such “constitutive exclusion” is systematically obliterated, even by means of rendering it a spectacle.
To remember Toussaint properly is therefore to confront the traumatic effects of colonial slavery, in its variegated forms, under the aegis of today’s capitalist, globalizing world that feeds on the disavowal or liquidation of its memory (, Hess, 158); it also means to re-examine the West’s liberal-democratic fantasy of the pastness of colonialism and its simultaneous rendering of contemporary postcolonial failures as otherworldly spectacle. In a more politically salient sense, to remember Toussaint is to come to realize that “the cruelest Haitian paradox, then, is not that its role as the nation that birthed the black postcolonial movement is forgotten. Nor is it that the country that was one of the wealthiest of the Caribbean . . . is currently the poorest in its hemisphere. Rather, it is that the very model of resistance that Toussaint and the slave developed almost two hundred years ago continues to offer unread lessons to contemporary postcolonial societies in Haiti, Ghana, Kenya, Jamaica, and even in the newly post-apartheid South Africa” (Farred, “Mapping,” 245; emphasis mine).
Apropos of the structure of this book, the centrality of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution to this book in general will be illuminated in terms of universality/particularity; of the final moments of (formal) colonial slavery and the fine moments of revolutionary hopes; of taking place at the originary instances of the (Western) nation-state, decolonization, and postcoloniality; and of the constitutive yet disavowed role of colonial slavery in an expanding capitalist globalization. Each chapter of this book, in a sense, is structured around one of these illuminations, though interrelated points are unavoidable and may thus cut across different sections.
1 One of the most important representatives of such debates can be found in the special issue of the journal Social Text 31/32 (1992), which some critics consider an “event” in the short history of postcolonial studies (e.g. Masao Miyoshi, 750; Grant Farred, “New Faces, Old Places”). For queries of the term “postcolonial,” see, particularly, Anne MacClintock’s and Ella Shohat’s pieces in this issue. For the contour of the debate and the focus of these polemics, see the editors’ “Introduction” to this special issue. The first question enlisted here, about the semantic vagueness of the “post” in “postcolonial,” is adapted from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay with the straightforward title, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonialism?” The most notable and fiercest critiques of the “careerism” of postcolonial intellectuals, their complicity with the dominant neo-colonial regime of knowledge or cultural production, and their position vis-à-vis the non-cosmopolitan postcolonial subjects they presumably represent, are levied by Aijaz Ahmad, Timothy Brennan, Arif Dirlik, Stuart Hall, and Benita Parry, though Hall is adamantly critical of what he perceives as reductionist dismissals made by more orthodox Marxists, particularly Dirlik (see Hall, 258–259). In addition, Hall conveniently reviews these contestations over the term postcolonial itself, especially on the question of its temporality, in his “When Was the Postcolonial?” For critiques from scholars who identify with and work within the field of postcolonial studies yet register discontent with the French-inspired “high theory” in much of the works of prominent postcolonial theorists, see Bart Moore-Gilbert’s distinction between “postcolonial
