Unsilencing the Haitian Revolution and Refiguring Toussaint Louverture

Unsilencing the Haitian Revolution and Refiguring Toussaint Louverture: C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins Flourishes Again

How did drama and history-writing shape James’s multiple accounts of the Haitian Revolution? This paper follows the revision trail of the genesis and evolution of James’s The Black Jacobins history and other Haitian Revolution-related writings, charting his evolving interest in the leadership of Toussaint Louverture against the backdrop of his Marxist political path. Building on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s idea of the active and transitive process of “silencing the past” of the Haitian Revolution, this paper reads James’s own process of making history and drama as an equally active and transitive reverse process of unsilencing the past. How does James unsilence the past and represent the unrepresentable—all of the silences and gaps in the colonial archives, sources, and history narratives? James’s own unsilencing of certain sources and their negative representations of the Haitian Revolution is evaluated here.