Enlightened Hesitations: Black Masses and Tragic Heroes in C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remain immature for life.

Kant ¹

While the question of modernity (and more recently postmodernity) has been posed with regard to Latin America and the Caribbean on innumerable occasions and in a variety of forms, much less has been said in this context about what in Europe is considered the origin of modernity, the Enlightenment and the late eighteenth-century revolutions which were its culmination. If the idea of modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean can be described as a "burden," something simultaneously (or alternately) wished for and rejected, ² or, in García Canclini's memorable formulation, as something that in these regions has not entirely arrived while tradition lingers on, ³ then by focusing on interpretations and representations of the Enlightenment from this perspective, we gain insight into the origins of this problematic and ambivalent state of modernity.

Kant defines the Enlightenment as "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." ⁴ As we can see in the epigraph, he stresses that this so-called immaturity is not an intellectual one, but rather, "spiritual," due more to laziness and lack of courage. And yet, lethargy and cowardice are also important keywords that Kant uses to describe people living outside of Europe:

. . . All inhabitants of the hottest zones are exceptionally lethargic. . . . Indians are also very indecisive. . . . The weakening of their limbs is supposedly caused by brandy, tobacco, opium, and other strong things. . . . Montesquieu is correct in his judgment that the weakheartedness that makes death so terrifying to the Indian or the Negro also makes him fear many things other than death that the European can withstand. ⁵

While providing a blueprint for autonomy, Kant at the same time epitomizes the "Negro" as cowardly and as embodying the antithesis of Enlightenment. This differentiating mechanism laid a groundwork for a circular kind of thinking: "you are unenlightened and therefore incapable of autonomy; how can you stake a claim to enlightenment without being autonomous?" At this point we are one step away from an outright imperialist program. Kant declares in "Idea for a Universal History" that "our continent will probably legislate eventually for all other continents." ⁶

Kant is obviously not the only Enlightenment philosopher whose opinion should be taken into account in this regard. Rousseau, for example, was undoubtedly much more important for the Caribbean's and Latin America's understanding of the Enlightenment ⁷ --even though his notion of the "noble savage," and the whole current of thought stemming from Montaigne's original defense of America's "cannibals" is locked in as the second or weaker term in a dialectic with Kant's "immaturity." While the Enlightenment was actually something fragmented and contradictory rather than consolidated and monolithic, the primary epistemological players of the Enlightenment show an uncanny solidarity as regards their opinions on race and non-European civilizations. In fact, as Kant's reference to Montesquieu attests, there is even a kind of incestuous cross-referencing--something Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, calls "intertextuality"--among Kant, Diderot, Hume, Jefferson and others to support their mutual opinions on race. ⁸

C.L.R. James will write his history of the Haitian Revolution both within and in response to this tradition of thought. His invaluable contribution to Caribbean writing and scholarship, The Black Jacobins, more than a history of an eighteenth-century slave rebellion in the West Indies, is also a commentary and reflection on the Enlightenment. Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti's most prominent "founding father," represents for James the unequivocal figure of the autonomous Black Caribbean, who has thrown off the yoke of extraneous authority in order to achieve maturity; by that very definition Toussaint is for James the...