The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints by Philip Kaisary (review)

The Haitian Revolution has been studied extensively for its historical and political significance. The work of C. L. R. James (The Black Jacobins) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Silencing the Past) are just a few of the influential texts that have shaped Haitian revolutionary studies, turning scholarly attention to the revolution’s enduring political importance for anticolonial thought and action and to how history, writ large, is studied and told. The fresh analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic representations of the Haitian uprising that Philip Kaisary offers in The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints is firmly indebted to this tradition of Haitian revolutionary studies. Kaisary’s study of fiction and art inspired by the revolution rightly encourages attention to the manner in which literature and art both make and unmake how history and politics are understood and, in turn, undertaken. Indeed, Kaisary’s intent with this book is to consider “how certain aesthetic modes of recuperating the Haitian Revolution have enabled and or hindered particular political visions” (2), empowering, on the one hand, or negating, on the other, the radical “project of universal freedom” Haitians initiated in 1791 (175). Kaisary’s dedicated interest to this “project of universal freedom” owes as much to the scholarship of James and Trouillot as it does to Peter Hallward’s and Nick Nesbitt’s extensive work on post-colonial thought and Haitian liberation; their respective works are instrumental components of the rhetoric of universal human freedom guiding this book.¹ This interest in universal human freedom shapes how Kaisary approaches the literary and art texts in his book, determining what constitutes a “radical horizon” or a “conservative constraint.”

The eight chapters that compose The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination are divided evenly into two sections, respectively, concerned with radical and conservative representations of the revolution. Kaisary’s underlying purpose in structuring his text this way is to “draw out the situation and ideological thrust of each of the works considered” (2). In doing this, he seeks to trace “the cultural and intellectual history of anticolonial, Black Nationalist, and Pan-African movements of the twentieth century” (3) as evinced in the implicit dialogue between the “radical” and “conservative” artistic camps. The literary and art pieces discussed in part one of the book (chapters one–four) are regarded as radical aesthetic treatments of the uprising, which include James’s historical text The Black Jacobins and his play of that name, Aimé Césaire’s poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and play La Tragédie du roi Christophe, Langston Hughes’s plays The Emperor of Haiti and Troubled Island, René Depestre’s poem Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien, and lastly, the Haitian paintings of Jacob Lawrence and Kimanthi Donoki. Part two of the book (chapters five–eight) treats literary texts that Kaisary regards as conservative, specifically, Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint, Alejo Carpentier’s novel El reino de este mundo, Derek Walcott’s collection of plays The Haitian Trilogy, and Madison Smartt Bell’s biography of Toussaint, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, and his trilogy on the uprising. Kaisary focuses, in particular, on the first two novels of Smartt’s trilogy, All Souls’ Rising and Master of the Crossroads. The breadth of primary texts covered by Kaisary, in addition to the extensive secondary material cited, attests to how carefully he perused the Haitian revolutionary historical, political, and artistic record. Such comprehensive attention afforded him the means to substantiate the most compelling position offered in the book: that the struggle for universal human autonomy in the hemispheric Americas and the Atlantic world has long been championed and silenced with and through Haiti.

Kaisary’s book is noteworthy for its purposeful iteration of Haiti’s ideological importance to human liberation and for the breadth of materials studied. Haiti’s ideological significance to the struggle for universal...