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2 Enlightened Hesitations C. L. R. James, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the Black Masses Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance . . . nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In the previous chapter, I characterize the writing of Alejo Carpentier as being informed by a subtle contradiction at its core: the author’s proclaimed intention to find synthesis and symbiosis between Afro-Caribbean and European Enlightenment culture is in fact belied by the narrative and psychological propensity to thematize their very incommensurability . In the case of the great Trinidadian writer and intellectual C. L. R. James, an inverse tendency seems to operate. James’s towering contribution to Caribbean writing and scholarship, The Black Jacobins, also balances certain tensions that, left to themselves, might seem to be mutually canceling or exclusive. And yet, whereas for Carpentier an intellectual acknowledgment of the interpenetration and mutual dependence of Caribbean and European culture gives way to an almost libidinal attraction to incommensurability, in the case of James—at least the C. L. R. James who published The Black Jacobins in 1938—the specificity of eighteenth-century Saint Domingue is deemphasized in favor of a totalizing view tending toward universality. In 1971, James intimated that his thoughts when he wrote The Black Jacobins were in fact directed toward the cause of African independence: “Now, what did I have I mind when I wrote this book? I had in mind the writing about the San Domingo Revolution as the preparation for the revolution that George Padmore and all of us were interested in, that is, the revolution in Africa.”1 For James (in 1938), the Haitian Revolution had an almost allegorical and organic relationship not only to the French Revolution but to early-twentieth-century Africa; and European literary genres such as epic and tragedy were an intricate part of the historical unfolding. In 58 The Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination this sense, James is a far more engaged partisan of historical and cultural “symbiosis” or interconnectedness than is Carpentier. 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 prototype of the Enlightened Man—a problematic and paradoxical categorization. The contradictions and tensions that the present study will bring out result not so much from a shortcoming on the part of James, but rather from the fact that the particular conceptual conditions within which he operates already contain an incommensurability—between leaders and masses, center and periphery, autonomy and dependence. James works simultaneously within the framework of Enlightenment thought while challenging or attempting to go beyond its tenets—a dual effort that could be described as emblematic of the modern moment in the Caribbean historical imagination. This effort to operate within the laws of Enlightenment historicity while transcending its borders might be seen as contradictory or counterproductive; at the same time, however, the paradoxes this situation occasions provide a matrix for some of the most notable achievements in Caribbean writing. James’s identification with Toussaint is illustrative of the conflicts that characterize much of his writing, conflicts that, when read in the context of his lifelong production , come to a narrative climax in the form of a confessional in Beyond a Boundary, when James reflects on his decision to join the “white” cricket club, Maple: “I was teaching, I was known as a man cultivated in literature, I was giving lectures to literary societies on Wordsworth and Longfellow. Already I was writing. I moved easily in any society in which I found myself. So it was that I became one of the men whose ‘surest sign of . . . having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion that himself.’ . . . I had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed my political development for years. But no one could see that then, least of all me.”2 This honest confession seems to contain the allegorical kernel of a critique of The Black Jacobins. As a response to those...

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