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  • Prophetic Visions of the Past: Pan-Caribbean Representations of the Haitian Revolution by Víctor Figueroa
  • Kahlil Chaar-Pérez
Víctor Figueroa. Prophetic Visions of the Past: Pan-Caribbean Representations of the Haitian Revolution. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2015. Pp. 336. $69.95 hardcover; $29.95 paper.

In his second book, Prophetic Visions of the Past, Víctor Figueroa offers a relevant, often compelling study of the modern literary imagination of colonial being in the Caribbean, with the Haitian Revolution at its center. Interweaving theoretical reflections on coloniality with literary analysis of texts by key twentieth-century Hispanophone, Anglophone, and Francophone writers, Figueroa invites us to grapple with the ghosts of the Haitian Revolution without romanticizing its leaders or achievements. He proposes instead a decolonial critique that, in looking back to the revolution, imagines the possibility of "alternative, ever more inclusive 'wholes' on which to locate Caribbean history" (24), as well as its present and future.

The first chapter brings together two of the most well-known portrayals of the Haitian Revolution: the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938) and the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World (1949). The analysis in this chapter is particularly insightful for its comparison of the texts's divergent meanings: James presents a "vision of the revolt as a strictly social and political endeavor that [...] relies exclusively on the rational language of enlightened ideas" (46) while Carpentier foregrounds "Vodou's view of the cosmos, as opposed to the instrumental approach of colonial reason" (59). Through this comparison, Figueroa illuminates the respective silences of the texts. He argues, on the one hand, that James minimizes the impact of black cultural and religious forces in the insurrection, and, on the other hand, that Carpentier's snapshots of otherworldly black spirituality conceal the social agency of the rebels. Figueroa's comparative analysis [End Page 148] insinuates thus that an ideal decolonial approach to the Haitian Revolution should learn from both The Kingdom of this World and The Black Jacobins and, at the same time, go beyond the opposition between rational agency and religiosity that characterizes most Eurocentric narratives about Haiti.

The second chapter focuses on the Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos and his portrayal of blackness and Haiti in Tuntún de pasa y grifería (1937). Figueroa navigates with aplomb the scholarly polemics about the Tuntún: he does not condemn the book's often comical images of Afro-Caribbean bodies as mere racist, ahistorical forms, nor does he celebrate them as positive affirmations of regional identity. Instead, he considers how some poems reinforce Eurocentric stereotypes about race, while others pay homage to blackness and the Haitian Revolution, positioning them as central elements within the history of decolonization in the Caribbean. Interestingly, Figueroa explains this contradiction by stressing the constant use of ironic distance in these poems, which he reads as a symptom of the poet's anxious ambivalence about Afro-Caribbean culture and his desire to cultivate a "safe" space" as a member of the predominantly white intellectual elite of Puerto Rico (91).

But, in venturing this claim, Figueroa does not consider the fact that irony and ambivalence are not specific to Afro-Caribbean themes in Palés Matos. Moreover, the Puerto Rican poet often ironizes the value of his own texts. For instance, in the first poem of the Tuntún, "Preludio en Boricua," he associates his poetry with: "time wasted, / whose last page is boredom. / Things glimpsed or envisioned / scant actually lived, / and much concoction and fable" (Palés Matos 165-66; my translation). Through this playful yet melancholic moment of self-reflexivity, Palés Matos deflates the ideological authority that the reader might attribute to the Tuntún-it is all "lost time" and "lies and stories"—signaling that loss and the limits of representation are central to his vision of not only the Caribbean but the act of writing itself.

In the third chapter, Figueroa analyzes the Martiniquan writer and politician Aimé Césaire's relationship with the Haitian Revolution by examining the historical essay Toussaint Louverture (1961) and the play The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963...

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