The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution by Jeremy M. Glick (review)

Jeremy Glick's recent book, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution, raises many new questions and presents challenging insights into the relationships between art and revolution. In particular, it explores the ways in which modern theatrical performances and artistic interpretations of the Haitian Revolution allow us to reconfigure the problematics of the black radical tradition as they relate to the present. To be precise, he asks: "What insights are gained when we link problems of aesthetic organization with problems of revolutionary organization?" (6). Put another way, can such linkages between the historical past and the actual present-as "ontological equivalences"-open possibilities for an ameliorative, if not a revolutionary future? Fundamentally, it comes down to a question of black self-determination and black sovereignty as an intrinsic part of universal history played out in and through revolution. For Glick, the precedent for this line of inquiry is embedded in the Haitian Revolution. Also embedded in the Haitian Revolution, as in all revolutions, are the tensions as well as the convergences between the role of official leadership on one hand, and the goals and often unarticulated, but deeply entrenched, aspirations of the masses on the other.

The book is largely devoted to examining how these dynamics are cast in various twentieth-century theatrical representations of the revolution, ranging from those of C.L.R. James, Edouard Glissant, and Aimé Césaire to Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O'Neill, and Sergei Eisenstein. At the core of Glick's book is a discursive analysis of C.L.R. James's 1967 play The Black Jacobins, and Edouard Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint, produced in 1961, as two case studies from which to explore the use of the tragic as a way to approach the intrinsic problem of revolutionary leadership and its interdependence with the mass base.¹ Glick sees James's use of tragedy as the idiom through which the protagonist as revolutionary leader mediates his relationship with the chorus, whose voices represent and give expression to the justifiable claims of the revolutionary masses "from below." Glissant deals with the same problematic of the individual leader and his relationship to the mass base, but the approach Glissant takes is one that attempts to resolve the inherent opposition of the two through the concept of the Whole, or le Tout, wherein both the individual leader and the masses are intrinsically tied, and thus subsumed in the totality of the revolutionary project by which the nation comes into being.

While the narratives of James and Glissant both ultimately insist on the interdependence between leader and base at the expense of an exclusive focus on the leader, in James such interdependence is problematized by profound divergences in goals and mentalité that, as in any revolution, inevitably emerge between leader and base, and in the case of the Haitian Revolution are grounded in the specific material conditions of the ex-slave population and the larger political objectives of Toussaint Louverture. Given these apparently irreconcilable divergences and the potential "threat from below," James confronts, but does not resolve, the recurring question in revolutionary politics of the "purge" as a necessity to justify and preserve the greater good of the revolutionary project. Just as Louverture's arrest and execution of his nephew, General Moïse, who embodied the aspirations and spoke for the agrarian masses under his supervision, and who led an open revolt against the oppression of his uncle's regime of coerced plantation labour, was done in the name of saving the revolution, for James it was also Toussaint's greatest error as a revolutionary leader. The impossibility of reconciling the mass base's collective goal of personal landownership as the means of living their lives freely, and Toussaint's overarching economic, political, and military objectives for an emancipated black state in the slaveholding Atlantic, is what lies at the very heart of the tragedy. Glick reads Edouard...