The Black Jacobins

"Like many West Indians of my generation, I have been reading C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins over and over for many years. I know many of its passages by heart... I found myself reading The Black Jacobins differently. I found myself wondering about the distance that separated James and me; I found myself looking back at James looking toward me and thinking that I inhabit as a dead-end present the postcolonial future he lived as a fervent expectation and hope... I think that The Black Jacobins offers us a very tantalizing hint, one that has everything to do with modernity. I mean if you compare the story of slavery told in the body of the text (which belongs to 1938) to the one told in the appendix, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro” (which belongs to 1963), a very interesting contrast comes into view. Whereas the earlier story belongs to the familiar resistance narrative of slavery-as-repressive-power (remember the great first chapter, “The Property”), the later story underlines something else, namely, the power that produced the subjects of a distinctive civilization—a power, in other words, that didn’t only negate (“demoralize” is the word James uses here) the humanity of the slave, but contributed to structuring and shaping the conditions of a particular form of humanity."