Haiti and the revolution unseen : the persistence of the decolonial imagination /
"A reconsideration of the Haitian Revolution and its valorization by non-Haitian writers"--
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Nashville, Tennessee :
Vanderbilt University Press,
2025.
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| Series: | Black lives and liberation.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "A reconsideration of the Haitian Revolution and its valorization by non-Haitian writers"-- "With Haiti and the Revolution Unseen, Natalie Marie Léger shifts our attention to the Haitian revolutionists previously left out of the archive of Caribbean cultural thought: Saint Domingue's African and Africanized captives. Though two-thirds of the enslaved population were African-born on the eve of the Revolution, canonized literature writes the Haitian revolutionist as acculturated into the West, replicating the forms of colonial power that it sought to vilify. This book tells the stories of a Haiti and the Haitian Revolution unseen. Léger asks scholars and artists to know Haitians as Ginens (African Haitians) and Haiti as Ayiti Ginen (Africa Haiti). This form of knowing demands a decolonial understanding of the Haitian Revolution and a reevaluation of its stories as told by influential twentieth-century Caribbean authors writing outside of Haiti. Léger showcases the immense political impact of the African Haitian revolutionist's philosophies of freedom in Saint Domingue and Haiti thereafter, arguing that the absence of these philosophies in Caribbean classics demands consideration of their continued dominance. Léger insists that we pay attention to the pervasive presence of colonial paradigms and the way they undermine the generative manner Caribbean writers have used Haiti to think through their past, present, and future."--Cover page 4. |
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| Physical Description: | xii, 372 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780826507884 0826507883 9780826507877 0826507875 |