Black Studies and the Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution was one of the singularly important events in modern history and within the Black world. While traditional studies of the Haitian Revolution emerged from European historians focusing on its relationship to the French Revolution, decades of scholarship from the Black Studies tradition (broadly defined to include contributions from Black North American and Caribbean thinkers, as well as white radicals, concerned with centering the shared conditions and experiences of Africans and African descendants) has made critical interventions to Haitian Revolution studies. If the Haitian Revolution was silenced or buried in Western scholarship, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued, Black Studies has done much heavy lifting to recover its global import. This presentation will evaluate major issues and debates within Haitian Revolution studies, highlighting the ways that Black Studies scholarship has broken through archival and social science silences to advance understanding of Haiti’s importance to the modern world.