In a brief, brilliant overview of the reception of The Black Jacobins in the Caribbean, Aaron Kamugisha notes that George Lamming devotes so much time in The Pleasures of Exile (1960) to retelling and quoting James’ history in order to recall it to public notice.

The academic silence that surrounded The Black Jacobins perhaps owes less to the politics of history writing and more to a pretty mundane fact: it is unclear how widely available the 1938 edition was.

Sadly, Palmer’s minimal reference to James was much more recognition than the latter would receive-until extremely belatedly-from the British Marxist historians. That Palmer knew of James is certain he cursorily cites The Black Jacobins in The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Palmer, for instance, would note that “Toussaint l’Ouverture led the Black Jacobins of Haiti” without footnoting James. Sometimes the non-citations of James’ book approach the absurd.

While the 1938 edition of The Black Jacobins was reviewed in both popular and academic publications, the book would be but infrequently cited for the next decade and a half in academic articles and books. Great books do not always have great effects, at least not immediately. Genovese’s complaint serves as a monitory warning for scholars building genealogies of their field. Such an assumption would, I think, be hasty. James’ “great book,” The Black Jacobins (1938 revised edition, 1963) on the field of history writing. And if scholars today are more and more inclined to assume, appreciate, and investigate the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the making of the modern world, we might take this turn to Haiti as evidence for the impact of C.L.R. Cutting across disciplines and conventional geographies of analysis, the Haitian Revolution has been a hot topic in the Anglophone North Atlantic academy for the nearly two decades-as it should have been, without question, all along. James’s great book, “has seldom been appreciated.”Įchoing Du Bois’ 1896 lament, Eugene Genovese’s 1979 claim about the historiographical marginality of the Haitian Revolution in general, and Toussaint in particular, does not map so easily onto the terrain of scholarship on the age of revolutions today. Du Bois wrote almost eighty years ago, as might be written now despite C.L.R. “The role which the great Negro Toussaint, called L’Ouverture, played in the history of the United States,” W.E.B.

The black jacobins reader