Black Atlantic Republicans and the Limits of the Plantation

Abstract

This article engages with two bodies of literature—the interdisciplinary studies of the Haitian Revolution and republican political theory—to make two corresponding interventions. First, I show how, despite republican political philosophy’s exclusion of the slave from the practice of freedom, Haitian revolutionaries and radical abolitionists—whom I call Black Atlantic Republicans—challenged this exclusion using republican logic. To make this point, I engage with shared understandings of tyranny and domination in David Walker’s Appeal and Toussaint Louverture’s personal correspondence. Second, using Jean Casimir’s notion of the counter-plantation system and Louverture’s proclamations on labor, I argue that despite the Black Atlantic universalization of republican freedom, the ideology fails to properly theorize the domination inherent to plantation labor. This inability to theorize labor freedom, I claim, is endemic to republican political thought itself. We can arrive at this insight by centering the revolutionary Haitian masses rather than their leadership.