Enlightened Hesitations: Black Masses and Tragic Heroes in C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins

Abstract

While the question of modernity (and more recently postmodernity) has been posed with regard to Latin America and the Caribbean on innumerable occasions and in a variety of forms, much less has been said in this context about what in Europe is considered the origin of modernity, the Enlightenment and the late eighteenth-century revolutions which were its culmination. If the idea of modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean can be described as a burden, some-