Race and Revolution at Bwa Kayiman

Abstract

It is no longer remarkable to claim that, out of all the revolutions in the making of the modern world order, the Haitian Revolution was the most radical and remains the most challenging to Euro-Western narratives. The Haitian Revolution did what no other did – end slavery – in an age when white Europeans and North Americans spoke of natural rights and freedoms while they remained traffickers and brutal exploiters of African flesh. The stakes at play are significant: To theorise and narrate the Haitian Revolution is to necessarily take part in a struggle over the authorship of the meaning of global justice and modern freedoms. But as we deepen our understandings of the Revolution we must grapple more audaciously with the intellectual strictures that have in various ways ‘silenced’ these struggles of enslaved Africans. Race informs these silencings. Fundamentally, race silences the response to slavery. In this article, I return to Bwa Kayiman – the meeting that inaugurated a world-shaking response.