The same lines are echoed in James’s more famous anticolonial classic history The Black Jacobins (1938, revised 1963), but do not appear in James’s later second Haitian drama The Black Jacobins (1967). James’s first play about the Haitian Revolution Toussaint Louverture (1936). But the tree of Negro liberty will flourish again, for its roots are many and deep.” Footnote 1These lines above are spoken by visionary leader Toussaint Louverture, the ultimate protagonist in C. Toussaint Louverture : “In destroying me you destroy only the trunk. James’s own making of The Black Jacobins over nearly sixty years is linked to the process of rasanblaj (re-assembly, gathering) and the search for Caribbean identity. James should be recognized as a precursor to “history from below.” It uncovers James’s “writing in” of more popular leaders, masses and Haitian crowd scenes, of whom there is little archival trace. James’s own unsilencing of certain negative representations of the Haitian Revolution is evaluated, as is James’s move away from presenting the colonized as passive objects, instead turning them instead into active subjects.
How does James “show” as drama versus “tell” as history? Building on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s idea of “silencing the past,” this article argues that James engages in an equally active and transitive reverse process of unsilencing the past.
Exploring the genesis, transformation and afterlives of The Black Jacobins, this article follows the revision trail of James’s evolving interest in Toussaint Louverture.
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