The Two Freedoms of the Haitian Revolution/s: Rethinking Freedom in the Modern World .

by Anthony Bogues

Increasingly conventional historical knowledge is that the Haitian Revolution was perhaps the most successful slave revolution in human history . Given the nature of racial slavery in the modern world , writers and historians now examine the revolution as an integral feature of political modernity. Within the Caribbean radical tradition , the exemplar figure of Toussaint L' Overture is the critical figure of the revolution . CLR James's classic Black Jacobins , Edouard Glissant's play Monsieur Toussaint and Aime Cesaire's Toussaint Louverture : The French Revolution and the Colonial Problem promulgate narratives which equate the Haitian Revolution only with the ending of racial slavery . This essay will argue that this narrative of the Haitian revolution narrows the political logic of the two revolutions which occurred in Haiti between 1791-1804. The essay will do so by suggesting that there were three critical conceptions of the political which emerged in the dual Haitian revolution: the concept of a different kind of freedom than that which was dominant at the time ; a conception of rights and a conception of race and anti-colonial sovereignty . The paper will undertake this task by a close examination of Toussaint L' Overture letters, the recently discovered biography of him written by his son and the various revolutionary Haitian constitutions promulgated in the early 19 th century . The aim of the paper is to suggest that in thinking and writing about the Haitian revolution/s we want may want to pay attention to the practices of freedom of the revolutionary slaves , how they were shaped and elaborated and what fundamental questions they raise for our contemporary moment. The Haitian Revolution/s reconfigures the conventional views about political modernity and in that reconfiguration may reside clues that we may need to think about freedom in contemporary life.