The first translation into English of 'Le Système colonial dévoilé', the first systematic critique of colonialism ever written from the perspective of a colonized subject.
This critical edition offers the first English translation of Baron de Vastey's 'Le système colonial dévoilé', a trailblazing critique of colonialism and the transatlantic slave system that was originally published in Haiti in 1814. His first and most incendiary work provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, as well as an unrelenting denunciation of racial hierarchies and colonial rule that anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre.
Focusing on the influential life and works of the Haitian political writer and statesman, Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), in this book Marlene L. Daut examines the legacy of Vastey’s extensive writings as a form of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a discourse devoted to attacking the enlightenment foundations of colonialism. Daut argues that Vastey, the most important secretary of Haiti’s King Henry Christophe, was a pioneer in a tradition of deconstructing colonial racism and colonial slavery that is much more closely associated with twentieth-century writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire. By expertly forging exciting new historical and theoretical connections among Vastey and these later twentieth-century writers, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black Atlantic authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, Daut proves that any understanding of the genesis of Afro-diasporic thought must include Haiti’s Baron de Vastey.
Frantz Fanon's seminal work on anticolonialism and the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution. Psychiatrist, humanist, revolutionary, Frantz Fanon was one of the great political analysts of our time, the author of such seminal works of modern revolutionary theory as The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. He has had a profound impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world. A Dying Colonialism is Fanon's incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as "primitive," in order to destroy those oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression. This is a strong, lucid, and militant book; to read it is to understand why Fanon says that for the colonized, "having a gun is the only chance you still have of giving a meaning to your death."
A literary history of the Haitian Revolution that explores how scientific ideas about ‘race’ affected 19th-century understandings of the Haitian Revolution and, conversely, how understandings of the Haitian Revolution affected 19th-century scientific ideas about race.
A powerful and impassioned historical account of the largest successful revolt by enslaved people in history: the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1803 “One of the seminal texts about the history of slavery and abolition.... Provocative and empowering.” —The New York Times Book Review The Black Jacobins, by Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, was the first major analysis of the uprising that began in the wake of the storming of the Bastille in France and became the model for liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of plantation owners toward enslaved people was horrifyingly severe. And it is the story of a charismatic and barely literate enslaved person named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who successfully led the Black people of San Domingo against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces—and in the process helped form the first independent post-colonial nation in the Caribbean. With a new introduction (2023) by Professor David Scott.
Decolonization and Anti-colonial Praxis presents research on contemporary forms of decolonization and anti-colonialism in practice. It pertains to the ways in which individuals, groups, and communities engage with the logic of epistemic colonial power within areas of citizenship, migration, education, Indigeneity, language, land struggle, and social work. The contributions in this edited volume empirically document the conceptual and bodily engagement of racialized and violated individuals and communities as they use anti-colonial principles to disrupt criminalizing institutional discourses and policies within various global imperial contexts. The terms ‘Decolonization’ and ‘Anti-colonialism’ are used in diverse and interdisciplinary academic perspectives. They are researched upon and elaborated in necessary ways in the theoretical literature, however, it is rare to see these principles employed in applied forms. Decolonization and Anti-colonial Praxis provides a much needed contemporary and representative reclamation of these concepts from the standpoint of racialized communities. It explores the frameworks and methods rooted in their indigeneity, cultural history and memories to imagine a new future. The research findings and methodological tools presented in this book will be of interdisciplinary interest to teachers, graduate students and researchers. Contributors are: Harriet Akanmori, Ayah Al Oballi, Sevgi Arslan, Jacqueline Benn-John, Lucy El-Sherif, Danielle Freitas, Pablo Isla Monsalve, Dionisio Nyaga, Hoda Samater, Rose Ann Torres, Umar Umangay, and Anila Zainub.
Drawing on both personal experience and critical theory, Carole Boyce Davies illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. From her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria, Brazil, England, and the United States, Carole Boyce Davies portrays a rich and fluid set of personal experiences. She reflects on these movements to understand the interrelated dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality embedded in Caribbean spaces, as well as many Caribbean people's traumatic and transformative stories of displacement, migration, exile, and sometimes return. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the connections between theory and practice, intellectual work and activism, and personal and private space.
Money, often portrayed as a straightforward representation of market value, is also a political force, a technology for remaking space and population. This was especially true in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada, where money - in many forms - provided an effective means of disseminating colonial social values, laying claim to national space, and disciplining colonized peoples. Colonialism's Currency analyzes the historical experiences and interactions of three distinct First Nations - the Wendat of Wendake, the Innu of Mashteuiatsh, and the Moose Factory Cree - with monetary forms and practices created by colonial powers. Whether treaty payments and welfare provisions such as the paper vouchers favoured by the Department of Indian Affairs, the Canadian Dominion's standardized paper notes, or the "made beaver" (the Hudson's Bay Company's money of account), each monetary form allowed the state to communicate and enforce political, economic, and cultural sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their lands. Surveying a range of historical cases, Brian Gettler shows how currency simultaneously placed First Nations beyond the bounds of settler society while justifying colonial interventions in their communities. Testifying to the destructive and the legitimizing power of money, Colonialism's Currency is an intriguing exploration of the complex relationship between First Nations and the state.