Category Archives: Recommended Reading

1938

CLR James the year The Black Jacobins was first published.

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FA20: Haitian Revolution

WORKING

Haitian Revolution

Historiography

CLR James, The Black Jacobins

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World

Gerald Horne, Confronting Blak Jacobins

Film

Gillo Pontecorvo, Burn!

Lydia Bailey (1947?)

Edward Halperin, White Zombie

doc. Egalitè for All

doc. Aristide and the Endless Revolution

Visual Arts

Kimathi Donkor, Caribbean Passion: Haiti 1804

Jacob Lawrence, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture

Black Dawn (film)

Drama

Aime Cesaire, The Tragedy of King Christophe

Orson Welles, Voodoo Macbeth

Eugene O’Neill, Emperor Jones

CLR James, Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Play in Three Acts

Novel

Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World

Madison Smart Bell, All Soul’s Rising (Haitian Trilogy)

Leonora Sansay, Secret History, or The Horrors of Santo Domingo

Nalo Hopkins, Midnight Robber

Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder

Syl Cheney-Coker, Sacred River: A Novel

Politics/Theory/Anthropology

Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood

Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti

Stewart Lee and Caspar Friedrich

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The Possibility of an Island

If I have a job in the Fall, I’ll probably teach this dystopian novel by Michel Houellebecq:

Houellebecq is an interesting writer with a certain degree of notoriety. To me he also looks a lot like Antonin Artaud after years of drug abuse and electro-convulsive therapy:

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Organize

The last Democratic president urged his party to embrace the audacity of hope. For him, hope was an airy thing: a feeling rooted in the faith that our future can be built on reason and goodwill alone. But offering real hope to the American people is a material project. Hope depends upon the deconstruction of an economic system that leaves too many Americans wondering if they have the resources and capacity to make it through today and a privileged few free to build themselves a better tomorrow.

Osita Nwanevu, “Don’t Mourn Bernie Sanders’s Candidacy, Organize”

Journal 1

“All the Plays and Interludes, which after the Manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to encrease among us, were forbid to Act; the gaming Tables, publick dancing Rooms, and Music Houses which multiply’d, and began to debauch the Manners of the People, were shut up and suppress’d; and the Jack-puddings, Merry-andrews, Puppet-shows, Rope-dancers, and such like doings, which had bewitch’d the poor common People, shut up their Shops, finding indeed no Trade; for the Minds of the People were agitated with other Things; and a kind of Sadness and Horror at these Things, sat upon the Countenances, even of the common People; Death was before their Eyes, and every Body began to think of their Graves, not of Mirth and Diversions.”

–Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)