The Politics of Terror and the Haitian Revolution: Narratives of Demonisation and LIberation

Abstract

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was demonised by its detractors across the North Atlantic world by deploying racialised tropes of horror and terror. At the same time, those tropes were turned against their colonialist originators by Black Atlantic writers, politicians, and activists. This book analyses these twin processes.

The main purpose of the book is to demonstrate how the Haitian Revolution occupied a central place in key discourses in the Age of Revolution that still reverberate
in the contemporary world: those of race, slavery, emancipation, human rights, and transatlantic revolution. It does so by investigating strategies for its demon-
isation by the North Atlantic world that have been replicated in the vilification of radical Black movements up to the present day. Set against this demonisation are
the responses to it, which form part of what Paul Gilroy has called a Black Atlantic “counterculture of modernity” directed against the colonial capitalist Atlantic slave
economy. As twentieth-century Caribbean intellectuals, such as C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire or Éduoard Glissant, have emphasised the resistance of the enslaved
was a thoroughly modern movement that imagined alternative modernities to the hegemonic one built on dehumanisation and exploitation.