Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution
(1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as
an event of world-historical importance. The former slaves' victory over
their French masters and the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in
1804 is being newly heralded not only as a seminal moment in the
transnational formation of the 'black Atlantic' but as the most
far-reaching manifestation of 'Radical Enlightenment'.
The best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after the revolution
is Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), who authored over ten books and pamphlets
between 1814 and his murder in 1820. His first and most incendiary work, Le
systeme colonial devoile (1814), provides a moving invocation of the
horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Its trailblazing
critique of colonialism anticipates by over a hundred years the
anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Cesaire, Fanon, and Sartre.
Translated here for the first time, Vastey's forceful unveiling of the
colonial system will be compulsory reading for scholars across the
humanities.
