The Haitian Revolution and the articulation of a modernist epistemology

Abstract

The focus of this article is a critical look at the epistemological treatment of the Haitian Revolution by progressive 20^th-century scholars such as C.L.R. James, Eugene Genovese, Robin Blackburn, David Geggus and Susan Buck-Morss. Their ideas and modes of thinking, knowing and constructing meaning, in respect of the cognitive and general epistemological basis of the Haitian Revolution, are examined in comparison to 19^th-century black abolitionist thinkers such as Pompee Valentin Vastey, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and James Theodore Holly. The essay concludes that the 20^th-century progressive Haitian revolutionary scholars have too uncritically relied on the 18^th and 19^th-century occidental ontological and epistemological complex to construct narratives of the Haitian Revolution. By doing so, they denied or underestimated the cognitive agency of Africans in the making of the Haitian Revolution and thus presented a distorted picture of the Haitian Revolution in Haitian revolution studies.

Keywords:

• epistemology
• French Revolution
• Haitian historiography
• Haitian Revolution
• ontology
• Toussaint L'Ouverture
• The black Jacobins