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Haitian Revolution and the Constitutive Outside of Modernity: C. L. R. James’s Postcolonial Imagination

  • Korean Review of French History
  • Abbr : KRFH
  • 2010, (23), pp.101~131
  • Publisher : KOREAN SOCIETY FOR FRENCH HISTORY
  • Research Area : Humanities > History

Youngjun Ha 1

1한양대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper is a study on C. L. R. James’ Black Jacobin. Through this book, C. L. R. James threw open the door to rescuing the Haitian Revolution from historical forgetting, and to rethinking modernity. Although modernity was the product of colonial encounters between ‘the West’ and ‘the non-West’, the West-centric discourses have forgotten the interaction and interpenetration which occurred in those encounters. Therefore it could construct the West into ‘modern universality.’ French revolutionary historiography was the typical example of this approach. It has been central to the establishment of ‘1789’ or the period from 1789 to 1815, as the birth-date of a new historical epoch, the modern, forgetting the colonial relations between France and Haiti or the Haitian Revolution. James attempted to view the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution together in the Atlantic connection of capitalism which was made from colonial encounters, so he revealed the historical importance of them. His perspective on the colonial encounters opened the door to rethinking modernity from the transnational and transcultural viewpoint, questioning the geographical-cultural boundaries between the West and the non-West.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.