Description
This paper positions itself within the contemporary drive across political, sociological, and international relations theory to reanimate the Haitian Revolution within historical analyses of central philosophical frameworks including freedom (Roberts 2015), Enlightenment (Dubois 2006), sovereignty (Bhambra 2016), race (Shilliam 2008, 2017), rights (Kaisary 2012), and history (Buck-Morss 2014, Trouillot 1995). Beginning with work that maps intellectual continuities between Haitian revolutionaries and the French revolutionary triptych of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, this paper will analyse these concepts through a selection of primary material including Louverture’s proclamations and the Haitian Constitution of 1801. Louverture’s writing offers a foundation for this analysis, situating these concepts in Haitian (post)revolutionary struggle. The next step of the argument will provide a theorisation of these concepts, and their connection to an Enlightenment philosophical tradition, in the context of Foucault’s “Age of History” (around 1800) and Koselleck’s “Sattelzeit” (between 1730 and 1850). Both intellectual historians describe an age of transition into modernity, accompanied by linguistic and epistemological shifts in concepts and terminology. Exploring both provincialization and continuity, various localities and various universals, Louverture’s republicanism allows for a critique of conceptual and temporal flows, and questions the boundaries of contemporary political-theoretical canons. Louverture’s Haitian revolutionary conceptualizations also foreground an interrogation of the lag between theory and practice, experience and expectation, or political rights and lived reality.
