The Black radical tragic : performance, aesthetics, and the unfinished Haitian Revolution

284 Pages·2016·1.653 MB·English

by  Glick, Jeremy Matthew

The Black Radical Tragic
America and the Long 19th Century
General Editors
David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
Elizabeth Young
Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal
Culture of Travel
Edlie L. Wong
Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the
Problem of the Color Line
Gretchen Murphy
Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded- Age America
James B. Salazar
Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the
Philippines
Meg Wesling
Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature
William A. Gleason
Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery
to Civil Rights
Robin Bernstein
American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century
Imaginary
Jacob Rama Berman
Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth- Century
America
Andrew Lyndon Knighton
The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the
Phantasmatic Aaron Burr
Michael J. Drexler and Ed White
Unsettled States: Nineteenth- Century American Literary Studies
Edited by Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson
Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization
Hsuan L. Hsu
Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early
Nineteenth Century
Jasmine Nichole Cobb
Stella
Émeric Bergeaud
Translated by Lesley Curtis and Christen Mucher
Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the
Fictions of Citizenship
Edlie L. Wong
Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the
North American Borderlands
Robert Lawrence Gunn
The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished
Haitian Revolution
Jeremy Matthew Glick

The Black Radical
Tragic
Performance, Aesthetics, and the
Unfinished Haitian Revolution
Jeremy Matthew Glick
a
New York University Press
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2016 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Glick, Jeremy Matthew.
The Black radical tragic : performance, aesthetics, and the unfinished
Haitian Revolution / Jeremy Matthew Glick.
pages cm. (America and the long 19th century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4798-4442-5 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4798-1319-3 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Haiti—In literature. 2. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791–1804—
Drama. 3. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791–1804—Literature and the
revolution. 4. Blacks in literature. 5. Radicalism in literature. 6. Tragic,
The, in literature. I. Title.
PN56.3.H35G55 2015
809'.933587294—dc23
2015021342
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prepared.
New York University Press books are printed on acid- free paper, and
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Also available as an ebook
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
In loving memory of Barry H. Glick, Ivan Van Sertima,
and Amiri Baraka

Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Haitian Revolution as Refusal
and Reuse 1
Overture: Haiti Against Forgetting
and the Thermidorian Present 25
1 Haitian Revolutionary Encounters: Eugene O’Neill,
Sergei Eisenstein, and Orson Welles 54
2 Bringing in the Chorus: The Haitian Revolution Plays
of C.L.R. James and Edouard Glissant 85
3 Tragedy as Mediation: The Black Jacobins 126
4 Tshembe’s Choice: Lorraine Hansberry’s
Pan-Africanist Drama and Haitian Revolution Opera 170
Conclusion: Malcolm X’s Enlistment of Hamlet
and Spinoza 198
Coda: Black Radical Tragic Propositions 214
Notes 223
Index 255
About the Author 267