The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution

Jeremy Matthew Glick

Published by New York University Press 2016

The Black Radical Tragic

Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution

Jeremy Matthew Glick

Volume 2 in the series America and the Long 19th Century

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479844425.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

2017 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association

As the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora.

In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.

Author / Editor information

Glick Jeremy Matthew :

Jeremy Matthew Glick is an Associate Professor of African Diaspora literature and modern drama in the English Department of Hunter College, CUNY.

Reviews

Glicks book...stands as an indispensable contribution to the field. Staging an essentialand all too rareconversation between dramatic literature and black radicalism, Glicks work itself stands as part of what Errol Hill called 'the revolutionary tradition in black drama.'

Anthony Bogues,Brown University:
Grappling with the continuing reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in our present, Jeremy Matthew GlicksTheBlack Radical Tragicdefines the notion of the tragic within the black radical tradition with remarkable insights and impressive breadth. An engagingly written text that will shape not only how we think about the centrality of the Haitian Revolution but also questions of the modern in political thought.

Fred Moten,author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition:
The Black Radical Tragicis infused with questions of memory, revolution, and how these concepts interact with one another across history. With rigorous attunement to the various registers in which revolt is recalled and recited, Jeremy Matthew Glick charts the Haitian revolution as an extended, ongoing historical moment of fugitive insurgency, the open culmination of the terrible and beautiful interplay of enlightenment and darkness. A brilliant and necessary book.

Slavoj Žižek:
Jeremy Matthew Glick'sThe Black Radical Tragic is a book we were all waiting for without knowing it....[Glick] combines here a sober and ruthless insight into the necessary tragic twists of the revolutionary process with the unconditional fidelity to this process. He stands as far as possible from the standard 'anti-totalitarian' claim that, since every revolutionary process is destined to degenerate, its better to abstain from it. This readiness to take the risk and engage in the battle, although we know that we will probably be sacrificed in the course of the struggle, is the most precious insight for us who live in new dark times.

Jeremy Matthew GlicksThe Black Radical Tragicis a book we were all waiting for without knowing it. Only now, after finding it, do we know what we were waiting for.

Topics

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

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 1 black and white illustrations

eBook

Published: January 15, 2016
ISBN: 9781479814855