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

by Jeremy Matthew Glick

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479813193
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2016
Series:	America and the Long 19th Century , #2
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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

Table of 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

Editorial 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.'"

TDR: The Drama Review

"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."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Slavoj Žižek

"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."

Anthony Bogues

"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."

Fred Moten

"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."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Jeremy Matthew Glick's The 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, it’s 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."-Slavoj Žižek, Los Angeles Review of Books

“ The Black Radical Tragic is 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.”-Fred Moten,author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

"Jeremy Matthew Glick’s The Black Radical Tragic is a book we were all waiting for without knowing it. Only now, after finding it, do we know what we were waiting for."- Los Angeles Review of Books

"Glick’s book...stands as an indispensable contribution to the field. Staging an essential—and all too rare—conversation between dramatic literature and black radicalism, Glick’s work itself stands as part of what Errol Hill called 'the revolutionary tradition in black drama.'"- TDR: The Drama Review

“Grappling with the continuing reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in our present, Jeremy Matthew Glick’s The Black Radical Tragic defines 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.”-Anthony Bogues,Brown University

From the Publisher