2026/05/05 by Alex Dubilet · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Caribbean and African Literature and Culture #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Cuban History and Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/1462317x.2026.2620272
openalex publication_date 2026/05/05 · openalex created_date 2026/05/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
This essay argues that a rigorous account of popular insurgency across the Haitian Revolution unsettles dominant scholarly presuppositions and coordinates, including the basic narrative elements that make the Haitian Revolution a distinct political sequence – its senses of beginning and end, continuity and discontinuity, success and failure. In contrast to the (largely Creole) official revolutionary leadership, who defended legal emancipation and strove for state power, the (largely African-born or Bossale) popular insurgency of formerly enslaved insurrectionaries, maroons, and workers sought to destroy the plantation order as such. This essay takes destituent power as a starting point for conceptualizing the complex unity of insurrectionary activity of immediate abolition and subtractive withdrawals to the outside at the heart of the Bossale popular insurgency. It also revises contemporary approaches to destituent power by theorizing the impossible-yet-real modality as an insurrectionary correlate to deactivating impotentiality and by recovering the necessary imbrication of the general insurrection and the general strike.If these black insurgents were “conscripts of modernity,” they were also its deserters and mutineers. Turning the plantations into a “charred desert,” they launched a transcendental attack on the plantocratic order of modernity, on the power of the plantation to produce the modern world and to determine the conditions of possibility for action, thought, and experience. Contravening the metaphysical-political paradigm of realization, their trajectory expressed the unrealizable in the revolution’s successful realization, indicating something more and less – and entirely different – than a revolution: the most extensive enactment of industrial sabotage in modern history, the earliest victorious modern guerilla war, the most successful long-term struggle against the plantation order, and the singular invention of a post-capitalist destituent form of life. This multiplicity appears only once we relinquish our treasured investments in revolution, which is what fidelity to the mass self-emancipation of the enslaved demands, if it is not to betray its object.