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Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (A John Hope Franklin Center Book) | 
 enlarge | Author: Sibylle Fischer
Publisher: Duke University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 285488
Media: Paperback
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0822332906
Dewey Decimal Number: 972.9403
EAN: 9780822332909
ASIN: 0822332906
Publication Date: 2004
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Product Description
Modernity Disavowed is a pathbreaking study of the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791 1804). Revealing how the radical antislavery politics of this seminal event have been suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two hundred years, Sibylle Fischer contends that revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity. She develops a powerful argument that the denial of revolutionary antislavery eventually became a crucial ingredient in a range of hegemonic thought, including Creole nationalism in the Caribbean and G. W. F. Hegel s master-slave dialectic. Fischer draws on history, literary scholarship, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to examine a range of material, including Haitian political and legal documents and nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican literature and art. She demonstrates that at a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of race as political. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been told as one outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence. From the time of the revolution onward, the story has been confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, and confidential letters. Fischer maintains that without accounting for revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal, Western modernity including its hierarchy of values, depoliticization of social goals having to do with racial differences, and privileging of claims of national sovereignty cannot be fully understood.
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| Customer Reviews:
One of the most important recent books in Caribbean thought July 9, 2006
Lewis R. Gordon (Philadelphia, PA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This extraordinary book won the Frantz Fanon Prize of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2004 and then went on to win the Modern Language Association's prize in Latin American Studies and the Latin American Studies Association prize in 2005 for outstanding book. It is all well deserved. This work challenges many of the contemporary approaches to the study of race by offering a rich interplay of the compexities of Latin American conceptions of whiteness and those in the U.S. as they converge in a unified denial of the existence---and more, the HUMANITY---of the first Black Republic in the New World. Dr. Fischer's array of specializations, which range from comparative literature, philosophy, and history to linguistic skills that include French, Spanish, German, and some of the indigenous languages of South America, brings out the nuance and challenges of the Haitian revolution as understood in Haiti and as feared, cheered on, or simply denied from without. This work is a must-read for anyone working in Africana thought, especially in Caribbean studies, and theories of modernity.
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