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From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution, edited by Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 318 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $22.95.)
In the introduction to From Toussaint to Tupac, editors Michael West and William Martin claim that the "two dominant scholarly traditions, the metanarrative and the national narrative, have intellectually marginalized the black international" from Western academic discourse (1-2). West and Martin assert that generations of scholarship have facilitated a fragmented narrative of the global Black experience by isolating Blacks and their enduring struggles for equality to specific time periods and locales. Thus, From Toussaint to Tupac provides an important scholastic reorientation, a "black internationalist counternarrative" of culture and resistance within the African diaspora that transcends both time and place (2). Beginning with the Age of Revolution and concluding with the rise of hip hop culture, the collection of essays demonstrates that the Atlantic was not a barrier but a conduit for the ideological, cultural, and organizational links that have long sustained traditions of Black political radicalism and racial consciousness.
Part 1 of From Toussaint to Tupac, with essays by Sylvia Frey and by Michael West and William Martin, contends that modern Pan-Africanism is rooted in a rich history that stretches back to the Haitian Revolution. According to these scholars, the American and Haitian Revolutions, in conjunction with the Evangelical Revival, produced a revolutionary and revivalist tradition that gave birth to a nascent Pan-African ideology-a loose, though recognizable, worldview that served as the springboard to more formalized institutions like the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Pan-African Congress. Furthermore, these scholars insist that the Haitian Revolution and the geographically diverse, post-revolutionary diaspora contributed to the conMichael struction of a subversive political tradition steeped in a steadfast, spiritual belief in Black liberation that permeated the Atlantic world.
Part 1 is emblematic of a crucial shift in scholarship on the Age of Revolution. Although the Enlightenment had a significant impact on the democratic fervor of the era, it is now conventional wisdom amongst scholars that such sociopolitical upheaval possessed limitations, particularly along the lines of race, gender, ethnicity, and...