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Haitian Revolutionary Studies. BY DAVID PATRICK GEGGUS. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. 334 pages ISBN 0-253-34104-3 cloth.
In his thoughtful essay "An Unthinkable History, The Haitian Revolution as a Non-event," Michel Rolph Trouillot argues that "[t]he Haitian Revolution [. . .] entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened" (73). In such a situation where intellectual discourse lags behind actual practice-a condition that afflicted the West as much as the protagonists in the revolution-knowing what actually transpired and the intentions of the participants are particularly difficult. If the Haitian Revolution challenged not only the Western institution of slavery but the every idea of man as it was denned at the time and pushed the radical universalism of the French Revolution to a new extreme, it did so without a narrative framework or ideological conceptualization.
Given the "unthinkable" nature of what occurred in Saint Domingue, It would be loo ambitious for David Geggus, one of the foremost historians of the Haitian Revolution, to claim in Haitian Revolutionary Studies that he has torn away the veil of silence or misrepresentation that shrouds the events that took place in Saint Domingue between 1791 and 1804. Rather, he judiciously assesses at the competing claims for representation that surround the Haitian Revolution at the present and points to those overlooked areas in early nineteenth-century Haitian historiography that...