Appropriation of metaphors, disciplinarity and universalism in ‘rescuing’ the idea universal history from its service to white domination

The self-liberation of the African slaves of Saint-Domingue gained for them, by force, the recognition of European and American whites – if only in the form of fear. Among those with egalitarian sympathies, it gained them respect as well. For almost a decade, before the violent elimination of whites signalled a deliberate retreat from universalist principles, the black Jacobins of Saint-Domingue surpassed the metropole in actively realising the Enlightenment goal of human liberty, seeming to give proof that the French Revolution was not simply a European phenomenon but world historical in its implications.

Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, p. 835-836. (Italics added, my emphasis).

Response paper for POL5048S Global Political Thought, Political Studies Department, University of Cape Town

Abstract

Enlightenment thinking in Western political philosophy defined freedom in relation to its conceptual antithesis, slavery. As metaphors, slavery and freedom were mobilised towards real world political and economic ends in parallel to the philosophic discourses on human liberty. This essay offers a rejoinder to Buck-Morss’s illuminant paper and suggests that ironically, Buck-Mors proposition to salvage the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it, perhaps unwittingly or inevitably, falls into the trapping of Eurocentrism. To that effect, the essay aims to examine aspects of Buck-Morss own analysis, which seems to unquestioningly categorise the principles of the French revolution as universal even as she simultaneously illustrates how some of the core enlightenment thinking on freedom and liberty was anchored in particular economic interests to protect private property. In locating this critique, the essay pays particular attention to Buck-Morss treatment of Dessalines and the violent elimination of whites from Saint Domingue after Napoleon sent genocidal French troops to subdue the colony and suppress the slave revolt.

Introduction

Background and contextual location

Toussaint Louverture, a former slave widely regarded as a leader of the 1791 African slave revolt on the French colony of Saint Domingue – an event which is now commonly referred to as the Haitian revolution – had supported the French Revolution[1]. In his disappointment that the ideals of equality, brotherhood and freedom which drove the 1789 French Revolution had not extended to the colony of Saint Domingue and blacks on the island, he led a revolt which was partly inspired by these Enlightenment discourses on human liberty. These also influenced his political-economy thinking and posture after the successful slave revolt (James, 1938). Consequently, arguing that it would help preserve lasting sovereignty and autonomy, an argument premised on development of the island from backwardness (James, 1938; Robinson, 1981), Toussaint elected not to overhaul the plantation regime[2] after the French were defeated by the slaves in 1794.

Depicted as the enlightened black leader in France, Toussaint served as an ideal image of reason because of his conciliatory attitudes towards whites and as he brokered various treaties with the British and the United States (Buck-Morss, 2000:834), thus tempering the European metropole’s fear of a well-organised slave rebellion[3]. C.L.R. James (1938) noted the tragic irony of Toussaint’s enlightenment, infamously reflected in his decision not to overhaul the plantation regime, which led to his demise. For his loyalty, Toussaint was arrested and deported to France in 1802 on the orders of Napoleon who re-established slavery on the island. He died in prison a year later. In contradistinction, and undeterred, the figure of Jean-Jacques Dessalines under the banner of the now infamous slogan Liberty or Death, rose in 1804 in response to France’s retaliation which had “amounted to a war of genocide”. Sparing no prisoners, Buck-Morss (2000:835) describes the turn which saw the island declaring independence from France, a step Toussaint did not take, as particularly marked by the destruction of the white population on the island to birth the nation now called Haiti. Also in contrast to Toussaint, Dessalines did not draw up a constitution on the basis of non-racialism – a move which many have noted puts Toussaint ahead of his time in the same league of stature as Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King[4]. Rather, Dessalines’s constitution declared all Haitians as “black”.

Aims and outline

This rejoinder to Buck-Morss’ Hegel and Haiti does not focus on the various debates which arise when some of the liberation icons are branded sell-outs or accused of betraying the revolution, perhaps more arguably so in the case of Toussaint. Rather, I am interested in the idea of how these characters are seen and treated on the basis to which they embody or subscribe to values of universalism, which in turn serve as markers of qualified acceptance into humanity as they fulfil the criteria of what it means to be human[5]. For this response, the paper examines Buck-Morss’s brief treatment of the response meted out by Dessalines and situates this evaluation in the broader goal Buck-Morss suggests of rescuing universal history from its misuse by white domination. I suggest that ironically, the assessment Buck-Morss makes is Eurocentric because of its gaze toward the French Revolution.

Appropriation and metaphors; the convergence of theory and reality at historic moments

Buck-Morss (2000:842) explores the scholarly silence on Hegel’s philosophy which articulates the “struggle to death” between the master and slave and its connection to the Haitian revolution. Regarded as the key to the unfolding of freedom in world history[6], Hegel’s master and slave dialectic is a near indispensable cornerstone in modern political philosophy[7]. Working towards the idea of rescuing universal history from its use by white domination, Buck-Morss asks the question: where did Hegel’s idea of the relationship between lordship and bondage originate? (Buck-Morss:842). The article, Hegel and Haiti, is grounded in an analysis which illustrates a tradition of appropriation in a century long line of Enlightenment philosophers, from Hobbes writing in mid-17^th century to Rousseau writing in the mid-18^th century, with Locke in between. Each appropriated slavery as the root metaphor of their theoretical articulations of freedom whilst ignoring really existing slavery[8].

Hegel’s master-slave dialectic emerges from this line. Writing in 1805, the year Dessalines establishes Haiti as an independent state, Hegel made no mention of actual slaves fighting for liberty or death against the French colonial master. Buck-Morss extensively illustrates that by most likely accounts, Hegel was well informed of the slave revolt from its genesis till the setting up of the new nation[9]. She concludes:

• Either Hegel was the blindest of all the blind philosophers of freedom in Enlightenment, surpassing Locke and Rousseau in his ability to block out reality in front of his nose[10], or Hegel knew about real slaves revolting successfully against real masters, and he elaborated his dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within this contemporary context (Buck-Morss, 2000: 844).

Disciplinarity and its trappings

With an eye toward the contemporary, Buck-Morss attributes the continued silence on the Hegel-Haiti connection to the fact that some academic disciplines would not only be made irrelevant if certain questions which fundamentally challenge their existence are asked. She also illustrates how in turn, a field of study, or discipline, is able to push certain questions to its margin relegating them as irrelevant to the main focus of the scholarly subject matter. In attempting to illustrate alternative readings of the history where theory and reality converged, of philosophy breaking from the confines of academic theory and becoming a commentary on the history of the world, Buck-Morss (2000: 852) offers the poet as one such alternative. The romantic poet William Wordsworth was born in the same year as Hegel. On the death of Toussaint, Wordsworth, who was an abolitionist, published a poem in dedication to Toussaint’s honour and memory. If one of Buck-Morss suggestion is the idea of rescuing universal history from the use white domination has put it to, who better to turn to than the poet to capture the universal human condition towards freedom? 

The main title of this essay borrows from an inscription on John Keats’ grave, a poet who died at the age of 25 believing he had made no mark on history. Partly moved by Buck-Morss offering, and being someone with a general interest in poetry, as a writer or even artists of sorts, I was inclined to briefly investigate the work of the romantic poets like Blake, Wordsworth and Keats. Having gone through the South African high school system, these names are familiar in most English curriculums. Buck-Morss’s illumination provided additional stimulus to revisit these figures. In classic romantic fashion, the end result of this sojourn was metaphorical heart break which I think is captured in the essay title. As the news of violence against whites on the French colony spread in Europe, the work of romantic poets which aimed at illustrating that the differences between blacks and Europeans were only cosmetic was severely undermined. In response, the poets changed tune. Elliot (2017) notes:

• Post-Revolution poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge focused on the need for whites to exercise complete sovereignty, thereby maintaining control over black slaves and subjects while also seeming more benevolent. It is unfortunately this approach that has endured, in many respects, through emancipation and independence to today.

Though the poets such as Blake and Wordsworth were more candid in their denouncement of slavery, ultimately, and in true artistic fashion, abolitionist poetry was geared towards consoling white guilt and allaying white fears[11]. Buck-Morss’s does not consider these aspects in her reading of Wordsworth, which then ironically leads one to describe the potential of the idea to rescue a universal history as romanticised.

Rescuing universal history: which fantasy?

When I was reading Buck-Morss description of Dessalines’ rise and how the violent elimination of whites signalled a departure from universalist principles, I could not help but think of a recent history which generated a social media storm. It involved a politics student at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Masixole Mlandu, who in the acknowledgements section of his honours research project titled The Coloniser/Colonised Dialectic ended with the signature “one settler, one bullet”[12]. The head of the UCT philosophy department co-authored a paper On the genocidal fantasies of Masixole Mlandu. Benatar’s analysis, soaked in tropes of constitutionalism and human rights[13], and in a universality claiming that Mlandu advocates hate on the basis of race, led me to the following questions.

What does the unfolding of freedom in world history look like? What is the conception of the idea of a universal history? As I have suggested, Buck-Morss glosses over the real unfolding of freedom and acts of liberation most viscerally and violently reflected in Dessalines; and instead, opts for a world history which is tempered and ‘enlightened’ as was the case with Toussaint. Yet, could it not be that Dessalines response to the French resistance is in practice, in reality, the universal, and not a departure from universalist principles? The fact that Buck-Morss does not consider this is ironic precisely because her article seeks to do just that; shedding light between the connection of the real and abstract. The idea of even a rescued universal history from this reading would seem to lend itself as just being a metaphor, open for appropriation. For example, it is an open secret that America was born in the genocide of the native American. Haiti was birthed in mass slaughter. What is the universality connecting these two events? There seems to be an unquestioned assumption that these principles of universality cannot be retreated from. Yet, the universalist discourse which birthed the French revolution excluded African slaves. Why should they then, the African slaves of the French colony, be bound to it? Why at all adopt a discourse which systematically negated their existence and did not recognise them even as slaves? These questions are key in considering the aspects of rescuing universal history from white supremacy.

This is not to suggest a romanticisation of retributive violence either. A radical non-eurocentric approach to the question of universal history cannot afford to ignore and gloss over harsh realities where mass genocide has sometimes baptised the dawn of independence of African states in the aftermath of national liberation struggles. A non-Eurocentric approach would need to explain the unfoldings claiming to be movements towards liberation and freedom which saw massacres in Rwanda, Darfur, Somalia, without castigating them as deviations from a normative ideal centred on Europe nor offering convenient, albeit sometimes true explanations of imperialist meddling.

This essay ends with a question which I do not take a position on. That is: whether the very idea of universal history is itself inevitably Eurocentric. This essay was limited and did not explore that aspect sufficiently to draw meaningful commentary on that point. For sure, there is a Eurocentric conception of universal history. But to claim that the very idea itself of universal history inevitably becomes or is Eurocentric is one I did not explore. Suffice to say that this essay has suggested that Buck-Morss reading might find itself falling into a Eurocentric version of universal history due to its centring of the French Revolution.

Bibliography

Allen D. (2013) And Finally…. The Slave and the Emperor. The Expository Times 125: 52-52.

Buck-Morss S. (2000) Hegel and Haiti.(Critical Essay). Critical Inquiry 26: 821.

Chakrabarty D. (1992) Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for Indian Pasts?   Representations: 1-26.

Chatterjee P. (2014) Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, New York: Columbia University Press.

Cooper F. (2005) Postcolonial Studies and the Study of History. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 401-422.

Ekeh P. (1997) European Imperialism and the Ibadan School of History. Problematising History and Agency: From Nation to Subalternity. Buffalo: State University of New York, 401-422.

Feierman S. (1993) African History and the Dissolution of World History. Africa and the Disciplines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 167-212.

James CLR. (2001) The black Jacobins : Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution, London: Penguin.

Robinson CJ. (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.

Trouillot M-R. (1995) An Unthinkable History: The Haition Revolution as a Non Event. Silencing the Past. Boston: Beacon, 70-107.

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[1] Allen, David. “And Finally…. The Slave and the Emperor.” The Expository Times 125.1 (2013): 52–52.

[2] C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) cited in Lewis Eliot (2017) “Exultations, Agonies, and Love: The Romantics and the Haitian Revolution”

Exultations, Agonies, and Love: The Romantics and the Haitian Revolution

[3] Ibid. The protagonist in Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” announces “I am black but O, my soul is white!”. Eliot notes that the Romantic poets who were abolitionists such as Wordsworth and Blake, sought to illustrate that the blacks were not so different from whites, therefore providing a lulling sense of comfort to swart gevaar.

[4] Allen, David. 2013. As cited above in footnote 1.

[5] Hegel, Kant, Hume and other moral philosophy on the subject has been extensively acknowledged as racist.

[6] Hegel (1805). The Phenomenology of Mind cited in Buck-Morss (2000) Hegel and Haiti

[7] From Liberalism, Marxism to Decolonisation, the master-slave dialectic as the driver of world history has been leveraged by various political philosophy

[8] Buck-Morss (2000) Hegel and Haiti. p. 830. Locke for example particularises slavery as a metaphor of legal tyranny which exacts taxes on property. Rousseau’s infamous Social Contract opens with the words “men is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”. Unlike Locke, he goes further to condemn the institution of slavery but omits to discuss millions of European owned African slaves.

[9] Ibid. Pages 837-845 of Hegel and Haiti exclusively offer a meticulous account of various newspapers and journals in circulation at the time, of which Hegel was a frequent reader, reporting reputable information on the Saint-Domingue rebellion.

[10] Ibid. Literally, the newspaper print in front of his nose on his breakfast table.

[11] Richardson, Alan. “Darkness Visible: Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry, 1770-1810.” The Wordsworth Circle 27.2 (1996): 67–72. Web.

[12] See the first few pages of his Political Studies Honours research project https://twitter.com/masixolemlandu/status/1059832413994602496/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1059832413994602496&

[13] https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/on-the-genocidal-fantasies-of-masixole-mlandu