What's Ginen Got to Do With It? On Haiti and 20th-Century Caribbean Anticolonialism

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Monday, February 9th, 2026 at 7 PM ET

Join us on the evening of February 9th for a virtual seminar with author and historian Natalie Léger about her new book: Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Radical Decolonial Imagination (Vanderbilt, 2025).

Since the 1938 publication of the Black Trinidadian writer C.L.R James’s seminal history of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 20th-century Caribbean anticolonialists imagined Caribbean freedom through Haiti. This imagining bore classics of Caribbean literature from the likes of the white Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (The Kingdom of this World, 1947) and the Black Martinican writers, Aimé Césaire (The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1963) and Édouard Glissant (Monsieur Toussaint, 1961). These texts are rightfully classics, but they are foundational works that misremember and misrepresent the Revolution as a republican feat led by Caribbean-born revolutionists. They write Africans (or Ginens) out of the uprising, notwithstanding that two-thirds of the enslaved were African-born on the eve of the uprising. This talk addresses the political consequences of erasing Africans from the story of the Haitian Revolution in the moment of 20th century Caribbean anticolonialism. It argues that without them the story becomes a poor means of inspiring anticolonial contestation as intended and worse, Haiti and Haitians, become representative of the impossibility of securing liberation from colonial predation.

Natalie M. Léger is an Associate Professor of English at Temple University, who specializes in twentieth-century anti-colonial thought and decolonial philosophy in Caribbean literature and African diasporic fiction. Her research interests also focus on race and visual culture, Latin American literature, and magical realist cultural production. Her first book, Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Radical Decolonial Imagination, was recently published with Vanderbilt University Press.

Hosted by the Program of African American History