Abstract

This article argues that the C.L.R. James in his seminal history of the Haitian Revolution, "The Black Jacobins" (1938/63) establishes a fledgling poetics of anti-colonial revolution. The article demonstrates how he harked back to Karl Marx's poetics of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. As he contends in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" revolutions veered between tragedy and farce. James, this article, concludes adapted Marx's poetics to the anti-colonial Haitian Revolution.