Imagining Insurrection

This essay examines the ethics of fictional representations of history underlying the work of André Schwarz-Bart, author of the Last of the Just (1959), and of a “Caribbean cycle” that he left unfinished. In this respect, his procedures can seem doubly problematic. Not only does Schwarz-Bart use fiction to relate historical events that are considered incompatible with it—the Shoah and the transatlantic slave trade—but he also sets up a comparison between the two. No historian worthy of the name would proceed in this way. Yet in the epilogue to A Woman Named Solitude (1972), Schwarz-Bart performs precisely these two operations. Starting with a close reading of this scene, this essay explores the issues it raises and how these resonate with the approaches of contemporary historians—namely, Georges Didi-Huberman and Saidiya Hartman—with a view to displacing the nodal points of the vast and highly charged debate it participates in. Under what conditions are imagination and comparison acceptable as means to grasp these historical events? What is the reasoning behind their mobilization, and with what ends in view?

Aunt · Close reading · GRASP · Reading (process) · Solitude · The Holocaust · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · South African History and Culture