Toussaint Louverture
A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions, by Charles Forsdick & Christian Høgsbjerg
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7932513 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philippe Girard (0000-0001-7202-6910, 1 McNeese State University History Department, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 92 |
| Issue | 3-4 |
| Pages | 324-325 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-07 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1382-2373 • E-ISSN: 2213-4360 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/22134360-09203031 |
| OpenAlex | W2969287310 |
| Language | EN |
To the question "Will there ever be a truly authoritative biography of Toussaint Louverture?" Charles Forsdick (a professor of French) and Christian Høgsbjerg (whose writings focus on black Marxist thinkers) reply that "the answer is probably no" (p. 6).It is an odd way to start a biography of Louverture, but the statement surely applies to this book, which is undermined by its ideological bias and its overreliance on other authors.(Both the question and the answer are borrowed from an article by David A. Bell in The Nation, November 2, 2016.)Historians normally comb archives and then follow the sources wherever they may take them.Forsdick and Høgsbjerg proceed the other way around, beginning with a wish "to reassert the incendiary political implication of [Louverture's] life, actions, and revolutionary political thought" (p.10).Their model is The Black Jacobins (1938), the classic biography of Louverture by C.L.R
Art · Art history · Biography · Ideology · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law
| Highly cited | No |
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