'Arguing around Toussaint': The Black Jacobin in an Age of Revolution

Reflecting on the recent experience of writing (with Christian Høgsbjerg) a biography of Toussaint Louverture, I draw in the talk on Edouard Glissant’s claim – in his Caribbean Discourse – of the continued need to ‘argue around Toussaint’. The paper focuses on the domestication of the revolutionary implications of Louverture’s life by those who have presented him as an ancien régime figure, and detects the renewal of such thinking in what has been identified as a recent ‘conservative turn’ in global histories of the revolutionary age.