The Colonial System Unveiled

By Pompée-Valentin de Vastey

Book Overview

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event of world-historical importance. The former slaves' victory over their French masters and the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 is being newly heralded not only as a seminal moment in the transnational formation of the 'black Atlantic' but as the most far-reaching manifestation of 'Radical Enlightenment'.

The best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after the revolution is Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), who authored over ten books and pamphlets between 1814 and his murder in 1820. His first and most incendiary work, Le syst me colonial d voil (1814), provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Its trailblazing critique of colonialism anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of C saire, Fanon, and Sartre.
Translated here for the first time, Vastey's forceful unveiling of the colonial system will be compulsory reading for scholars across the humanities.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1781383049
• ISBN13: 9781781383049
• Release Date: January 2016
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.1"