Reading across history and theatre while using an intellectual-historical methodology based in the material archive, Douglas’ transparent prose finally lays textual conflation to rest. Douglas observes that most scholarship has conflated or neglected the multiplicity of texts and genres at work in James’ Haitian preoccupations. Then, following the 1963 updated edition of The Black Jacobins – whose additions are the subject of David Scott’s monumental study, Conscripts of Modernity – we learn of the second stage play written by James in 1967, also called The Black Jacobins.

The Black Jacobins, a book of history published in 1938, is the most famous work of the great Trinidadian historian and theorist, but Douglas introduces us to its predecessor: the 1936 play Toussaint Louverture. They are not epiphenomenal to the author’s published work but allow us to understand books as provisional and unfinished objects. In James’ case, real life contingencies are preserved in manuscripts, papers, archives, notes and ephemera. Adding to this wave, Douglas reminds us that written history not only aligns or experiments with generic conventions, but is also an act undertaken by an author in a social context and under specific political conditions. Attention to the torsions of history as drama and drama as history have been the basis for a number of studies of James’ The Black Jacobins in recent years, in particular Jeremy Glick’s The Black Radical Tragic. By taking account of each separate rendition of the story, it has done scholars of Caribbean revolutionary history an immense service. Making the Black Jacobins synthesises the many versions and marginalia of James’ work on the Haitian Revolution. In the same way that there are poets’ poets and communists’ communists, Rachel Douglas is a C.L.R. James and the Drama of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Rachel Douglas, Making The Black Jacobins: C.

The black jacobins review