Take Haiti, whose Revolution was that other Independence, not a bourgeois one like those of the United States or Spanish America, let alone the paradoxically colonial Brazilian Independence. In the Haitian Revolution enslaved persons took power and founded a nation for the first time in human history. Yet as scholars like Michel-Rolf Trouillot (2015) and Eduardo Grüner (2017, 2020) have noted, it is the most forgotten major event in modernity. The questions this revolution raises on the universality of rights, the origins of totalitarianism in the slave plantation, and the role of slavery in the formation of the modern world are still rarely discerned. Grüner compares the proliferation of bicentennial celebrations in 2010 and the silence on Haiti’s bicentennial in 2004. This sort of elision, where the memory of insurgent Haiti flashes up only as it is submerged by a different kind of Independence, is a key example of the scene of engulfment, in which the modern subject—who in Latin America is criollo or mestizo—emerges by appropriating exteriority, or Blackness, to itself.
In a scenario like this the liberal discourse Roberto Schwarz refers to as “misplaced ideas” may not be as misplaced as he suggests…
coldhearted scientist وداد 