Li-Chun Hsiao - The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation

2This capital “E” certainly cannot hide its implicit allusion to Alain Badiou’s notion of Event or Truth-Event. For reasons that will become clearer to the reader in the remainder of the book, I’d say, under the rubric of Badiou’s work, the legend of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution is definitely an Event for the post-Bastille “situation” from which it sprang, and, to a certain degree, for the problematic of the “postcolonial situation” we’re exploring in this book: It is an Event in the sense that it foregrounds the inherent lack or excess of the “official” situation—what the latter has to exclude in order to come into being; it produces its own Truth—a new Universal—which is not yet accountable or justifiable in the terms of the preceding situation.

3To be sure, the memory of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution had lived in local folklore, historical accounts, and official documents written by Haitian historians or fellow Caribbeans, despite the metropolitan neglect which sufficed to ensure the marginalization of this memory. It was not until after the emergence of James’s book, and the political climate of the last century, that it was able to have such planetary influence and significance. See Farred (“Mapping”; “Victorian”).

4Eugene Genovese emphasizes that the Haitian Revolution differs from the numerous slave revolts before it mainly because of its revolutionary ideology and practices, not simply due to its much greater military success over the white colonial powers.

5It must be noted that Said, as he was to stress again and again, never discounts a “really existing” Orient outside of the West’s discursive formations. In his later works, for example Culture and Imperialism , he points out, on the other hand, the West’s dependence on its epistemological and cultural Other.

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