Black Spartacus - The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture - Grand Format

Of the major figures who gave us the modern world, the Haitian slave turned liberator Toussaint Louverture is among the most enigmatic. Though his image has multiplied across the globe — appearing on banknotes and in bronze, on T-shirts and in film — the only definitive portrait executed in his lifetime has been lost. Well versed in the works of Machiavelli and Rousseau, he was dismissed by Thomas Jefferson as a "cannibal".
A Caribbean devotee of the European Enlightenment, Toussaint nurtured a class of black Catholic clergymen who became pillars of his rule, while his supporters also believed he communicated with vodon spirits. Though he once summed up his modus operandi with the phrase "Say little but do as much as possible," he was a prolific correspondent, famous for exhausting the five secretaries he maintained simultaneously at the height of his power in the 1790s.
Employing groundbreaking archival research and a keen interpretive lens, Sudhir Hazareesingh restores Toussaint to his full complexity in Black Spartact s. At a time when his subject has been, variously, reduced to little more than a one-dimensional icon of liberation or criticized for his personal failings, Haza-reesingh proposes a new conception of Toussaint's self-understanding and his role in the Atlantic world of the lare eighteenth century.
Black Spartacus is rich with insights into Toussaint's dynamism and achievements—above all, his ability to unite European, African, and Caribbean traditions in the service of his revolutionary aims. Hazareesingh offers a new and remnant interpretation of Toussaint's racial politics, showing how he used radical ideas about equality to argue for the common dignity of all human beings while also insisting on his own world-historical importance and the universal pertinence of blackness — a message that chimed particularly powerfully among African Americans.
Ultimately, Black Spartacus offers a vigorous argument in favor of "getting back to Toussaint'—a call to take Haiti's founding father seriously on his own terms, and to honor his role in shaping the posrcolonial world to come.