by Gerald Horne

Gerald Horne’s masterly Confronting Black Jacobins is a tour de force of historical excavation: he not only extends the intellectual trajectory of C.L.R. James’s work on the region, but he reimagines the geography of black revolt by documenting the impact of the Haitian Revolution in France, Britain, Spain, and most notably, in the United States too. By tracing the lethal spread of white supremacy, and its courageous confrontation by a rebellious black republic, Horne helps us to see the powerful blow for justice struck by a militantly resistant population of black citizens who more nobly embodied the ideals of freedom and equality than the European and North American powers that sought to defeat them.

424 pages

October 2015, Monthly Review