Somewhere among the boxes of notebooks in my study is the rough draft of a paper from the 1990s in which I started to pull together a paper on “Toussaint Louverture,” a play by C.L.R James produced in London in 1936. Paul Robeson, in the title role, played the military genius who led a slave revolt on the island known as San Domingo to its ultimate triumph: the creation of the republic of Haiti.
It was intriguing to know that James – who went on to tell the story in detail in The Black Jacobins (1938), one of the great works of historical narrative published in English over the last century – had first experimented with putting the events on stage. And the circumstances were certainly rich. Born in Trinidad in 1901, James had arrived in England in 1932 with the manuscript of a novel in his luggage and the distinction of having had a short story included in an anthology of the best short fiction for 1927.
