On Revolutionary History and the Freedom Project: A Review Essay of Julius Scott’s The Common Wind

Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution was rightly bestowed with the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book award in 2020. In my view, any book that begins to properly illuminate the transcendental basis of the Haitian Revolution, one grounded in a freedom for all human beings, is one that deserves ceaseless accolades. We live in a world where black peoples across the globe are being strangulated by the heavy hand of antiblack racism, neocolonialism, and misanthropy. The Haitian Revolution, by itself, is an act of historical defiance and an embodiment of political rupture—it was an insistence on doing the impossible: rescuing black humanism in the face of a global, concerted effort to extinguish its torch of revolutionary ire. It is against this backdrop that Scott’s text is so timely and timeless.  

A few years ago, I remember being at an academic conference, and one fairly prominent historian, to paraphrase, proclaimed to one and all: Historians do not theorize nor philosophize; they leave such things to philosophers and theorists. We simply allow the archive to speak for itself.

Now, as a political theorist who often engages the work of historians—I was, after all, at a conference of, and by, historians—I found such a declaration not only incredulous, but also to be an act of grievous folly. Not because I expect historians to be philosophers or, for that matter, philosophers to be historians—though, some are—but rather, in the doing of meaningful scholarly work, one attuned to the transdisciplinary nature of evidentiary disclosures and lived truths, we will, inevitably, reveal facts as being, at the same time, social, philosophical, and, even, historical. In other words, if the phenomenon to be studied is multi-dimensional, as is the Haitian Revolution, then, so must our instruments of inquiry. Social phenomena cannot be isolated to a single disciplinary apparatus (see Lewis Gordon’s robust discussion of disciplinary decadence).

There is no denying that Scott is a historian, a very skilled one at that, yet the history that Scott brings to the fore, what he emancipates through the once shackled archives, was a philosophical history of black liberations—broadly and particularly the Haitian Revolution and its sweeping liberatory impact beyond its shores. Taken together, The Common Wind is a restitching of a once tattered historical record so as to enable the continuity of black (re)emergence.

Indeed, the Haitian Revolution, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, was supposed to be “unimaginable;” for black people, it was believed, had no thought, as human reason fled dark-skinned peoples. Scott, in my mind, takes up Trouillot’s argument by showing that the people who were not supposed to be rational, reasonable, or political actors did, in fact, think, reason, and act to subvert the prevailing colonial logics. We witness this in the ways Scott adeptly outlines the means and modes through which the enslaved, ex-enslaved, and mulattoes would employ tactical intelligence to acquire information in urban areas and through seaports. Perhaps what’s striking in Scott’s unveiling is the fact that cities, as spaces for socialization and places of political urbanity, provided corridors for the free flow of information. Urbanization functions as a social conduit for the resuscitation and cultivation of political consciousness; when folks organically meet in the happenings of mundane life, they inevitably unmask themselves. This, to be sure, allows for a collective seeing of selves, as totality—being apart from in order to be a part of. In fact, the polis, the domain of the political, emanates from the city. Scott’s text provides us with a sociology of urbanization as a form of political living rooted in radical renunciations.

Viewed from another angle, The Common Wind represents a vibrant theory of Caribbean continuity by speaking fluently to the possibility of an ongoing, contemporary regionalism, particularly among black nation-states. As the threat of neocolonialism grows more pronounced and pernicious in contemporary Caribbean politics, there is a meddling intent to make fragile and factional the current political order—that is, a fracturing of CARICOM, for example, in order to liquefy Caribbean unity so as to make domination inevitable. Scott provides a historical template that engineers Caribbean connectedness as perhaps the last bastion against agents and regimes of oppression, subjugation, and polarization.

Scott writes: “Following independence, Haitians continued to support the cause of black liberation…. Residents of the black republic also maintained communication with blacks in other parts of the hemisphere” (208–209). This allows me a provocative formulation: Haitians were the first to articulate Caribbean identity as an alignment with black humanity and with Haitian-ness. It is this logic that provides us with an intelligible articulation of a black modernity that moves even beyond the Caribbean sea to Latin America, and back to the African continent. Herein lies the fecundity of Scott’s oeuvre, it reads as a genesis of black political formation and transformation within the New World. In this regard, it invites other scholarship, mine included, to explore the mechanics and effects of black revolutions, writ large.

Scott also induces us to consider another revelation; that is, the biology of revolutions—their circulatory system, as it were. The Haitian Revolution reveals itself as transcending its own nationalistic cause for sovereignty. It stood as a common cause for the liberation of the human being, and so its common wind would blow in all directions. Enslavers from Jamaica to Cuba, and as far as Brazil, would vex themselves and concoct schemes to occlude black foreign contact in order to quarantine the brewing storm of black revolutionary praxis. Yet, ironically, the enslaved proved to be more adept in machinations and the art of the surreptitious, for they hid their information-gathering better than the enslavers could conceal the melody of liberty. Be that as it may, the Haitian Revolution discloses the anatomy of a liberation struggle; that is, though it may begin as a national movement, it will always be read as a transnational phenomenon, moving beyond its own historical particularities or physical geographies, simply because the human condition is one where freedom becomes its natural expression.

Though borrowed, Scott’s utilization of the term “masterless” is an intriguing one. The masterless speaks to a commonality beyond the social signifiers of race, gender, or even class—it was an odd mix, to be sure, from fugitive slaves to sailors, maroons to freed mulattoes, all who share a common destiny: Free people, ones without masters. Indeed, masterless makes sense only in light of a socio-political environ of masters. Master is etymologically derived from the Latin, magnus, meaning “great.” This is why, in Jamaican plantation society, Massa’s house was called the Great House. In a dialectical shift, the masterless, then, is a constituency of the lesser, the least, indeed, the last.

This depiction recounts, for me, Frantz Fanon’s insistence, in The Wretched of the Earth, that decolonization can “be summed up in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first.’…For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists” (2–3). The masterless, the last, must have their confrontation with the masters. The history of the Caribbean is a genealogy of confrontations against captors of freedom. Perhaps, the currency of the masterless may still have contemporary purchase; for if nothing else, it induces an urgent diagnostics of our twenty-first century’s hidden (or not-so-hidden) enclaves of masters. Last, we are, of course, left to talk about the “mastered”—the enslaved (curiously, a term Scott never invoked, as far as I could discern it). But the disruptive existence of the masterless makes even more tenuous and untenable, the categories of master and, conceivably, those that are thought to be “mastered,” which may very well be Scott’s point.

One can only make reasonable conjectures about how future historians will write of the early twenty-first century. In the last year or so, much has been made of the Black Lives Matter movement. This unqualified resurgence of revolutionary consciousness is both breathtaking and politically intoxicating. Maybe we are in another era where, it is said, we are “drunk with liberty.” I sure hope so. Black Lives Matter activists taking to the streets, the classrooms, the pews, and the cubicles across the United States and, indeed, across the world, is a historical phenomenon of grand proportions. Reading Scott’s The Common Wind foregrounds a playbook of how a revolution becomes enacted by illuminating the hemispheric conditions and actors necessary to precipitate it.

And so, The Common Wind is a footnote to, and a signposting of, the old revolutionary currents and circuitries that still roam throughout “Afro-America”—ready to be fused again. We are standing atop fault lines, and at any moment, there could be a fiery burst of revolutionary zeal that shifts our political landscape. Scott’s book is a remarkable treasure and a sentimental reminder of the poetics of black resolve. As such, I read it as an ode to the people of Haiti, who, for so long and with so much blood, led posterity toward fields of limitless horizons, often at the price of self. To them, the valiant people reclaiming of Western Hispaniola, The Common Wind is but one of many vindications.

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Memphis, who specializes in Africana Political Theory. Chevannes’ research interests center on issues of black liberation and black radical thought in the modern world. He writes at the intersection of Political Theory, Africana Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Disability Studies.