Jeremy Glick

As the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora. In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.

“The Black Radical Tragic is infused with questions of memory, revolution, and how these concepts interact with one another across history. With rigorous attunement to the various registers in which revolt is recalled and recited, Jeremy Matthew Glick charts the Haitian revolution as an extended, ongoing historical moment of fugitive insurgency, the open culmination of the terrible and beautiful interplay of enlightenment and darkness. A brilliant and necessary book.” —Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

“Grappling with the continuing reverberations of the Haitian Revolution in our present, Jeremy Matthew Glick’s The Black Radical Tragic defines the notion of the tragic within the black radical tradition with remarkable insights and impressive breadth. An engagingly written text that will shape not only how we think about the centrality of the Haitian Revolution but also questions of the modern in political thought.” —Anthony Bogues, Brown University

See Slavoj Zizek's review of The Black Radical Tragic in LA Review of Books