ABSTRACT
Consider the impact on Enlightenment discourse of the late eighteenth century slave revolt in Haiti, a turning point that, for Michel-Rolph Trouillot, revealed the “unthinkable even as it happened.” In this revolt the category of “slave” was limiting because European categorical and philosophical discourse could not account for slave self-organization. Trouillot chronicles the silences that forbade Europeans, and slaves, from recognizing the signifi cance of the revolution as it unfolded. Th us, a French
colonist in Saint-Domingue wrote to his wife in France, in 1790: “there is no movement among our Negroes…. Th ey don’t even think of it. Th ey are very tranquil and obedient. A revolt among them is impossible.” In this way, self-referential discourse simply “othered” the slave: “the more European merchants and mercenaries bought and conquered other men and women, the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man” (Trouillot, 1995, pp. 72, 75).
