ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how nationalist and emancipationist narratives of liberation in the pan-Atlantic refract the discourses of European colonial, revolutionary, and abolitionist agendas. My analysis focuses on how the discourse of liberation is modulated in the 1790s and early 1800s through the figures of Toussaint Louverture and Francisco Miranda, who both participated in the French Revolution, and who understood empire and enslavement as being constitutive elements of European power in the Americas. Bringing revolution to the Americas thus raises the question of liberating slaves, one that Miranda's potential backers, the British, were not ready to entertain when he approached them first in 1790 and again in 1798 after he had served as a general for the French. A pan-Atlantic reading of Louverture and Miranda addresses the gap that Blackburn has identified in studies about Atlantic slavery and the transposition of revolutionary discourse from France to other sites in the Americas.
