The Shakespearean moment in the writing of history

The Black Hamlet of C. L. R. James

Abstract

This essay examines the rewriting of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, comparing the 1938 edition with its 1963 revision. Drawing on David Scott’s narrative diagnosis, in dialogue with Hayden White’s theory of historical narrative, it argues that there is an inflection from romantic to tragic emplotment, associated with a reconfiguration of the historical horizon. The essay proposes that this inflection can be understood as a “Shakespearean moment”, in Eduardo Rinesi’s terms, in which dialectic and tragedy are intertwined. From this framework, James’s engagement with* Hamlet is mobilized to reread the 1963 additions and the final chapter of the work. It is argued that the figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture is reconfigured as a tragic agent situated in a “time out of joint,” in which the tension between the Republic and the plantation system redefines the horizons of the Haitian Revolution. In doing so, the article demonstrates that Scott’s reading conceals an unexplored tension between tragedy and dialectic, whose traces manifest in the Hamletian elements of Toussaint’s reconstruction and in the political function of the chorus of the enslaved.