The Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Karen Salt: Liverpool University Press, 2019. pp 240. $37.65 cloth.
The expanding corpus of scholarly works on theHaitian revolution and the creation of the Haitian state in 1804 has produced a remarkable set of compelling arguments and evidence. Collectively, this work has brought Haiti from the margins to where it started out—at the center of metropolitan discussions on freedom, slavery, and democracy. The great benefit of the richness of the literature is that it has encouraged scholars in complementary disciplines to advance their own ways of conceptualizing Haitian independence, as Karen Salt has done in this book. A scholar of transnational studies, Salt founds her intervention on the question of sovereignty. She does not treat it as simply a time-bound historical definition of postcolonialism. For her, sovereignty is a process incorporating all internal and external relations that shape a country’s place in the world. “Black sovereignty” is even more particular in the inescapable binding of racial prejudice of the past with present appraisals. It is, “a journey of being and performing in the world that has the potential to demand and open space” (207).