Citizenship from the Margins: Vernacular Theories of Rights and the State from the Interwar Caribbean (original) (raw)
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as elites struggled to retain control, but in France itself as counterrevolutionaries grew dominant. A brief interlude of hard-won emancipation was shot through with contradictions, restrictions, and exclusionary racism. The book ends with the tragic and violent reinstatement of slavery in Guadeloupe, which as Dubois points out, is unprecedented and unrepeated in history. Any one of these episodes could be a book in itself; this impressive work takes on all three. The principal claim, that slaves' struggles shifted the terms of universalism, raises questions. As Dubois himself suggests, even this version of universalism, supposedly transformed to a more radically egalitarian one, fell short in practice. The declarations of emancipation were accompanied by efforts to restrict the freedoms of former slaves. Dubois ignores extensive debates about the uneven nature of "universalism"such as critiques of the enlightenment and critiques of liberal theory and practice-which underscore the ways in which the notion of universalism is, and was, contentious. Some engagement with these complex debates might have enriched his discussions and clariªed precisely how events in the Caribbean changed notions of democracy, equality, and freedom, or, rather, how they impinged on concepts that were continually in ºux.
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