History: Reviews of New Books
ISSN: 0361-2759 (Print) 1930-8280 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vhis20
The Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture
Brandon R. Byrd
To cite this article: Brandon R. Byrd (2015) The Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture,
History: Reviews of New Books, 43:3, 99-100, DOI: 10.1080/03612759.2015.1032098
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03612759.2015.1032098
Published online: 03 Jun 2015.
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Date: 15 January 2016, At: 10:24
July 2015, Volume 43, Number 3
but the study is too invested in exposing the processes by which history is
forgotten to effectively reconstruct the
dramas of slavery, race, and emancipation that took place on Long Island
over the course of several generations.
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DAVID N. GELLMAN
DePauw University
Copyright Ó 2015 Taylor & Francis
Levenson, Deborah T.
Adi
os Ni~
no: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
200 pp., $22.95,
ISBN 978-0822353156
Publication Date: April 2013
Adi
os Ni~
no: The Gangs of Guatemala
City and the Politics of Death is a compelling genealogy of the Maras, or
street gangs, of Guatemala City and
one of the first books of its kind to consider Guatemala’s history of state terror, collective trauma, and neoliberal
policies in the production and reproduction of gang violence. An associate
professor of history at Boston College,
author Deborah Levenson has written
extensively on issues of labor, youth,
gender, and urban history in twentiethcentury Guatemala. Adios Ni~
no builds
on Levenson’s earlier work, Trade
Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala
City 1954–1985 (University of North
Carolina Press, 1994), which documented the efforts of the working classes to develop a united labor front in a
climate of intensified repression by the
Guatemalan military. Both books discuss how youth played a critical role in
city strikes and urban protests in this
period, but Adi
os Ni~
no examines the
limits of this youthful citizenship when
social movements were silenced by the
state after 1985, crushing the decadeslong struggles for political change.
Through oral interviews, fieldwork,
and intertextual readings from popular
media and academic press, Adi
os Ni~
no
illustrates the politics of precarity in
99
Guatemala today revealed by the experiences of mareros, or gang members,
and the shifting public discourse on
urban youth.
Levenson’s work is a significant
contribution to the study of juvenile
gangs and Guatemalan history for its
perspective on gang life, which comes
from the mareros themselves. With this
insight, the author draws a more
detailed picture of the Maras and their
evolution than the government and
popular media have created. The bonds
of gang membership, as Maritza, from
the all-female gang Mara de la 4,
explains, served as a space of protection, affection, and camaraderie where
none existed for young people. The
Maras’ petty thievery functioned as
“a weapon of social justice,” claimed
another marero, meant to level
inequalities in Guatemalan society.
However, gang life became a place of
hierarchy and control. As another
marero stated, “there is a prison
inside you that you can’t escape.. . .
[In the Mara,] I end up being what
others want me to be” (71).
The anti-capitalist ideology, political activism, and class solidarity that
influenced the formation of the first
Maras changed as city life was also
transformed in the late 1980s. By the
1990s, rape, extortion, and murder
had become defining features of marero identity. Levenson skillfully juxtaposes the increased media attention
given to the Maras’ violent crimes
with the press censorship of heightened atrocities committed by the Guatemalan military. Levenson contends
that violence was born not from these
gangs but from habitual state terror as
a practice of urban governance and
the structural violence that was part
and parcel of everyday life. Escaping
violence proved as difficult as living
with it. Ex-gang members are marked
for death, Levenson writes, with
exceptions made for mareros who
convert to Pentecostalism. However,
the converted have also been murdered by their clikas, or units of their
gang, sometimes years after they
defect. Although their prospects for
survival are tenuous, Levenson
stresses that the mareros’ choice to
leave their gang is a choice for life
over death and a sign of hope in the
midst of terrifying uncertainty for
urban youth.
Although Adi
os Ni~
no is part of the
emerging literature on gangs in Central America and the bourgeoning
transnational history of gang subculture, its theoretical and analytical
approach allows it to dig much
deeper than other works, such as
Maras: Gang Violence and Security
in Central America (by Thomas Bruneau, Lucıa Dammert, and Elizabeth
Skinner; University of Texas Press,
2011). Levenson argues against generalizing the experience of Maras in
Central America. She asserts that,
although gangs represent a worldwide and transnational phenomenon,
the reasons for gang membership and
the trademark brutality of Guatemala
City’s Maras are not adequately
explained by urbanism, parental dysfunction, or poverty, though she does
not dismiss these problems entirely.
Scholarship on the Maras has often
focused on their ties to Los Angeles
gang subculture, illegal drugs, and
organized crime, but, in Levenson’s
view, this transnational focus masks
the history of political violence,
genocide, and racism that have
marked Guatemalan society. The
Maras’ relationship to trauma, violence, and collective memory is only
partially revealed in Levenson’s
work, but it should widen our angle
of inquiry about the effects of both
state terror and the silences it produces in the postwar period. Adi
os
Ni~
no is highly recommended for
undergraduate study and is an excellent source for teaching the methods
of oral history.
SHARI ORISICH
University of Maryland—College
Park
Copyright Ó 2015 Taylor & Francis
Girard, Philippe R., ed. and trans.
The Memoir of General Toussaint
Louverture
New York: Oxford University Press
192 pp., $55.00,
ISBN 978-0199937226
Publication Date: February 2014
In April 1803, Toussaint Louverture died
in the French prison of Fort de Joux. The
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100
memory of the former slave who led the
Haitian Revolution before becoming the
governor of Saint-Domingue would,
however, transcend death. In the United
States, generations of white southerners
cursed the man whom they associated
with emancipation and racial equality.
Conversely, some white northerners
remembered Louverture as a genteel
Christian patriarch who demonstrated
the potential of his race. All the while,
African Americans regarded Louverture
as black masculinity, pride, and selfdetermination incarnate.
The lingering effects and perpetuation of these competing narratives
have not escaped Philippe Girard. In
his introduction to The Memoir of
General Toussaint Louverture, the
McNeese State University professor
and author of numerous works on
Haiti and the Haitian Revolution
insists that Louverture remains subject
to much “debate and speculation,”
even though he is “arguably the most
relevant historical figure of African
descent” (2). Scholars, he notes, still
dispute whether Louverture was a
“black nationalist. . . or a son of the
French Revolution,” a “herald of
emancipation or a reactionary figure”
(2). In essence, the historical Louverture remains shrouded by an accumulation of conjecture and myth.
Girard recognizes, too, that limitations in the sources available to Anglophone writers have enabled the copious
(mis)representations of Louverture.
Before 1863, no English edition of
Louverture’s memoir existed. Since
that year, audiences have had access to
Memoirs of General Toussaint
l’Ouverture written by himself, the
translation of a manuscript dictated to a
secretary by the imprisoned Louverture.
The dearth of writings in Louverture’s
own hand has facilitated the construction of alluring theories about Louverture but impeded a more accurate
accounting of his life and times.
The Memoir of General Toussaint
Louverture helps alleviate this problem. Girard begins with an introduction to the memoir, a text written
solely by Louverture, which he
addressed to Napoleon Bonaparte after
his capture and imprisonment in the
Fort de Joux. Based on archival
research in France, the United States,
HISTORY: Reviews of New Books
and the Caribbean, the introductory
essay situates the memoir within
Louverture’s tumultuous final years. A
brief preface follows. Girard then provides an original transcript and an
English translation of the memoir, the
texts alternating on adjacent pages.
Footnotes
containing
linguistic
explanations accompany the original
transcript, and descriptions of key people, events, and places append the
translation.
Readers will appreciate not only the
welcome translation but also the masterful entry into and explication of the
memoir given by Girard. He rightly
describes the manuscript as a unique
Francophone slave narrative, a rare
window into the mind of a black leader
who fought foreign armies while
experiencing a more common struggle
against slavery and racism. Accordingly, in the introduction and the footnotes, Girard deftly points out major
insights provided by the memoir. For
instance, although he predicts that
Louverture’s ideas about colonialism
“will forever remain a matter of
debate,” Girard identifies several
instances
where
the
language
employed by Louverture suggests that
he was “thoroughly assimilated into
French culture” and committed to the
colonial bond tying Saint-Domingue
to France (20, 147).
Indeed, the strength of this edited
translation lies in Girard’s engagement
with debates that concern linguists and
literary scholars, as well as historians.
Girard augments strong historical
interpretation with an examination of
the memoir’s style and language. The
linguistic analysis proves particularly
revelatory. Girard convincingly argues
that Louverture’s final testament
reveals “an intermediateR language
between French and Krey l,” a kind
of “aspiring French” that was used by
lower-class whites and upwardly
mobile blacks (29).
In the end, The Memoir of General
Toussaint Louverture does far more
than provide insights into Louverture’s
worldview or manner of speech. To
paraphrase Girard, it humanizes him
(35).
The
memoir
highlights
Louverture’s disdain for racism and
his insecurities about his lack of formal education. It brings to the fore
Louverture’s concern about and love
for his family. It is still possible, even
likely, that Louverture will remain a
symbol, a “larger-than-life historical
figure. . .hard to understand” for scholars and popular audiences alike (35).
However, Girard’s work surely makes
the task of exceeding speculation and
myth far easier for those willing to try.
BRANDON R. BYRD
Mississippi State University
Copyright Ó 2015 Taylor & Francis
McMahon, Darrin M., and
Samuel Moyns, eds.
Rethinking Modern European
Intellectual History
New York: Oxford University Press
305 pp., $99.00,
ISBN 978-0-19-976923-0
Publication Date: January 2014
The editors of Rethinking Modern
European Intellectual History, Darrin
M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, present essays written by some of the most
prominent practitioners in the field on
developments in modern European
intellectual history over the last fifteen
years. The volume follows in the tradition of two milestone anthologies on
the historiography of intellectual history: Dominic LaCapra and Steven L.
Kaplan’s Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New
Perspectives (Cornell University
Press, 1980) and Victoria E. Bonnell
and Lynn Hunt’s Beyond the Cultural
Turn: New Directions in the Study of
Society and Culture (University of
California Press, 1999). More than a
few contributions grapple with the legacy of the historiographical developments that these earlier anthologies
catalogue, most prominently, the rise
of social history in the 1960s and
1970s and the rise of the new cultural
history in the 1980s.
Review of the major schools of
intellectual history in the twentieth