Susan Gillman’s scientific contributions

Classics of revisionist historiography published only three years apart, W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (1935) and C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins (1938) court what Benedict Anderson call the “spectres of comparison” that overshadow their fields of history. Susan Gillman discusses how both titles signal their aim to produce a corrective historical narrative, named as “black.” Just a few years later, in the 1940s, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier coined his “New World Mediterranean,” another implicitly comparative formula that was key to his work on Haiti as a historical object, locating the Haitian Revolution in the context of pre-revolutionary Cuba and an Americas legacy of slave revolt. As three models of comparative studies by prominent New World/American intellectuals, how do they manage both to raise and exorcise the spectres of comparison± The chapter focuses on the textual history of Black Jacobins, both a single celebrated work by James, a cluster of different editions, prefaces and appendices, a play and set of lectures, as well as a wider circle, a text-network that takes in Du Bois and Carpentier, among others. The chapter concludes by speculating on the uses of adaptation for comparative studies.