An extraordinary graphic novel of a groundbreaking play
When C.L.R. James's Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only
Successful Slave Revolt in History opened in London featuring Paul
Robeson in 1936, it was the first time black actors starred on a British
stage in a play written by a black playwright. But after this
extraordinary play ended its run, the script was lost for almost 70
years. Then a draft copy was found among James's archives, and now this
groundbreaking drama has been turned into a graphic novel by artists Nic
Watts and Sakina Karimjee.
The polymath intellectual and Trinidadian revolutionary James, who wrote
many books, including analyses of world politics, novels, and a seminal
cultural study of cricket, is perhaps best known as the author of the
classic history of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins. But James
wrote this story first not as history but as theatre, and Toussaint
Louverture brings his brilliant interpretation of the epic of the
Revolution into rousing, dramatic form.
This book reproduces the stirring script James wrote, and which united
James for at least one night with his friend Robeson on the London
stage, when the playwright was forced to stand in for an absent actor.
