Haiti and Du Bois, in the New Black Thought

The Haitian Enlightenment is one of the most splendid phenomena of the nineteenth century, but ignored somehow; in spite of which it is still there, as if waiting for the occasion that will resurrect it historically, due to its importance and scope. What makes this intellectual phenomenon unique is that it reproduces that of W.E.B. Du Bois, but already as a country and culture; so that its difficulty is not a structure in which it participates, but its own structurality, and for which it is always sufficient.

Du Bois —the Hegel of the black world— is contradictory, because of his excellent assimilation of Western thought; which it modifies, providing it with its existential experience, like the elusive Dasein it naturally lacks. Haiti is the same phenomenon, but without the pressure of the context, so its contradiction is not political; on the contrary, if the contradiction in Du Bois has two stages, that of Haiti has only one, and in this it becomes exponential. The two stages of the contradiction in Du Bois are his own blackness as a western, and then his westernity as a black; but Haiti only have the first one, because this one becomes a new positivity as potential, and not a contradiction.

Du Bois's existential experience is then that of culture in Haiti, translated into a lack of political contradiction; not because Haitian culture is harmonious, but because its contradictions are internal and characteristic of its development. Therefore, the Haitian contradiction is one of the functions with which its substructures are related in a singularity; with the same referential value as that of Du Bois, but at the country level, as a self-reference, in its own determination.

This is what makes Haiti so amenable to the reflective function of its African ancestry, with its existential value; contrary to Du Bois —following the example—, who lacks this reflexive ascendancy, due to his political circumstance. What is interesting here would be the confluence of these two singularities, proving the existential quality of the Haitian; which resides in the practical realism of the two, although Du Bois's is more relative, conditioned by the Westernism in which he participates.

Of course, as relative, somehow this is also the case of Haiti, organized as a country in a typical European structure; just less susceptible —and this is important— to this conditioning, lacking this difficulty suffered by Du Bois. Nor was this lack absolute, but its contradiction was weaker, because of the sufficiency of Haitian culture; that when resolved as a nation, even institutionally, it was a diplomatic, not social as an immediate difficulty.

Thus, Du Bois resorts to complex theoretical circumambulations, such as his discourse A Nation Within the Nation; unnecessary and even incomprehensible in Haiti, where the concept of nation doesn’t require a reconciliation of this duality. That does not mean that Haiti didn’t have —or still has— racial conflicts, such as those between mestizos and blacks; it is just that this is not legislable in a culture, as in the United States or Cuba, with a lower political density.

Hence, an intelligence like Jean Prince-Mars does not have to resort to conventional philosophy to reflect on politics; but that it resorts to folklore, resurrecting the typically romantic cognitive function, with its greatest efficiency. It should be remembered that Romanticism is not strictly but figuratively an idealization of the past; updating it as a reflexive referent for a determination of the present, which is possible in the trans-historical nature of its structure.

This understanding of reality differs from that of the idealistic, because it is not an abstract concept or Idea (Eidos); but an effective reality, abstracted in its representation, but with its own historical value and consistency. As a tradition, Idealism redounds to this function proper to culture, but artificially, by its specialized elites; which thus make these determinations of political and not cultural nature, distorting the functions in which the structure organizes itself.

That is why Du Bois cannot afford the luxury of romanticism, responding to the political convention of his environment; and he has to resort to the idealist tradition —the only one available— in adaptations such as Peirce's more efficient pragmatism. This would be what relates both phenomena, in a complementary and symbiotic function due to their parallelism; with an exchange of resources, which results in greater efficiency of the two, with this confluence.