Failure

Postcoloniality as a formation is haunted by failure. After the dismantling of European empires in the mid-twentieth century, the promise of decolonization dissipated quickly, as crises of governance, and flawed schemes of development often led to a descent into authoritarianism. In the wake of 1989, the rubric of the failed state gathered rapid prominence in international realpolitik to describe such dysfunction. Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner influentially defined the "failed nation-state" as "utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community."1 In 2024, the Failed State Index (recently renamed the Fragile State Index) ranked the following as the top ten failed states: Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Congo Democratic Republic, Yemen, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Haiti, and Chad. Each year, such a map corresponds exactly to First World nations tagged as "sustainable" and "stable" with much of the erstwhile postcolony earning the label of "warning" or "alert."

If such indices purporting to define or measure failure are likely already suspect for liberal academics, it is worth noting that proclamations of postcolonial failure are by no means limited to such international organizations. The call is coming from inside the house. Influential postcolonial critics have declared the inadequacy of existing theories of empires past and present, and proposed new vocabularies to fathom the ongoing impact of colonial violence. The rubric of failure in fact inflects the field of postcolonial thought in three distinct ways: as a descriptor of current geopolitical dysfunction, as a marker of dashed hopes of decolonization, and as an account of theoretical lack. All three involve an assessment of the valence of anticolonialism itself - as an ideology that failed to deliver the promised emancipation, as a practice that birthed governmental ineptitude and chaos, and as a set of conceptual tools relevant for ongoing projects of liberation. To note how quickly the scene of decolonization shifted from exhilaration to despair, we may contrast the shift from 1960 (rapturously declared the "Year of Africa") to 1975, a mere decade and a half later. Historian Basil Davidson captures the pulse of anticolonial jubilation when he writes about the dawn of decolonization: "People even talked of a 'new Africa' and yet it did not sound absurd. A whole continent seemed to have come alive again, vividly real, bursting with creative energies, claiming its heritage in the human family, and unfolding ever more varied or surprising aspects of itself. The world became a larger and happier place."2 But as early as 1975, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o voices widespread feelings of disenchantment and despair: "Where have all our hopes gone? They have been replaced by a general feeling that water, water everywhere is bitter."3

In response to such vivid manifestations of postcolonial failure, succumbing to the logic of TINA ("There is no Alternative"), prominent scholarly voices declare the end of revolutionary possibilities in the present, asking us to learn to live with the failure of the dreams of national liberation and revolutionary transformation.4 In pondering the causes of state failure, for instance, Orlando Patterson uses the specific example of Jamaica and its many paradoxes: the coexistence of functioning democracy and widespread violence (with highest global homicide rates), the soft power of music and sport alongside flawed achievements of economic policies that sought to alleviate poverty, and the failure of charismatic leaders like Prime Minister Michael Manley to achieve social democracy.5 Perhaps most pithily, David Scott sums up the critical consensus when he laments that "anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares."6

At the heart of the claim of postcolonial failure, then, is the question of the specific relation of anticolonial thought to our historical conjuncture today — a moment of seemingly permanent crisis that seems ill-fitted to the visions of revolutionary hope and worldmaking of a century that left in its wake catastrophe and failure. Is it possible to hold together the specific political and historical urgencies of an era where revolution was imminent with the shattered dreams of our own? How can we hope to assess the potential of revolutionary thought today if we do not turn back first to a more critical examination of what it means to characterize anticolonialism as a historical failure?

I propose that to do so, we must revisit anticolonial thought with the understanding that many of its key figures (Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, and Walter Rodney) were actively involved with liberation movements, even as they produced much of the philosophical critique of colonial power that informs academic study today. In other words, we must recognize that many of the anticolonial thinkers undergoing a critical rediscovery did not necessarily formulate their theories in abstraction, but responded to real events on the ground, with the hope of actively influencing the course of history, in a moment when revolution was on the horizon. In contrast, our own era has brought a massive retrenchment of xenophobia, racism, economic inequality, and ecological catastrophe — both slow violence and spectacular catastrophe in political, social, economic, and geological terms.

To understand both conjunctures, as well as their complex entanglement, we will thus have to rethink the easy ascription of failure. To task any theory with the burden of achieving the transformation of economic and social life seems unfair. We must assess anticolonial thought on its own terms, returning the ideas that often circulate as memes or mantras, shorn from their historical sites of struggle, to the revolutionary contexts in which they arose. Next, we must restore the connection — fraught as it is — between anticolonial and postcolonial thought. Since the 2015 "Rhodes Must Fall" movement in South Africa, calls to decolonize have become ubiquitous. Rather than anoint selected figures as icons or prophets, or seek new prefixes like "anti," "de," and "neo," to displace the much-vaunted "post," we need to recognize that anticolonialism must never be seen as static but itself an object of inquiry - messy, reactive, and processual. Only by recognizing its historicity and tracking its circulation can we hope to de-sloganize it. In doing so, we may find that anticolonial thought emerges as a rich repository for nimble thinking about failure. 

"The Fever and the Fret"

Recognizing that the transfer of power from European colonizers to local elites would always fail to deliver the desired transformation, anticolonialism imagined revolutionary change beyond national liberation and state capture. Anticolonial thinkers were cognizant of the risk of seeing the formal end of European empire as a definitive rupture between past and present, as a finite, earth-shattering event. Rather, they understood the limits of such a transition and underscored the need for a revolution that would serve what Fanon termed "a program of complete disorder."7 To imagine such a program, they needed to break down existing forms of knowledge.

As Michel-Rolph Trouillot influentially argues, "the Haitian revolution entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened." "Ready-made categories" could not fathom "the idea of a slave revolution" let alone narrate it. He asks, "if some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later? Can historical narratives convey plots that are unthinkable in the world within which these narratives take place? How does one write a history of the impossible?"8

For most critics, the answer to this question is likely found in C.L.R. James's magisterial study of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, The Black Jacobins (1938). In his preface, James notes, "the violent conflicts of our age enable our practiced vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily." Challenging Wordsworth's notion of emotion recollected in tranquility, James favors the "fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement" instead.9 "Such is our age and this book is of it, with something of the fever and the fret," he declares. To be sure, the "fever and the fret" of the World Wars, the Great Depression, the waning power of colonial empires, the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and the threat of race wars all impact James's rethinking of Toussaint Louverture's life and death as the "only successful slave revolt in history" (ix). But James is clear that his account is a model for the Third World struggles for decolonization about to come, "intended to stimulate the coming emancipation of Africa" (vii).

James underscores his prescience in the preface to the revised 1963 edition of The Black Jacobins: "in 1938 only the writer and a handful of close associates thought, wrote and spoke as if the African events of the last quarter of a century were imminent" (vii). Indeed, even as his account of San Domingo anticipates the history of decolonization, it also uncannily appears to describe the fate of the postcolony in the latter half of the twentieth century. The conflicts he delineates in painstaking detail — among the mulattos, the French owners, the many political factions in France, the masses, the leaders, their strategies, their compromises, their calculations, frequently tragic with the hindsight of history, the thrill of a revolution that overthrows tyranny, the reckoning with its failure — all too often find their strange echo today.

Despite such convergences, David Scott has influentially returned to James to theorize the postcolonial present, but only to emphasize a break between the two eras.  In a moment when "the bankruptcy of postcolonial regimes is palpable in the extreme," Scott argues that "the old languages of moral-political vision and hope are no longer in sync with the world they were meant to describe and normatively criticize."10 Because we are now in a different problem-space, he insists, "we need to give up constructing an image of colonialism that demands from us an attitude of anticolonial longing, a longing for anticolonial revolution."11

Scott's argument hinges on genre. In a virtuosic reading of The Black Jacobins and changes in the text from 1938 to 1963, when James adds a few paragraphs on tragedy in his account of Toussaint's defeat, imprisonment, and death, Scott insists on the value of tragedy and the limits of romance. Reading James's Toussaint as Hamlet — "a modernist intellectual, suffering, like Hamlet, the modern fracturing of thought and action" — Scott resists anticolonial stories plotted as a romance: narratives of overcoming, salvation, redemption where "history rides a triumphant and seamlessly progressive rhythm."12 In contrast, tragedy does not conceive of past, present, and future "as moments of epic succession; they do not line up neatly as though history were heading somewhere: from bondage to freedom, from despair to triumph."13 While romance assumes that "we are masters and mistresses of our destiny, that our pasts can be left behind and new futures leaped into," tragedy reckons with forces beyond our control, with vulnerability, chance, and contingency.14

To align a literary genre with a global political formation, as Scott does, presumes that genres are transhistorical entities. No wonder that his primary interlocutors remain such classic genre theorists as Aristotle (on tragedy) and Northrop Frye (on romance). But the relation between genres of tragedy or romance and the political form of revolution is not so simple. Neither are the lessons the past holds for us. To calibrate the relation between genre and history, as I propose, forces a reckoning with the fact that anticolonial revolution is imagined as a moment of total upheaval that entails reinventing received forms and formations. In fact I want to insist that all of anticolonial thought should be read as an instance of what Lauren Berlant termed in another context "genre flail" — a riotous clash of epic and lyric modes, elegiac and ecstatic moods, as writers redraw the boundaries of literary, historical, sociological, and anthropological knowledge.15 The need for permanent transformation at the root of anticolonial revolution reimagines romance and commitment, tragedy and failure.

Accordingly, James's view of revolution and its relation to genre cannot be reduced to a binary of anticolonial romance and postcolonial tragedy. For James, restoring the true valence of the Haitian Revolution requires him to work against the grain of the "great man makes history" genre, and the ostensible focus on the revolutionary hero only gains its depth by displacement — as the masses of enslaved and free Haitians become the true motor force of the historical movement toward freedom. James thus calls on but reinvents both romance and tragedy in his account, rendering neither genre static. To reckon with his conception of tragedy, which is not about dead-ends, and his commitment to romance, which is not naïve, is to more fully fathom his rethinking of the narrative of failure.

Failed States, Failed Genres

In writing The Black Jacobins, James pinpoints the question of failure, when he insists that "the defeat of Bonaparte's expedition in 1803 [which] resulted in the establishment of the Negro state of Haiti which has lasted to this day" is the fruit of "the only successful slave revolt in history" — one that outwitted French, British, and Spanish powers (ix). But the question of success and failure is somewhat of a misnomer, since his goal is not simply to correct a massively distorted history but to theorize the concept of revolution itself, making it available to future generations, especially in Africa. This is why the book ends with a rousing belief that Toussaint's spirit burns brightly on an African continent ready for an upheaval and the destruction of colonial rule.

James is explicit about his aims in writing The Black Jacobins: "The transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement. Why and how this happened is the theme of this book" (ix). He is equally emphatic that "responsible for this unique achievement" was "a single man — Toussaint L'Ouverture" (ix). But, as numerous critics have noted, if this suggests a straightforward biography of an exceptional individual, nothing could be farther from the truth. James builds up Toussaint as a heroic figure to be sure, but also famously insists that "Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint" (x). James thus takes up the "great man makes history" genre only to undermine it, transforming the very notion of how a leader relates to the masses, how the driving force of history works through the strengths and flaws of such leaders, and how conventional biography can never hope to capture the "whole truth" (Preface, x).

James's Toussaint undeniably emerges as Max Weber's charismatic leader but also as an instrument and embodiment of history itself. Forty-five years old when he answers the call of the revolution, Toussaint "would lay the foundations of a Negro State that lasts to this day. . . . But men make history, and Toussaint made the history that he made because he was the man he was" (91). This see-saw movement between the man making history and being made and unmade by it characterizes James's style throughout the account of the revolution.

Among several metaphors he uses to describe the relation between Toussaint and the people he led, James describes a revolution as a moment "when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption." Here Toussaint appears as "meteoric flares and flights" which must be seen as "projections of the sub-soil" made up of the "vast impersonal forces" named above (x). Toussaint's gifts and skills are thus meaningful insofar as he is able to express the desires of the people, understand their changing needs in response to a volatile political existence, and react appropriately. In other words, though Toussaint the man, the historical figure, the leader who makes a fatal error occupies James, he matters to history solely because he incarnates the desires of the people, and emerges not just as a theorist of emancipation, but as its embodiment. We catch glimpses of the flesh and blood figure on occasion - but the book as a whole presents him as an unrelenting historical force, incarnating the logic and thrust of revolution itself. He fails when he ceases to be in synchrony with this historical necessity. Refusing to romanticize the ex-slaves of Haiti, James recognizes that they are not fully agents of their own destiny, and thus need a leader to represent their interests. But they are also perceptive and wise, ahead of what the powers that control their lives think is possible. In this sense, the conventional notion of the masses being directed by their leader cannot adequately capture the dynamism of James's account. In showing how vast historical forces work through people, without reducing them to automatons, James reanimates history itself — as a spectacle that offers profound lessons for the future. James emphasizes not Toussaint's glory but the chorus that attends the making of history: the masses who, James shows, are actually ahead of even the best leaders. For him, enslaved Haitians adapt to, propel, and finally exceed Toussaint. The central tragedy of Toussaint's life is that he loses touch with the masses. It is in this sense that James concludes that "Toussaint's failure was the failure of enlightenment not of darkness" (288).

For James, all great tragedies take up the central question "in which two ideas of society are directly confronted and the old generation and the new are set face to face, each assured of his own right to power" (243). The essence of tragedy is that "the two societies confront one another within the mind of a single person" (243). Toussaint emerges as an exemplary tragic hero because his mind contains the antagonism between slavery and freedom, the possibility of Black self-determination and ongoing colonial rule.

But his defeat and death simply appears as a "lightning" announcing "the thunder" (25). As Rachel Douglas recently argues, James's many instances of writing and rewriting his account of the Haitian Revolution encapsulate "the dynamic of revolutionary process."16 The two editions of The Black Jacobins (1938 and 1963), the play Toussaint Louverture (1936), and the later play The Black Jacobins (1967) signal his relentless conviction that what started in Haiti would transform the world. The book is "unfinished and provisional" — it can never be finished — like the revolution itself. This also helps explain why James kept returning to the story in different genres. In denoting Toussaint's death as the rebirth of another revolution James doesn't simply allow for the catharsis of tragedy but elaborates the logic afforded by the genre of romance. To suggest that the slave revolt in Haiti must be seen as the "first revolution in the Third World," James calls into play a revolutionary sublime.

James was writing against an entire Western tradition which barely acknowledged the Haitian Revolution, and only to see it as "a bloodthirsty and savage race war, without reason or rhyme" (11). Having to rely solely on the master's archives, as he lamented in 1971, James nevertheless restores the drama of history in spellbinding prose, with the ex-slaves as protagonists not victims. It is not Toussaint, despite the billing, who emerges as the beating heart of The Black Jacobins but rather revolution itself - as concept and exigence, fragile and powerful in equal measure, contingent but also inexorable. This is why the significance of the second edition of the 1960s is not so much in few added paragraphs on tragedy, as Scott suggests, but in the appendix, "from Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro," where James insists that "what took place in French San Domingo in 1792-1804 reappeared in Cuba in 1958" (391).

Suggesting that "the future is not born all at once. It exists in the present. The thing is to know where to look" (230), James traces a revolutionary energy that connects distinct times and places. To be a historian of the revolution is to learn to spot this energy, and to relate past, present, and future in untimely ways, outside of conventional narratives of cause and effect. In this way James emblematizes my larger claim - that anticolonial thought always spoke to times and places other than those of its immediate genesis and beyond local exigencies or immediate political strategies. This is why James is able to write against the narrative of failed revolutions, since their ultimate resonance and meaning for history cannot be limited to their moment of emergence. Because the genre of romance allows for multiple temporalities, it comes in handy for James to keep in play the neglected Haitian past, the interwar present laden with risks and possibilities alike, and the desired future of African and Third World liberation.

To recognize James's desire to call to the future even as he excavates the past is thus also to reckon with the complicated temporalities or romance itself. Though Scott highlights romance as a tale of triumph and overcoming, it is more commonly assessed as a genre of recursion — to an imaginary past, to lost glory, to a desired future, or a submerged present. James's romance of revolution rejects the circular logic of failure and emphasizes recurrence — what happened in Haiti can happen again, in Cuba, Ghana, and elsewhere. This is also why to claim that the real subject of The Black Jacobins is the concept of revolution itself is to appreciate James's profound sense of how historical change occurs — the agency of the masses, the role played by great men, the calculations of imperial forces, the vicissitudes of chance. As he writes in anticipation of the revolution in Africa to come, he continually calls to later generations who will understand the import of his writing better than his contemporaries could. Revolutionary romance can open up the blockages of the present such that the time that is "out of joint" may be redeemed.

James's Black Jacobins should stand then as a manual for Third World revolution not as a primer for accepting the inevitability of postcolonial failure. In situating Toussaint not as an aberration but a precursor to a host of African leaders, James delineates an alternate memory in the African diaspora — a continuum of revolt that links Haiti to Ghana, and recreates a pan-African memory of heroism. The memory of rebellion stays alive in other times and places, and can be revived to light the spark of the revolution. As James suggests in A History of Negro Revolt, first published in 1938 and reissued in 1969 with a new introduction, instead of accepting that the "history of man" could easily be summed up as "They were born, they suffered, they died," he understands the history of Black revolt from 1939-1969 as "They fought, they suffered, they are still fighting."17

The much wider archive of anti-colonial writing similarly writes and rewrites the meaning of success and failure, making it imperative for us to revisit how today's world has been shaped by that seismic mid-century cataclysm, still poorly absorbed into our historical consciousness or our visions of postcolonial futures.  Any number of works from that era are subsequently seen as prescient. We could think of Fanon, Richard Wright, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, or Ama Ata Aidoo — the failure of African political leadership in the era of nation-building is a twice-told tale. But when we turn to something like the South African writer Peter Abrahams's stunning series of novels about Pan-Africanism and national liberation — A Wreath for Udomo (1956) and This Island Now (1966), we find something of value that exceeds the diagnosis of failure, the awareness of tragedy, or the hymn of despair. Similarly, the many returns to the martyred figure of Patrice Lumumba — from Césaire's A Season in the Congo to Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of A Negro (1964) to Raoul Peck's documentaries — have purposes other than the prophecy of failure. Kwame  Nkrumah's spectacular rise and fall have been anatomized endlessly — again, by Abrahams and Kennedy, by Wright and Fanon, but also by Nkrumah himself in Neocolonialism, and by James in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. Not only do such works invite us to assess anticolonial revolutions from the horizon of their eventual success, they variously excavate the complex causes of failure, pointing a finger either at cultural tendencies of a people or at global dynamics of resource extraction or the logic of dependency. For instance, Abrahams (in Wreath for Udomo), and Wright (in Black Power) both identify tribalism as the greatest threat to African independence and forced modernization as the remedy. In contrast, abstractionist or experimental meditations (like those of Kennedy) probe the very meaning of human life and the absurdity of desire. These differences matter. Each of these works proposes a theory of colony as concept, of collectivity and desire, of governance and impossibility. Anticolonial writers did not just foretell failure or succumb to romance and neglect tragedy; they insisted on utopia and commitment, antagonism and introspection.

This is also how I understand W.E.B. Du Bois's famous claim in Black Reconstruction — if Reconstruction failed, Du Bois insists, it was a "splendid failure."18 Rescripting the Dunning School of history which saw Reconstruction not as a general strike but as "a travesty of democracy, an era of corruption and misgovernment," in the vein of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, Du Bois skillfully outlined the folly of insisting that emancipated enslaved people should acquire land by working for wages, like everyone else in a market society, and how the "political revolution went forward but the economic revolution was stymied." Reconstruction did not fail for the reason its critics assumed it would fail — black inadequacy. It failed because the white working class refused to learn that its interests were bound up with the black working class. Du Bois meets Scott's terms by seeing Reconstruction as a tragedy and not a romance, but the tragedy for him was that it failed, not that it was attempted. Similarly, I want to suggest that our goal as critics should be to fulfill the aspirations of decolonization, not dismiss them as outmoded or constitutively flawed. We could remember here James's poignant dedication in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution: the book is dedicated "to Francis. . . . Like Cromwell and Lenin, he initiated the destruction of a regime in decay — a tremendous achievement; but like them, he failed to create the new society."19 Note how tempered his assessment of Nkrumah's historical failure is here: first restoring the grandiosity of the achievement of freedom, insisting on its world historical significance, and mourning the unfinished charge without giving up on its utopian possibility.

Thinking further about the grip of narratives of failure on our imagination, about revolutions not just as ruptures but as endless processes of reinvention and remaking, and pondering forms of political life outside the state might thus help not only generate a more accurate portrayal of decolonization and its relation to postcolonial thought but also force us to confront the stakes of associating the postcolony with failure.

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Yogita Goyal (she/her), (Twitter: @pocothought), is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek and Perkins Prizes. She has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature, and served as President of A.S.A.P. and editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature. She is writing a book called "Anticolonialism, Lost and Found," and recently joined the editorial team of American Literary History.

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