In his movie Top Five, Chris Rock portrays a comedic actor hoping to demonstrate his dramatic abilities by staring in a drama about the Haitian Revolution entitled “Uprize.” The plot line developed by Rock uses a “double-voiced” joke to critique Hollywood's unwillingness to tackle a formative event in Black history and white folks’ uneasiness with violence enacted by Black figures. The overt industry critique of Top Five exemplifies the research question posed by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall: Why have there been so few media portrayals of the Haitian Revolution? Her study goes further, comparing representations of the revolution by nation of origin and by including video games, shorts, and documentaries alongside feature films and television series. She argues that outside of Haiti few representations of the Haitian Revolution dare to portray the event as a justified, autochthonous, Black-led struggle to reject slavery and European colonialism. Instead, she shows that most non-Haitian portrayals struggle to overcome the “unthinability” of the revolution's origins and at best render the event banal and at worst perpetuate racist conceptions of Afro-descended people and Haitian culture. Her work does an excellent job going beyond a simple assessment of the media's depiction of historical events. Rather, she works to unpack the context of production to illustrate the myriad contemporary forces that shaped representations of the revolution at any given time and place.
Sepinwall divides the book into three parts. The first examines film and television depictions of the revolution produced outside of Haiti across six chapters arranged chronologically and thematically. The first chapter draws on the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot to highlight how the unthinkability of the revolution has led many films produced by foreigners to engage in either erasure or banalization of Haitians’ struggles. Frequently, films build upon stereotypes that mark Africans and their descendants as backward or primitive, they minimize the horrific context of slavery on Saint-Domingue as a justification for revolution, or worse feature a “white savior” character who provides the enslaved with an ideology for revolution.
Several chapters from part one offer deep dives into particular films. In chapter 3, Sepinwall explores the production and release of 20th Century Fox's Lydia Bailey. Although the screenwriters tried to incorporate surprisingly strong critiques of racism and colonialism, the film still primarily featured a romance between two white characters. Sepinwall does an excellent job unpacking how the efforts of the House Un-American Activities Committee impacted the writing and production of the film. Chapter 5 similarly engages in a close reading of Chris Rock's Top Five. In doing so, she reads the film and his own public comments about the Haitian Revolution through the lens of his double-voiced humor.
The two chapters of part two examine Haitian representations of the revolution and the struggles faced by Haitian filmmakers. Divided chronologically, the first chapter examines the industry through the 2004 bicentennial of the nation's independence. The second chapter turns to a younger generation of filmmaker and their frequent use of shorts to understand the figure of Toussaint Louverture.
Part three, comprising the last two chapters, offers a particularly compelling example for how to integrate Game Studies into the more traditional practice of history. These chapters do an excellent job of engaging with a medium that has begun to reach larger audiences than most Hollywood blockbusters. Her findings offer a contrast to the earlier chapters by illustrating how recent blockbuster games such as Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry present a more nuanced depiction of the Haitian Revolution than most non-Haitian produced film and television series. She also helps to recover and analyze several unique games from the 1980s produced by the Martinicans Muriel Tramis and Patrick Chamoiseau.
Written in clear effective prose, this work is accessible by students and scholars alike. Her innovative methodology and willingness to tackle new media make this an excellent study for illustrating the relevance of history and historical analysis. As we live through a golden age of media production, this work offers an excellent argument for why some historical events do not make their way onto the screen.
