“A New Rhythm Starts Immediately”: Women’s Spiritual Literacy in The Black Jacobins

This essay situates women’s “spiritual literacy” within a Black feminist framework that privileges religious and ancestral epistemologies. Following scholars such as Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Karen McCarthy Brown, this essay decenters masculinist heroes such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in C. L. R James’s 1967 dramatic adaptation of his 1938 The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Instead, it examines a critical but often neglected character: a fictional woman named Celestine. In a play obsessed with cultural hierarchies, it is remarkable that the most literate, flexible, and skilled cultural translator of the play is not a storied hero of the Haitian Revolution; rather, it is a servant woman overlooked by traditional histories. Through his portrayal of Celestine, James demands modes of historical production that decenter both the written word and traditional masculine iconography and instead engage with the embodied, spiritual, and performed.