*Susan F. Buck-Morss* # Progressive Summary Hegel's ideas in the Phenomenology of Spirit was inspired by the slave revolt in Haiti. This is something that most Eurocentric scholars of Hegel have been blinded to. Heard about this book from David Bollier's podcast interview with Leah Gordon. She had been radicalised by reading Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, and also this book. # Definitions # Chapter Notes Denmark was the first European country to abolish the slave trade. # Quotes > What if every time that the consciousness of individuals surpassed the confines of present constellations of power in perceiving the concrete meaning of freedom, this were valued as a moment, however transitory, of the realization of absolute spirit? What other silences would need to be broken? What undisciplined stories would be told? > The critical writing of history is a continuous struggle to liberate the past from within the unconscious of a collective that forgets the conditions of its own existence. > “Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery,” wrote Eric Williams in 1944, and recent scholarship confirms it. > # References [Sala-Molins 2006 - Dark side of the light: slavery and the French Enlightenment](zotero://select/items/1_6GQ89XT8) [James 1989 - The black Jacobins: Toussaint l'Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution](zotero://select/items/1_5WP33VFV) [Trouillot 2012 - Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History](zotero://select/items/1_5SX9ATEV)