Where does a performance go once it is over? This is a theoretical and practical problem of great magnitude: a key philosophical facet of dramatic aesthetics. It is apropos considering the lengths that Christian Høgsbjerg went to procure the original 1934 draft of C. L. R. James's Haitian Revolutionary play featuring Paul Robeson in the lead role as Toussaint. Høgsbjerg found the original draft of James's play in a folder of the British Trotskyist Jock Haton's papers at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull while researching his political and intellectual biography of C. L. R. James's England years. Drafts, revisions and ephemera of James's play are housed across a transatlantic expanse that includes Trinidad (University of West Indies at St Augustine's Alma Jordan Library); London (Victoria and Albert Museum Performance Archives); Hull, England; Harlem, NY (Schomburgh Center for Research in Black Culture); Washington, DC (Howard University's Alain Locke papers); and State College, Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania State University's special collections). These archival traces speak to the author's transatlantic crossings: C. L. R. James's travels in overlapping roles as Caribbean radical intellectual, sportsman, culture worker and professional revolutionary. His find constitutes an invaluable contribution to scholarship of C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, black radicalism, transatlantic performance, and the Haitian Revolution.

James's play has a formative relationship with his 1938 historiographic book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, in which dramaturgical language as well as the aesthetic and political attributes of tragedy as genre infuse the historical work. I view James's play as an expertly executed meditation on the intersections of statecraft (abolitionist black nation building) and stagecraft (the dialectics of arranging individuals and masses onstage). The volume's array of materials includes a facsimile of the original playbill, a substantial collection of theatre notices and reviews of the original London production, germane James and Robeson essays, and correspondence (including a fascinating query from pan-Africanist George Padmore to Alain Locke requesting help to produce and publicize James's play), as well as magisterial prefatory essays by Høgsbjerg and Laurent Dubois, eminent historian of the Haitian Revolution.

Included is James's response to a critic writing in the New Statesman, an analytic corrective on par with Marx's theorizing the complexities of ‘men’ making their own history: ‘The amiability or otherwise of [Haitian leader] Christophe has nothing to do with either the play or the history. All men do all things under certain circumstances, a lesson which your critic has not yet learnt, despite the steadily accumulating piles of evidence with which the post-war world has been furnishing him’ (p. 177). This formulation is a major organizing theme of James's Haitian Revolutionary work: the stage provides a format to demonstrate Marx's dialectical interplay between agency and historically determined limits. In James's play, you see Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire dialectic actualized.

Høgsbjerg's edition renders readers a new opportunity to track problems developed in the play's multiple versions – such as the relationship between leaders and masses, questions of gender and revolution, the performance of insurrection and instruction – in that now we have a more complete set of origins and drafts of the work to analyse. Tracking these issues complicates both an understanding of dramatic firsts as well as problems of telos in both revolution and literary projects: whether or not such problems are immanent to the work itself or rather indicative of contemporary critical prejudices. This book is curated with thoughtful expertise – Høgsbjerg deftly argues that ‘the production of Toussaint Louverture in 1936 at the Westminster Theatre in London is also of considerable importance for the light it sheds on imperial metropolitan culture in 1930s Britain, or rather the radical counterculture that has always existed in the “dark heart” of the British Empire’ (p. 2). He draws upon a robust sample of C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson and related theatrical archives to pen a detailed historical exposition of author, actor and conditions of performance.