Nick Nesbitt on The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean
A conversation with Nick Nesbitt about his new book The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean, published in April 2022 by University of Virginia Press.
This conversation is with Nick Nesbitt, who teaches in the Departments of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Nesbitt has published widely in black Atlantic cultural and political history, with particular attention to the francophone Caribbean and French Marxism. He is the author of Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (UVA 2003), Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (UVA 2008), Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool 2013), and the editor of The Haitian Revolution, a collection of writings by Toussaint L'Ouverture (Verso 2008). His new book, the occasion for this conversation, is titled The Price of Slavery: Capitalism and Revolution in the Caribbean, published in April 2022 by University of Virginia Press. In this conversation with Keisha Allan and John Drabinski, Nesbitt explores the argument of The Price of Slavery concerning the meaning of capitalism, commodification, and slavery in the Caribbean, with specific emphasis on Marx's key concept of the social forms of labor, wealth, and value.