The essays collected in this volume, along with Chris Bongie's introductory materials, notes, and translation, radically extend our understanding of Vastey's Le système colonial dévoilé. Taken together, these texts imply a series of further questions, a number of which I would like to address in what follows. If Colonial System, as Bongie writes in his Introduction, can ‘be considered the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written’ (p. 7), how, in the absence of their explicit exposition, are we to understand Vastey's use of such concepts as colonialism, system, and critique? How might we extend the related affirmation, made repeatedly throughout this collection, that Vastey's Colonial System anticipates the insights of anticolonial thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon? How does Vastey structure his critique of the principal phenomenon at issue in Colonial System: namely, violence (both in its colonial and revolutionary variants)? Here, in the wake of the preceding essays, I wish briefly to suggest some further elements for reflection on Vastey's intervention and invention of a postcolonial, emancipationist critique, in which I will focus on: I. his critique of the colonial system; 2. his further articulation of this critique as a critique of violence; 3. his original contribution to the genre of what I have elsewhere called ‘Caribbean critique’; and 4. some elements of comparison between Vastey and other key figures in this critical tradition, including Césaire, Sartre, and Fanon.

Colonialism is a System…

While Vastey's Colonial System clearly constitutes ‘the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written’, just what Vastey means by ‘colonial system’ is never clearly stated in his text. As Bongie makes clear, Colonial System is emphatically written as a counter-discourse to the ex-colonist Malouet's proslavery defence of what the latter called ‘the colonial system ’ (pp. 46–51). The guiding ‘principle’ of this system, Malouet explicitly tells his readers, is the negation and quarantine of ‘the doctrine and principle of liberty and equality’ in ‘a society composed of masters and slaves’ (qtd. p. 47): in other words, the principled and violent defence of the order of racial hierarchy in a society of masters and slaves, against the political, existential threat of a society structured upon the countervailing principle of equality. The nature of this hierarchical colonial system, as Vastey's text strives to demonstrate, is violence of the most horrifying kind and degree.