Black Lives Mattered in the Haitian Revolution

This chapter examines the 2014 comedy Top Five, starring writer-director Chris Rock. Top Five centers on Rock’s character André Allen, a Black comedian and movie star promoting his new film Uprize!, an epic about the Haitian Revolution. The chapter analyzes Top Five alongside Rock’s interviews, tweets, and standup routines, to illustrate his using the Revolution as a symbol of whites’ ignorance regarding the history of slavery, as well as their discomfort with violence by Blacks (even when the latter were enslaved people yearning for freedom). The chapter argues that Rock, exemplifying the African American trickster tradition, appears to be joking when he is actually making a searing critique of Hollywood disinterest in making serious films about slavery and other painful chapters in Black History.