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The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and
slavery, and as its thinkers and fighters blazed the path to
universal freedom, they forced anticolonial, antislavery, and
antiracist ideals into modern political grammar. The first state in
the Americas to permanently abolish slavery, outlaw color
prejudice, and forbid colonialism, Haitians established their
nation in a hostile Atlantic World. Slavery was ubiquitous
throughout the rest of the Americas and foreign nations, and
empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty. Yet Haitian
writers and politicians successfully defended their independence
while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian statehood. In
Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and
lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian
revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the
global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and
interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While
modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration
of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference
should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being
should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by
the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.
The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and
slavery, and as its thinkers and fighters blazed the path to
universal freedom, they forced anticolonial, antislavery, and
antiracist ideals into modern political grammar. The first state in
the Americas to permanently abolish slavery, outlaw color
prejudice, and forbid colonialism, Haitians established their
nation in a hostile Atlantic World. Slavery was ubiquitous
throughout the rest of the Americas and foreign nations, and
empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty. Yet Haitian
writers and politicians successfully defended their independence
while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian statehood. In
Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and
lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian
revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the
global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and
interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While
modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration
of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference
should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being
should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by
the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the first antislavery and
anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the
creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. The
momentousness of this thirteen-year-long war generated thousands of
pages of writing. This anthology brings together for the first time
a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the
revolution, from the beginnings of the conflicts that resulted in
it to the end of the nineteenth century. With over two hundred
excerpts from novels, poetry, and plays published between 1787 and
1900, and depicting a wide array of characters including, Anacaona,
Makandal, Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
and Henry Christophe, this anthology provides the perfect classroom
text for exploring this fascinating revolution, its principal
actors, and the literature it inspired, while also providing a
vital resource for specialists in the field. This landmark volume
includes many celebrated authors-such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor
Hugo, Heinrich von Kleist, Alphonse de Lamartine, William
Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, and William Edgar Easton-but the
editors also present here for the first time many less-well-known
fictions by writers from across western Europe and both North and
South America, as well as by nineteenth-century Haitian authors,
refuting a widely accepted perception that Haitian representations
of their revolution primarily emerged in the twentieth century.
Each excerpt is introduced by contextualizing commentary designed
to spark discussion about the ongoing legacy of slavery and
colonialism in the Americas. Ultimately, the publication of this
capacious body of literature that spans three continents offers
students, scholars, and the curious reader alike a unique glimpse
into the tremendous global impact the Haitian Revolution had on the
print culture of the Atlantic world.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the first antislavery and
anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the
creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. The
momentousness of this thirteen-year-long war generated thousands of
pages of writing. This anthology brings together for the first time
a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the
revolution, from the beginnings of the conflicts that resulted in
it to the end of the nineteenth century. With over two hundred
excerpts from novels, poetry, and plays published between 1787 and
1900, and depicting a wide array of characters including, Anacaona,
Makandal, Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines,
and Henry Christophe, this anthology provides the perfect classroom
text for exploring this fascinating revolution, its principal
actors, and the literature it inspired, while also providing a
vital resource for specialists in the field. This landmark volume
includes many celebrated authors-such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor
Hugo, Heinrich von Kleist, Alphonse de Lamartine, William
Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, and William Edgar Easton-but the
editors also present here for the first time many less-well-known
fictions by writers from across western Europe and both North and
South America, as well as by nineteenth-century Haitian authors,
refuting a widely accepted perception that Haitian representations
of their revolution primarily emerged in the twentieth century.
Each excerpt is introduced by contextualizing commentary designed
to spark discussion about the ongoing legacy of slavery and
colonialism in the Americas. Ultimately, the publication of this
capacious body of literature that spans three continents offers
students, scholars, and the curious reader alike a unique glimpse
into the tremendous global impact the Haitian Revolution had on the
print culture of the Atlantic world.
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was an event of monumental
world-historical significance, and here, in the first systematic
literary history of those events, Haiti's war of independence is
examined through the eyes of its actual and imagined participants,
observers, survivors, and cultural descendants. The 'transatlantic
print culture' under discussion in this literary history reveals
that enlightenment racial 'science' was the primary vehicle through
which the Haitian Revolution was interpreted by nineteenth-century
Haitians, Europeans, and U.S. Americans alike. Through its author's
contention that the Haitian revolutionary wars were incessantly
racialized by four constantly recurring tropes-the 'monstrous
hybrid', the 'tropical temptress', the 'tragic mulatto/a', and the
'colored historian'-Tropics of Haiti shows the ways in which the
nineteenth-century tendency to understand Haiti's revolution in
primarily racial terms has affected present day demonizations of
Haiti and Haitians. In the end, this new archive of Haitian
revolutionary writing, much of which has until now remained unknown
to the contemporary reading public, invites us to examine how
nineteenth-century attempts to paint Haitian independence as the
result of a racial revolution coincide with present-day desires to
render insignificant and 'unthinkable' the second independent
republic of the New World.
Focusing on the influential life and works of the Haitian political
writer and statesman, Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), in this book
Marlene L. Daut examines the legacy of Vastey's extensive writings
as a form of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a discourse
devoted to attacking the enlightenment foundations of colonialism.
Daut argues that Vastey, the most important secretary of Haiti's
King Henry Christophe, was a pioneer in a tradition of
deconstructing colonial racism and colonial slavery that is much
more closely associated with twentieth-century writers like W.E.B.
Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aime Cesaire. By expertly forging
exciting new historical and theoretical connections among Vastey
and these later twentieth-century writers, as well as eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century black Atlantic authors, such as Phillis
Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs,
Daut proves that any understanding of the genesis of Afro-diasporic
thought must include Haiti's Baron de Vastey.
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