Haitian Revolution

This week, the communities at University of Miami are thrilled to welcome Dr. Marlene Daut to give a talk as part of our distinguished lecture series. To prepare for this, I am reading her two new books.

The first is a tour-de-force like I have not read in a long time. Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution has truly transformed how I think about the very concept of revolution. Part of what she documents is the role of Haitians in writing the history of the revolution in the first generation after independence. In so doing, she excavates an intellectual history of the nation that has a very different relationship to it’s people and it's past. At the most basic level, it showed me that far too often I have thought about various communities who lived through revolution but I have not thought with them. In rooting the practice of history in a different genealogy, we can come to see how concepts like slavery, freedom, and independence had a very different career than what I had previously assumed.

The second is a massive and sweeping biography of Haiti’s first king: Henry Christophe. This is a more popular account and a biography meant for a wider audience, which is surly deserves. Yet Daut’s method in her first book enables her to tell the story in the second. It opens with the conundrum familiar to historians of slavery and Black people more generally: how to write a history of individuals who could not (or did not) leave many of their own sources in modern archives. Christophe was attacked in his own era, and so many of the sources for his life must be taken from his fervent enemies. Yet Daut does not just want to think about Christophe, and instead chooses to think with him, at least at first, by centering a history told by one of his loyalists, Baron de Vastey. From there, we follow a new history of this man who fought in two revolutions, defying enemies at every turn until the bitter end when he ultimately took his own life.