AWAKENING THE ASHES | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Oct 25, 2023 6:00 pm
Location
Shirlington
4251 S. Campbell Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22206
Oct 25, 2023 6:00 pm
Shirlington
The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and slavery. 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.
Marlene L. Daut and Julia Gaffield are joining us on the Busboys stage to share an intellectual history of the Haitian Revolution. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and the author will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of AWAKENING THE ASHES will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is IN PERSON and will NOT be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Marlene L. Daut is an author, scholar, editor, and professor. Her books include Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World; Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism; and Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. Her articles on Haitian history and culture have appeared in over a dozen magazines, newspapers, and journals including, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, The Nation, and the LA Review of Books. She has won several awards, grants, and fellowships for her contributions to historical and cultural understandings of the Caribbean, notably from the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Haitian Studies Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Most recently, she won a grant from the Robert Silvers Foundation for a biography she is writing, The First and Last King of Haiti, about the Haitian revolutionary turned monarch General Henry Christophe. Daut graduated from Loyola Marymount University with a B.A. in English and French in 2002 and went on to teach in Rouen, France as an Assistante d’Anglais before enrolling at the University of Notre Dame, where she earned a Ph.D. in English in 2009. Since graduating, Daut has taught Haitian and French Colonial history and culture at the University of Miami, the Claremont Graduate University, and the University of Virginia, where she also became series editor of New World Studies at UVA Press. In July 2022, she was appointed as Professor of French and African American Studies at Yale University.
Julia Gaffield is Associate Professor of History at the College of William & Mary. She received her PhD in History from Duke University in 2012 and previously taught for eight years at Georgia State University. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Her first book, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015 and won the 2016 Mary Alice and Frederick Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society. Gaffield is also the editor of The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2016.
Gaffield is currently working on two book projects: the first, entitled Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Haitian Revolution, is a trade biography of the Haitian founding father (under contract with Yale University Press). The second, entitled The Abandoned Faithful: Race and International Law in the Aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (under contract with OIEAHC/UNC Press), shows how Haiti’s state-sanctioned claim to Roman
