Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865

Liverpool Studies in International Slavery

by Marlene L. Daut

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

694 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2015

About the author

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; Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press); and The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. Her articles on Haitian history and culture have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Essence, The Nation, the LA Review of Books, and others. 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. She recently won a grant from the Robert Silvers Foundation for The First and Last King of Haiti. Daut graduated from Loyola Marymount University 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 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.

Reviews

[Purple Iris]

Fabulous introduction. Especially appreciate the reading of Nicholls.