Marlene L. Daut, “The Haitian Atlantic” | National Humanities Center

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Marlene L. Daut, “The Haitian Atlantic”

November 10, 2016

Thursday, November 10, 2016 at 7:00 pm at the National Humanities Center

San Domingo
Battle at San Domingo

“The Haitian Atlantic” discusses eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Afro-diasporic writing and art about the Haitian Revolution.

By exploring a broad range of engagement with the Haitian Revolution from writers living in the Atlantic World, Daut reveals a traveling language of Haitian revolutionary thought to be central to the development of not only Afro-diasporic anti-slavery activism, but a broader transatlantic abolitionist literary culture that reveals itself to have been shaped in many ways by imagining Haiti.


Marlene L. Daut is associate professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (2015), examined the connection between 18th- and 19th-century scientific debates about race and the Haitian Revolution in U.S., Haitian, and European colonial literatures. Her second book, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (forthcoming) will be the first single-authored, book-length exploration of the Haitian author and politician Baron de Vastey. This year, as the Josephus Daniels Fellow at the National Humanities Center she will be working on An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery).