Marlene L. Daut

In 2002, Haiti’s former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide argued that France should pay his country US$21 billion.

The reason? In 1825, France extracted a huge indemnity from the young nation, in exchange for recognition of its independence.

April 17, 2025, marks the 200th anniversary of that indemnity agreement. On Jan. 1 of this year, the now-former president of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Leslie Voltaire, reminded France of this call when he requested that France “repay the...

In this series commissioned by Marlene L. Daut, scholars reveal what 220 years of Haitian independence means for how we tell the story of abolition and the development of human rights around the world.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT

The first land to be colonized in the Americas was Haiti. Europeans first enslaved native Americans and captive Africans there, too. But the first permanent abolition of slavery also happened on Haiti, in 1804: 220 years ago this month. Such abolition only occurred in the rest...

An exiled revolutionary, André Rigaud’s return to the island of his birth changed Haiti’s political destiny. Was he sent back to help reinstate slavery? His enemies would have us believe so.

In 1893 the Black American playwright William Edgar Easton published Dessalines, a Dramatic Tale: A Single Chapter From Haiti’s History, a play about the Haitian Revolution. Ostensibly a biopic of independent Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the play prominently featured another of the...

On June 2, 1811, Henry Christophe and his wife Marie-Louise Coidavid were crowned the king and queen of Haiti. Little did they know, they would be Haiti's first and last....

I...

The Haitian American scholar reveals her journey from a California upbringing deep into Haitian history, unearthing “Haitianists” along the way, meeting the complex “First and...

April 17th is the 200th anniversary of the indemnity "agreement" with France that was a condition for French recognition of Haitian independence. Over the next 122 years, Haiti...

What writing about Haiti’s first, last, and only king taught me about archives, ethics, and unreliable narrators.

By Marlene L. Daut

As a literary and intellectual historian, I have spent a large part of my career focusing on how literary fictions (poetry, drama, novels, and short stories) affected the way that people living in the 18th and 19th centuries understood the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). My newest book, a biography called The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of...

Remembrance as a Radical Act

By Marlene L. Daut

AMASA DELANO: “But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”

BENITO CERENO: “Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human.”

--Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” the character George attempts to console his wife Hazel—for what, he is not sure—by...

Way back in 2019, phew!, what a different, but also similar world it was then. We were pre-pandemic, but prime Trump, and I am now at Yale, not the University of Virginia, but universities and academia are still under attack, and even more so..... Sigh....

Well, today, because it is still Haitian Heritage Month, and I want to keep the hope alive, I am resurrecting one of my first forays into public-facing scholarship. In April 2019, I partnered with WAMU/NPR's show "The Academic Minute" to...