Marlene L. Daut

Cundill Prize Finalist Marlene L. Daut Recommends Baron de Vastey, Jean Casimir, Louis Joseph Janvier and More

Marlene L. Daut

October 20, 2025

After waging a thirteen-year revolution against slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the island’s Black freedom fighters declared their independence on January 1, 1804. In the country’s first constitution, issued one year later, the newly renamed Haiti subsequently became the first nation in the modern world to permanently abolish slavery. In...

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...

I recently appeared in Mathilde Demoisel's documentary Blood, Sweat, and Sugar (Le Sucre, pour la douceur et pour le pire)

Here is a brief description:

What is the price of...

If you happen to read this review of Rich Benjamin's book, Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History (which I just purchased and I'm looking forward to reading!), you...

How Haitian ordnance wound up in the Adirondack Mountains

New York’s Fort Ticonderoga is celebrated for the artillery it contributed to the American Revolution. Less known,...

By MARLENE L. DAUT

“I come back to the deadly seriousness of intellectual work. It is a deadly serious matter.”—STUART HALL, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” (1992)

This January has certainly been an eventful one, both politically, and perhaps, in a cosmic attempt to match the ongoing governmental mayhem we are facing, meteorologically as well. We recently had a major winter storm here in Connecticut that dumped about 18 inches of snow, sleet, and ice on the city where I live,...

BY MARLENE L. DAUT

“If injustice, bad faith, and cruelties of all kinds, give rights to those who have experienced them, over those who have perpetrated them, what people have ever had more right to independence than the Haitian people?”—BARON DE VASTEY, Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères (1816)

In the April 22, 1922 edition of the famous Harlem Renaissance era magazine, The Negro World, Eric Walrond recalled a visit he made to the Puerto Rican American bibliophile, collector, and scholar...

By Marlene L. Daut

In my first blog post of 2026, I want to mark the fact that today is the one-year anniversary of the publication of The First and Last King of Haiti. I remember last year at this very time, I was busy trying to finish up my syllabi for the impending semester (check, for this year too!), as I anxiously awaited the possible publication of early reviews and/or for a few podcast episodes I had pre-recorded to drop. In truth, I spent most of the day in a state of ambivalent...