Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution
Publishing Date: October 17, 2023
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and slavery, and 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.
Awarded Gold for The 2024 Book Awards at Independent Publishers of New England in the category of Informational Nonfiction
Named a finalist for the 2024 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History
Honorable mention for the 2024 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize at the French Colonial Historical Society
Awarded Honorable Mention for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year in the category of History
“[A] magisterial recounting of Haiti’s intellectual history....The book is the latest in Daut’s constellation of works on the Caribbean intellectual tradition, and Daut is herself one of the most dynamic contemporary voices on Haiti.”
“[A] gifted author...Daut superbly captures how Haitians reflected on their self-created sovereignty amid endless French and American attempts to undermine and negate what the Haitians had so painfully achieved.”
“[Daut’s] contagious passion for Haitian history fuels this groundbreaking account of Haitian intellectual history.”
“For some time, this book will reside in a class of its own....there is no other book written in English that presents the wide range of Haitian writers accompanied by such a detailed analysis of their impact on modern conceptions of abolition, resistance, and racial justice.”