Marlene L. Daut | Updates

Faculty-Graduate Seminar: "Global Blackness" ft. Marlene Daut, Yale University

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AY26 Faculty-Graduate Seminar: "Global Blackness" ft. Marlene Daut, Yale University

New Approaches to Black Studies in the 21st Century

Thursday, April 16, 2026, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pmAdd to calendar📅

Location

Hobson-Rogers Seminar Room, 104 Morrison Hall (by invitation only)

Faculty-Graduate Seminar

Speaker
Marlene Daut
Affiliation
Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies
Presentation
Yale University

https://aas.princeton.edu/events/2026/ay26-faculty-graduate-seminar-global-blackness-ft-marlene-daut-yale-university

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Keynote address: Outreach to Haiti annual gala

Marlene L. Daut — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Diocese of Norwich Outreach to Haiti
Invites You to the 19th Annual Gala

For the Love of a Child Charity Gala

Saturday, April 18, 2026

A Villa Louisa, 60 Villa Louisa Rd., Bolton, CT

The Most Reverend Richard F. Reidy, of the Diocese of Norwich invites you to join him in this event that benefits the children who live in the Archdiocese of Port-au-of Prince, Haiti.
Cocktails and appetizers at 5:30 pm, followed by dinner buffet. Special Guest Speaker, Haitian crafts, artwork and silent auction. Tickets are $100 per person and can be purchased on-line www.outreachtohaiti.org or by calling Outreach office at 860 800 3601.
There is a special price of $75 to all clergy and religious.

We hope you will join us for a fun evening that celebrates our Diocesan Ministry in Haiti.

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Five Essential Books For Understanding Haitian History

Marlene L. Daut — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:52:04 -0500

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 a move as equally momentous, in 1807, the Haitian state became the first to declare slavery and the slave trade a “crime against humanity.” Yet even though Haitians ended slavery more than three decades before Great Britain, more than four decades before France, and more than six decades before the United States, Haiti is often left out of the story of how the world went from slavery to freedom.

The Haitian anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot most forcefully signaled the damning implications of eliding the world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution in his well-known book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon, 1995). Trouillot insisted that the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is only “a chapter within a narrative of global domination.” “It is part of the history of the West,” he said, “and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.” By erasing, downplaying, or otherwise denying how the Haitian revolutionaries opened the door to the Age of Abolition—when they proclaimed slavery an actual crime and declared that freedom from slavery should be constituted as a universal human right—it is not just Haitian history, but the Haitian people themselves who have been silenced.

The remarkable stories of some of Haiti’s most famous Black freedom-fighters, Dutty Boukman, Cécile Fatiman, Toussaint Louverture, Suzanne Bélair, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe, for example, have been replaced in the world’s memory by the more treacherous recent histories of dictatorships, earthquakes, presidential assassinations, and armed paramilitary violence. Moreover, in the nineteenth century, instead of garnering global applause, Haiti’s insistence on remaining free and independent consistently brought punishment, most aggressively, by France. In 1825, French king Charles X ensured longitudinal impoverishment of the newly independent country when he ordered the Haitian government, under threat of war, to pay 150 million francs as the price of France relinquishing its territorial claim over the island and to compensate former French enslavers for the loss of their “property.”

Bringing forward the perspective of Haitians represents one way to both lessen the silences of the past and rectify the ongoing and harmful distortions of the present. In my recently published biography, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, I therefore sought to highlight the stories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitians, whose numerous memoirs, pamphlets, letters, and myriad collections of essays and other forms of writing about the Haitian Revolution have often been ignored in favor of consulting western European and U.S. sources. At the same time, an incomplete and sometimes non-existent written archive encouraged me as a historian and literary critic to be imaginative in considering alternative sources about King Henry’s life, including oral histories, and to question the privileging of written forms over other kinds of storytelling.

The present list of books, then, all by Haitian authors, is a further attempt to contribute to Trouillot’s wish for the “perspective of the world” to be brought forward. Spanning nearly the entirety of Haiti’s history, from the period of colonization in the eighteenth century, to the revolution and war of independence in the nineteenth, to the U.S. occupation in the early twentieth, to Haitian women’s cultural contributions at the turn of the century, these books tell complicated and nuanced stories about Haiti and Haitians’ attempt to create a sovereign existence in a world where Black freedom has been endlessly under threat.

Read my recommendations here: https://lithub.com/five-essential-books-for-understanding-haitian-history/

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200 years ago, France extorted Haiti in one of history’s greatest heists – and Haitians want reparations

Marlene L. Daut — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:30:45 -0400

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 debt of independence and reparations for slavery.” In March, tennis star Naomi Osaka, who is of Haitian descent, added her voice to the chorus in a tweet wondering when France would pay Haiti back.

Read the rest here: https://theconversation.com/200-years-ago-france-extorted-haiti-in-one-of-historys-greatest-heists-and-haitians-want-reparations-254550

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How Haiti Destroyed Slavery and Led the Way to Freedom Throughout the Atlantic World

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:23:55 -0400

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 of the Americas later, much, much later.

Haiti’s radical defeat of French colonizers and enslavers—which opened the door for slavery to be outlawed everywhere in the Atlantic World—is not how abolition is remembered today. Instead, conventional accounts of the end of slavery in the Americas typically center ideas about human rights from the United States, Great Britain, and France. The popular narrative of slavery and abolition usually begins with white Europeans from Spain and Portugal colonizing the Caribbean and the Americas, replacing native populations with captive Africans whom they forced into harsh labor as slaves. It continues with the rise of the plantation supported by the English, French, and Dutch and their advent of scientific racism. In these accounts, it was only after abolitionist pamphlets and lectures culminated in bans on the international slave trade in Great Britain and the United States that the age of abolition opened, eventually leading to the US Civil War, which ultimately ended slavery.

This conventional (and terrifically flawed) story of abolition is circular (white Europeans and their US descendants established slavery only to destroy it); almost magical (with the stroke of a pen a few white men upended 400 years of slavery); preordained (abolition could not have happened any other way); evangelical (thank God and Abraham Lincoln); and warrants gratitude, not reparation (descendants of the enslaved are lucky to be free). Yet this narrative oversimplifies and distorts the reality. Yes, there were abolitionists, revolutionaries, lawmakers, and philanthropists involved in abolition, but Haiti and Haitians are most often left out of the story of who the abolitionists were, where they first emerged, and how we got from slavery to abolition in the first place

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André Rigaud: Napoleon’s Man in Haiti

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:18:20 -0400

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 revolution’s notable figures: General André Rigaud, a free man of mixed French and African ancestry, described as a ‘mulatto’ in the parlance of the day. Off-stage, Rigaud is most infamous for his rivalry with Haiti’s best known revolutionary, Toussaint Louverture, but in Easton’s play Rigaud’s main rival is not Louverture (who does not appear as a character). While the heroic Dessalines fights the French to prevent them from reinstating slavery in the colony of Saint-Domingue, the too-trusting Rigaud fights, initially, on France’s behalf. Yet whether Rigaud’s foil is Louverture (as in the historical record) or Dessalines (as in Easton’s play), the accepted cause of the rivalry is always the same: Rigaud’s colour prejudice against Haiti’s Black revolutionaries.

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The Napoléon that Ridley Scott and Hollywood won’t let you see

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:15:46 -0400

Critics have been raking Ridley Scott’s new movie about Napoléon Bonaparte over the coals for its many historical inaccuracies.

As a scholar of French colonialism and slavery who studies historical fiction, or the fictionalization of real events, I was much less bothered by most of the liberties taken in “Napoleon” – although shooting cannons at the pyramids did seem like one indulgence too far.

I have argued elsewhere that historical fictions need not necessarily be judged by adherence to facts. Instead, inventiveness, creativity, ideology and, ultimately, storytelling power are what matter most.

But in lieu of offering a fresh and imaginative take on Napoléon, Scott’s film rehearsed the well-known battles of Austerlitz, Wagram and Waterloo, while erasing perhaps the most momentous – and consequential – of Bonaparte’s military campaigns.

As with every other Napoléon movie, Scott’s version will leave viewers with no understanding of the genocidal war to restore slavery that Bonaparte waged against Black revolutionaries in the French colony of Saint-Domingue – what’s known as Haiti today.

To me, leaving out this history is akin to making a movie about Hitler without mentioning the Holocaust.

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Did You Know About The Haitian Revolutionary Who Changed The Course Of The World When He Ended Slavery And Declared Haitian Independence?

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:12:48 -0400

On this date we remember Haiti’s founder General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who was killed after becoming the first world leader in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT, PH.D · UPDATED OCTOBER 17, 2023

After more than two hundred years of French slavery and colonial rule, Haiti broke free and emerged as the first nation to outlaw slavery and the slave trade in 1804. On the anniversary of the death of Haiti’s revolutionary founder, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, ESSENCE wants to make sure you know how he used all his might to destroy slavery and cement Haitian independence.

In 1758, Dessalines was born to an enslaved mother in Grande-Rivière-du-Nord in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today Haiti). After being tortured by his enslavers for thirty-three years, Dessalines participated in the Revolution (1791-1803) that brought slavery in the colony to a standstill. Eventually joining the famous revolutionary and formerly enslaved Toussaint Louverture, together, they and the other revolutionaries forced France to officially abolish slavery. As free men, Dessalines and Louverture then rose through the ranks to become generals in the French military at war, by turns, with Spain and Great Britain.

After Napoléon Bonaparte overthrew the French government to become First Consul of France, he made it his mission to reinstate slavery. He sent his brother-in-law to the island for that purpose with 60,000 French troops, and he instructed them to get rid of Louverture, Dessalines, and the other revolutionary leaders. The French arrested and deported Louverture in June 1802, but the revolutionaries persisted.

Dessalines successfully unified the Black population to create the armée indigène or indigenous army, who changed their motto from “Liberty or Death!” to “Independence or Death!” The Indigenous Army definitively defeated French troops at the Battle of Vertièreson November 18, 1803.

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We Love How ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ Honors Haiti

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:11:41 -0400

Yale historian Marlene Daut breaks down the meaningful references to Haiti and its revolutionary spirit in the blockbuster Marvel film.

BY MARLENE L. DAUT, PH.D · UPDATED NOVEMBER 17, 2022

Marvel’s blockbuster “Black Panther 2: Wakanda Forever” immerses us once more in the fictional African Kingdom of Wakanda, a Black refuge from the predatory nation states of Europe and the United States. The Black Panther, known as T’Challa, was the former king of this wealthy and hyper-modern asylum from the colonialists and capitalists who impoverished the real continent of Africa, but he perished in the first “Black Panther”released in 2018.

[Editor’s note: SPOILER ALERT, but if you haven’t seen the film yet, what are you waiting for?]

The sequel features a stunning revival of his legacy when we learn that the Black Panther left behind a son with his wife Nakia, a Wakandan warrior. In a mid-credit scene meant to set up the next “Black Panther,” Nakia and her son are revealed to have been living in Cap-Haïtien, a northern port city that was famously the capital of the nineteenth-century Kingdom of Haiti, ruled by King Henry Christophe.

It is not only the story of the first and last king of Haiti that the film evokes with this setting. The life and legacy of Christophe’s comrade-in-arms, the famous revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture who helped end slavery on the French-claimed island of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), surges forth when T’Challa’s son tells his father’s sister, Shuri, who has recently arrived in Cap, that his “Haitian name” is Toussaint. “Toussaint is a beautiful name,” she softly replies.

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Let's Set The History Record Straight. We Can't Excuse Racists Like Thomas Jefferson As Just Being "Men Of Their Time."

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:10:17 -0400

Conservatives may want to re-write history during Black History Month. But we have to be real about clichéd excuses for past abuses.

I’m a professor of Black Studies at the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. Jefferson wrote the American Declaration of Independence and went on to become third president of the United States. He was also an enslaver and a rapist. When I remind people of this they usually tell me not to call Jefferson a rapist or condemn him for enslaving Black people because he was just a “man of his time.”

But what does that mean? Does it mean we ignore that Jefferson enslaved more than 600 Black people during his lifetime, including Sally Hemings, the teenage girl he forced into a sexual relationship with him and whose six children he fathered only to enslave them too? Do we shrug off knowledge that enslaved children were whipped at Monticello—a brutal terror tactic used by enslavers to exert domination and control? And do we pretend that as head of state Jefferson was powerless to end slavery when other world leaders of the time managed to do so?

In day-to-day life, “man of his time” is a cliché often used to excuse past crimes, especially those of so-called great white men. For scholars it’s a meaningless phrase though. Every person is of their time. What we’re interested in is how people lived in their time. All of them. Not just a chosen few.

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4 Haitian novels that beautifully blend history, memory and reality

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:08:35 -0400

Following the July 7, 2021 assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse and after one Haitian official requested that the U.N. and U.S. send troops to help stabilize the nation, many Haitian activists and artists recoiled at the prospect of yet another outside intervention.

The Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat is one artist who has repeatedly railed against past U.S. occupations of Haiti. In her foreword to Jan J. Dominique’s “Memoir of an Amnesiac,” she highlights a tension that exists in Haiti’s collective memory – pride over the revolution for freedom and independence from France in 1804, and frustration over continuous foreign meddling, brought to a new height with a 20-year occupation by the U.S. military starting in 1915.

“Never again will foreigners trample Haitian soil, the founders…declared in 1804,” Danticat writes. “Yet in 1915, the ‘boots’ invaded,” which meant that Haitians like the father of the narrator in Dominique’s tale would “never truly know a fully free and sovereign life, having had not just his country but his imagination invaded and occupied by the Americans.”

A specialist in Haitian literary and historical studies from Yale University, Marlene L. Daut has selected four Haitian-authored novels that sit with this contradiction, along with many others.

By guiding readers through Haiti over the past century, she shows how these contemporary writers magnificently paint the entanglements of memory, history and imagination that make Haitian art, from all times, so enduring and brilliant.

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All the Devils Are Here

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:07:18 -0400

How the visual history of the Haitian Revolution misrepresents Black suffering and death.

By Marlene L. Daut

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2020

Both during and after the Haitian Revolution, the most widely circulated images of the thirteen-year violent conflict that remade French Saint-Domingue into independent Haiti depicted Black people killing white people. The 1805 book An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, by Marcus Rainsford—an army officer who had been stationed in Saint-Domingue during the British occupation of the island—included a representative, and frequently reproduced, picture from the genre: Black revolutionaries stringing up white soldiers on a hillside. This Black-on-white violence is described with the words “Revenge taken by the black army for the cruelties practiced on them by the French.” (The book also features a now iconic portrait of Toussaint Louverture.)

Rainsford’s account, like the caption, is generally sympathetic to the revolution and its leaders’ cause of ridding the island of slavery forever. Other less well-known illustrations in the volume support this perspective by offering graphic images of the violence that the French army exerted over the revolutionaries. One such engraving shows Cuban bloodhounds—which the French military notoriously trained to “eat the blacks”—attacking a terrified Black mother and child; another image illustrates the infamous drownings perpetrated by the French in their attempts, as the inscription reads, at “exterminating the Black Army.”

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The king of Haiti’s dream

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:05:36 -0400

How a utopian vision of Black freedom and self-government was undone in a world still in thrall to slavery and racism

After declaring independence from France on 1 January 1804, Haiti became the first state anywhere to permanently outlaw slavery and ban imperial rule. By establishing a land of freedom in a world of slavery, Haiti’s founders – the generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe and Alexandre Pétion – challenged the contradictions of the western European Enlightenment, whose proponents had pronounced liberty and equality to be only for white men. ‘I have avenged America,’ proclaimed Dessalines, independent Haiti’s first leader.

To this day, Haitian independence remains the most significant development in the history of modern democracy. The theories undergirding it – that no human beings could ever be enslaved – continue to define contemporary political ideas about what it means to be free.

Despite the Haitian Revolution, much of the credit for the eventual destruction of the transatlantic slave trade and the elimination of Atlantic slavery has gone to French and British abolitionists. The Trinidadian historian Eric Williams complained about this in his groundbreaking book Capitalism and Slavery (1944) when he wrote of the abolitionists: ‘their importance has been seriously misunderstood and grossly exaggerated by men who have sacrificed scholarship to sentimentality and, like the scholastics of old, placed faith before reason and evidence’. Many historians have likewise chosen to forget that Haiti’s fight to end slavery in the Americas didn’t cease when the Haitian revolutionaries declared victory over France.

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When France extorted Haiti – the greatest heist in history

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:04:36 -0400

Much of the reparations debate has revolved around whether the United States and the United Kingdom should finally compensate some of their citizens for the economic and social costs of slavery that still linger today.

But to me, there’s never been a more clear-cut case for reparations than that of Haiti.

I’m a specialist on colonialism and slavery, and what France did to the Haitian people after the Haitian Revolution is a particularly notorious examples of colonial theft. France instituted slavery on the island in the 17th century, but, in the late 18th century, the enslaved population rebelled and eventually declared independence. Yet, somehow, in the 19th century, the thinking went that the former enslavers of the Haitian people needed to be compensated, rather than the other way around.

Just as the legacy of slavery in the United States has created a gross economic disparity between Black and white Americans, the tax on its freedom that France forced Haiti to pay – referred to as an “indemnity” at the time – severely damaged the newly independent country’s ability to prosper.

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The Wrongful Death of Toussaint Louverture

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:03:31 -0400

Toussaint Louverture’s lonely death in a French prison cell was not an unfortunate tragedy but a cruel story of betrayal.

On the morning of 7 April 1803, Toussaint Louverture, leader of the slave insurrection in French Saint-Domingue that led to the Haitian Revolution, was found dead by a guard in the prison in France where he had been held captive for nearly eight months. The guard, Citizen Amiot, had written to the French Minister of the Marine in January 1803 describing Louverture’s condition as grave: he was suffering from constant fevers, severe stomach aches, loss of appetite, vomiting and inflammation of his entire body. Despite the fact that Amiot’s predecessor, Commander Baille, had reported similar problems to French officials the previous autumn, no doctor had ever visited Louverture while he was alive in Fort de Joux.

It was only after Amiot found Louverture’s lifeless body – his head resting upon the woodless chimney in his cell, as though he were in gentle slumber rather than in rigor mortis – that a surgeon, Gresset, and his medical apprentice were brought in to assess him. After ‘scrupulous’ examination Gresset observed that Louverture was ‘without a pulse, not breathing, heart devoid of movement, skin cold, eyes still, [with] stiff arms’. He concluded that the prisoner was ‘truly dead’, a strange turn of phrase for a case that must have been obvious. The official autopsy described Louverture’s lips as having been tinged with blood.

The seeming incredulity in these words was at least partially a result of the fact that Louverture had been accused of faking his physical ailments in the months leading up to his demise. The previous October, Louverture asked Baille to tell the government that his cell, which was often freezing, was too cold. Baille acknowledged Louverture’s claims that the temperature was causing him to suffer almost constant coughing, along with rheumatic pain throughout his body. But Baille told Minister Denis Decrès that more firewood would not be necessary since the captive was likely faking his symptoms; yet more proof of what he called ‘that destroyer of humankind’s aggregated monstrosity’.

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Inside the Kingdom of Haiti, ‘the Wakanda of the Western Hemisphere’

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 10:01:41 -0400

As a historian of Haitian literature and culture, I was excited to learn that Haiti plays a central role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” There are two lengthy scenes that take place in the Caribbean nation and feature original footage shot in the country.

It’s a fitting gesture: The fictional kingdom of Wakanda has a real-life corollary in the historic Kingdom of Hayti, which existed as a sort of Wakanda of the Western Hemisphere from 1811 to 1820.

The Haitian Revolution led to the creation of the first free Black state in the Americas. But the world was hardly expecting a former enslaved man named Henry Christophe to make himself the king of it.

Media accounts from the era, some of which I’ve collected in a digital archive, serve as a window into a brief period of time when the kingdom stood as a beacon of Black freedom in a world of slavery. Yet, like Wakanda, the Kingdom of Hayti wasn’t a utopia for everyone.

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Why Did Bridgerton Erase Haiti?

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:37:30 -0400

Bridgerton’s Caribbean Problem

BY
MARLENE L. DAUT

JANUARY 19, 2021

Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels are mostly populated with white people like the regency-era England where they take place. The London of Shonda Rhimes’s Bridgerton tv series for Netflix, in contrast, is a multicultural mecca, sprinkled with Black characters of various skin hues, as well as a smattering of east and south Asians walking around silently in the background. There is even a Black queen and a Black duke.

In the world of fiction—whether on the page, stage, or screen—such ahistoricity does not necessarily have to be an issue. We should not evaluate a work of art by how well it matches reality, or how faithful it is to history. But a work of art can and should be judged by the inspiration behind its creator’s vision. And this is where Bridgerton has a Caribbean problem.

In season one, episode four, we learn that the reason the Black Brits of Bridgerton are on par—economically and socially— with the white characters is not because they are the mixed-race children of white male British colonists and free women of color from the Caribbean, nineteenth-century England’s actual Black children of “uncertain fortune,” in one historian’s words. Instead, it is because the white king, George, fell in love with a Black woman, Charlotte, whose marriage to him made her the Queen of England. “We were two separate societies, divided by color until a king fell in love with one of us,” Lady Danbury explains to the Duke of Hastings. “Love… conquers all.” Cynical, the Duke replies, “The king may have chosen his queen, he may have elevated us from novelties, in their eyes, to now dukes and royalty, and at that same whim, he may just as easily change his mind….Love changes nothing.”

Yet in Bridgerton love has already changed everything. It has defeated color prejudice and it has eliminated chattel slavery. Likewise, it has erased any need to mention the thousands of Black revolutionaries in Haiti who fought for abolition for 13 long years, in the process creating the first independent and slavery-free nation of the American hemisphere.

Period romances like Bridgerton are designed to appeal to those who seek to lose themselves in the sumptuous visual pleasures characteristically offered in representations of nineteenth-century British royalty on screen. While I understand the impulse many Black people share, to see ourselves represented in this genre that has traditionally excluded us, contrary to what television usually features, an awe-inspiring world of Black nobility did actually exist in the nineteenth century.

In fact, watching how Bridgerton uses uncanny blackness in a desperate attempt to fill the void left by the overwhelming whiteness of Quinn’s novels, I kept thinking how easy it would have been instead to draw upon the many complexities of elite Black life in the nineteenth century—the kind that was at the heart of the Caribbean’s only modern Black kingdom. Created by Henry Christophe, a former general of the Haitian Revolution, Haiti’s first and last king reigned over the northern part of the country for the entire period commonly defined as the regency: 1811 to 1820.

If people want to see Black aristocracy on screen, then why not just put them in nineteenth-century Haiti where they really lived?

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What the French Really Owe Haiti

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:33:22 -0400

Compensation for a history suffused with violence that left physical wounds and psychological trauma.

MARLENE L. DAUT

Last month, The New York Times made headlines with its front-page series about the billions (in today’s dollars) that France forced Haiti to pay following centuries of slavery. Despite the terrors and tortures of French colonialism, the Haitian revolutionaries won their independence from France in 1804 to become the first modern nation to permanently abolish slavery. Yet, in 1825, the French returned to Haitian shores to demand 150 million francs in exchange for recognition of Haitian independence—21 years after the fact—and to compensate enslavers for their lost “property.”

Dozens of manuscripts and pamphlets from early-19th-century France show that what the French really wanted wasn’t money at all, though. Rather they sought, in their words, to “restore Saint-Domingue,” which meant to bring back slavery. The French began planning the reconquest of Haiti soon after the Haitian Declaration of Independenceon January 1, 1804, and threatened the new nation under all its first leaders from its founder, Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines (who was assassinated in 1806) to both King Henry Christophe (who ruled after Dessalines in the north until he committed suicide in 1820) and Alexandre Pétionwho was simultaneously president over a republic in the south and west until 1818 when he died of natural causes.

By the time Pétion and Christophe’s successor, President Jean-Pierre Boyer, signed the indemnity in 1825, the French had been openly plotting for two decades to “exterminate” the Haitian populace in the name of restoring slavery. That history of planned genocide is essential to understanding the threat of violent warfare, not merely financial exploitation, that 19th-century Haitians lived with because, in the words of Dessalines, they “dared to be free.”

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Haiti Isn't Cursed. It Is Exploited.

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:31:43 -0400

The mistreatment of Haitian migrants at the Del Rio border underscores the intersecting crises affecting Haitians, and “bad luck” has nothing to do with it, says historian Marlene L. Daut, Ph.D.

PHOTO BY JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES

BY MARLENE L. DAUT, PH.D · UPDATED SEPTEMBER 24, 2021

Haiti has suffered one blow after another this year. Before a 7.2 magnitude earthquake devastated the country’s southern peninsula in August—and a tropical storm caused severe flooding days later— media outlets reported on the July assassination of the nation’s president, Jovenel Moïse. Appeals for the United States to send aid to Haiti abounded. Such calls for assistance are not new—and do not reflect any particular interest in “helping” Haitians.

In 1915, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration used the death of a different Haitian president, Guillaume Vilbrun Sam, as a pretext to invade. But the U.S. had already seen assassinations of three of its own presidents: Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. The real reason for the occupation was economic. Fearing that upheaval in the Haitian government might cause them to default on U.S.–backed loans, the U.S. ordered marines to seize $500,000 worth of gold reserves. The U.S. stayed in Haiti for 19 long years, the second-longest military occupation in U.S. history after Afghanistan. More than 15,000 Haitians lost their lives fighting against the United States’ seizure of Haitian sovereignty. The memory of this occupation—and those in 1994 and 2004— has cast a shadow over Haiti’s glorious past as the first nation to permanently abolish slavery.

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Resurrecting A Lost Palace of Haiti

Marlene L. Daut — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:30:45 -0400

The artist Firelei Báez created an immersive installation of the lost Haitian palace Sans Souci. Haitian historian Marlene Daut ruminates on what the castle's ghost means during a turbulent year in Haitian history.

BY
MARLENE DAUT

PUBLISHED: OCT 8, 2021

I visited Dominican artist Firelei Báez’s large-scale installation of King Henry Christophe of Haiti’s famous 19th-century palace during the final weekend of its exhibition at Boston’s ICA Watershed. Báez’s re-creation of the breathtaking castle called Sans-Souci (meaning “without worry”), which was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 1842, reflects as much the deep history of the Caribbean island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic as it does contemporary political problems and environmental concerns in the region.

This year, Haiti experienced all the phenomena called forth by the installation: anti-government demonstrations, the death of their head of state, a massive earthquake in the southern city of Les Cayes, followed by a tropical storm that brought devastating floods. This was all compounded when in September, border agents in Del Rio, Texas, began expelling Haitian migrants seeking U.S. asylum. They had been sheltering under a bridge near the Rio Grande River between Mexico and the United States.

As a Haitian American, I couldn’t help but to feel all too acutely the painful relevance of Báez’s artwork as it intersects with the ongoing crises facing Haitians in Haiti and Haitian migrants across the Americas. But as a historian of the Caribbean, who is currently writing a book about the Kingdom of Haiti, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of gratitude that this enormously important but relatively unknown history appeared in a city like Boston, which after Miami and New York, contains the third-largest Haitian-American community in the United States.

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