Exploring Fictional Portrayals of the Haitian Revolution

As a literary and intellectual historian, I have spent a large part of my career focusing on how fictional portrayals affected the way that people living in the 18th and 19th centuries understood the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804).

In the pre-twentieth century, for ill or for good, a lot of people learned history from reading historical novels. An analogous example is how people often learn (or at least think they do) about big historical events from watching movies, like Amistad or Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List.

Haitians gave us the tools to understand what undergirded both the colonial system and the terrible regime of slavery: racism and white supremacy.

And in my first book, Tropics of Haiti (2015), I tried to identify patterns in fictional writings that led to distinctly traceable (and highly racialized) representations of the Haitian Revolution in historical writings. While I have remained interested in this question—in 2022, I published Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology with Grégory Pierrot and Marion Rohrleitner, which is a massive publication containing excerpts of more than 200 fictional writings about the Revolution—I have also always been attracted to studying lives.

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