In the June 2024 issue of H-Diplo, Ronald Angelo Johnson reviews Awakening the Ashes:
“The author of Awakening the Ashes understood that the journey upon which the book attempts to take its readers would be intellectually taxing. She admits, “Asking nonspecialists who may be newly interested in the history of Haiti to consult nineteenth-century Haitian-produced sources is an inconvenient argument” (p. 27). Yet, that is exactly what Haitian literary scholar Marlene L. Daut asks of her readers in this sweeping, incisive volume on early Haitian literature. In it, nonspecialists—scholars and graduate students—of early Haitian history will encounter rich challenges to their present conceptions of intellectual foundations for Black resistance to slavery, colonialism, and racism. The book intends to disrupt the preference of North Atlantic scholarship for European origins of thought on liberty and equality. In writing about his thoughts on Thomas Paine’s extremely popular pamphlet Common Sense, the American revolutionary thinker John Adams suggested, “Indeed this Writer has a better Hand at pulling down than building.”[1] Marlene Daut, on the other hand, has distinguished herself as both a perceptive catalyst for new scholarly thought and an architect for epistemological frameworks. She courageously illustrates the deficit in historical thinking regarding the place of Haiti in Atlantic world intellectual thought. She, likewise, carefully and painstakingly introduces Haitian writers to rearrange ideas and guide readers to satisfying places of fresh understanding.
For some time, this book will reside in a class of its own. Awakening the Ashes will make a great companion to intellectual historical works by Sara E. Johnson, Robert Fatton Jr., and Lewis Ampidu Clorméus.[2] Still, to date 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. For years, Daut has worked to place early Haitian ideas and literature before the eyes of Anglophone readers. Her first book highlights how North Atlantic scholars tend to understand Haiti's revolution in primarily racial terms—a vantage point that can lead them to underappreciate the intellectual significance of Haiti and Haitians.[3] A collaborative effort with Grégory Pierrot and Marion C. Rohrleitner produced a one-thousand-page anthology of primary works by Haitian writers, featuring novels, poetry, and plays published between 1787 and 1900.[4] Daut is upfront about the goal of Awakening the Ashes: “both to emphasize the methodological innovations found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian thought and to demonstrate the centrality of Haitian revolutionary thought within broader global intellectual currents” (p. xv).”
Read the rest of the review here: https://networks.h-net.org/group/reviews/20036180/johnson-daut-awakening-ashes-intellectual-history-haitian-revolution