Other Writing
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
How the visual history of the Haitian Revolution misrepresents Black suffering and death.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Bridgerton’s Caribbean Problem
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...
Compensation for a history suffused with violence that left physical wounds and psychological trauma.
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...
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...
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...
Napoleon Isn’t a Hero to Celebrate
Institutions in France should pay more attention to their country’s history of slavery instead of honoring an icon of white supremacy.
March 18, 2021
By Marlene L. Daut
Professor Daut teaches American and African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of “Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism.”
After a year in which statues of enslavers and colonizers were toppled, defaced or taken down...
What’s the Path Forward for Haiti?
As the international community contemplates another armed intervention, a reckoning with history is long overdue.
March 18, 2023
“What happened to the Creole pigs is a cancer for Haiti,” a woman explains in “Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy,” a documentary from 2009. Creole pigs—animals indigenous to the island of Hispaniola, which is home to both Haiti and the Dominican Republic—once served as bank accounts for Haitian...
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