BOOK TALK 46: HAITIAN REVOLUTION IN LITERATURE, with Marlene Daut (University of Virginia)

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">To learn more about the Haitian Revolution in fiction, I spoke with Professor Marlene Daut specialized in pre-20th-century Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Her first book, <em>Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865</em>, was published in 2015 by Liverpool University Press' Series in the Study of International Slavery. Her second book, <em>Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism</em>, was published in fall 2017 from Palgrave Macmillan’s series in the New Urban Atlantic. She is  also working on a collaborative project entitled, <em>An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery)</em>, which is under contract with the University of Virginia Press. Daut is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, <a href= "https://networks.h-net.org/h-haiti" target="_blank" rel= "noopener">H-Haiti</a>. She also curates a website on early Haitian print culture at <a href="http://lagazetteroyale.com/" target= "_blank" rel="noopener">http://lagazetteroyale.com</a> and has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at the website <a href= "http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com/" target="_blank" rel= "noopener">http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com</a>. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"Theresa. A Haytien Tale," (1828) is the first known published story by an African-American writer in the United States. The story appeared in four installments in <em>Freedom’s Journal</em>, the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the U.S. from 1827 - 1829. The story was rediscovered by pioneering scholar Frances Smith Foster.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The story is now included in <a href= "https://www.amazon.com/Fictions-America-Ulrich-Smaran-editors/dp/1735778982"> <em>Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts</em></a>.</span></p> <p> </p