by Disha Karnad Jani
In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, about her new book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Daut draws out the influential concepts transformed by 18th and 19th century Haitian thinkers writing during and in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. She shows the simultaneous universality and specificity of the Haitian revolutionary moment for the development of enduring ideas about freedom, indigeneity, revolution, and slavery.
Marlene Daut is Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University. Her books include Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015); Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023); and the forthcoming The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025). She is also co-editor (with Grégory Pierrot and Marion Rohrleitner) of the volume, Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA Press, 2022).
Disha Karnad Jani is a writer and historian from Markham, Ontario. She is currently a graduate student in the Department of History at Princeton University, where she studies global/transnational history. She is interested in the politics and practices of anti-imperial resistance between the World Wars, in the British Empire and across sites of empire’s incarnation.
Featured image: Cover of Awakening the Ashes. The painting featured on the cover is by Firelei Báez, A Motor with Medicinal Function (2018).
