Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxxix

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2. Introduction: Baron de Vastey in Haitian (Revolutionary) Context

   • Marlene L. Daut

   Pages 1-26

3. What’s in a Name? Unfolding the Consequences of a Mistaken Identity

   • Marlene L. Daut

   Pages 27-62

4. The Uses of Vastey: Reading Black Sovereignty in the Atlantic Public Sphere

   • Marlene L. Daut

   Pages 63-109

5. Baron de Vastey’s Testimonio and the Politics of Black Memory

   • Marlene L. Daut

   Pages 111-133

6. Baron de Vastey and the Twentieth-Century Theater of Haitian Independence

   • Marlene L. Daut

   Pages 135-181

7. Back Matter

   Pages 183-244

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Focusing on the influential life and works of the Haitian political writer and statesman, Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), in this book Marlene L. Daut examines the legacy of Vastey’s extensive writings as a form of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a discourse devoted to attacking the enlightenment foundations of colonialism. Daut argues that Vastey, the most important secretary of Haiti’s King Henry Christophe, was a pioneer in a tradition of deconstructing colonial racism and colonial slavery that is much more closely associated with twentieth-century writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire. By expertly forging exciting new historical and theoretical connections among Vastey and these later twentieth-century writers, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black Atlantic authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, Daut proves that any understanding of the genesis of Afro-diasporic thought must include Haiti’s Baron de Vastey.

     

                              

• Eighteenth-Century Anti-Slavery Literature
• Haitian Revolution
• Haitian Anti-Colonialism
• Eighteenth-century Haitian Writers
• Le Système
• Monsieur de Vastey

“This is a richly documented study of this key figure in the invention of the radical anti-slavery movement and anti-colonialism, and will be essential reading for scholars and students of Haitian Revolutionary studies and postcolonial theory.” (Nick Nesbitt, French Studies, Vol. 73 (3), July, 2019)

  

• Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA

  Marlene L. Daut

Marlene L. Daut is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies and the Program in American Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (2015).