This event has been canceled.
We will contact registrants if the talk is rescheduled at a future date.
Join us on September 17 for a lecture by Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University.
This talk reframes the story of slavery and freedom showing Haiti at the vanguard of abolition and challenging the idea that Africans and Black Americans were mere passengers on a seemingly linear road from slavery to freedom. As underscored in Daut’s book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, Atlantic World leaders perpetuated slavery until Haiti’s revolutionaries redefined it as a “crime against humanity.” Understanding this trajectory necessitates delving into over four hundred years of history, from European colonization to the rise of slavery and plantations in the Americas, to the pivotal role of Haiti’s revolution in sparking the Age of Abolition. Haiti was the driving force for abolition, and its profound influence stretches beyond inspiration, as Haitians actively contributed to the destruction of slavery throughout the Americas.
This talk is co-sponsored by the Global South Lab at the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley; the Center for Research on Social Change; the Department of Sociology; and the Anticolonial Lab.
The talk will be introduced and moderated by Ricarda Hammer, Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and a 2024-2025 Matrix Faculty Fellow.
About the Speaker
Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, teaches courses in anglophone and francophone Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Primarily a literary and intellectual historian of the Caribbean, she writes about the history of the Haitian Revolution, literary cultures of the greater Caribbean, and racial politics in global media, especially as appears in film, television, and art. Professor Daut’s public-facing articles have appeared in The New Yorker; The New York Times; The Nation; Essence Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Avidly: A Channel of the LA Review of Books; The Conversation; and Public Books, among others. Her peer-reviewed articles can be found in journals such as, New Literary History, archipelagos, Small Axe, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Comparative Literature, Studies in Romanticism, and more.