Imagining Histories of Haiti is a discussion with Professor Marlene Daut (Yale University) about her new book The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. The goal of this event is to explore critical developments within the scholarship on colonial Saint-Domingue/early Hait. Columbia Professors Madeleine Dobie and Pierre Force (Department of French) will conduct a Q&A after Prof. Daut's remarks.
This event is organized by LAIC's Graduate Student association (GALAIC) and co-sponsored by the Department of French and the Institute for Latin American Studies' Greater Caribbean Program.
About the book:
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe offers an innovative contribution to understandings of Haitian history by unraveling the biography of a controversial figure in Haitian history, Henry Christophe. A figure of debated origins, Christophe stood at the tenuous middle ground of enslaved/free, revolutionary/royalist, and traitor/confidante. After the events of the Haitian Revolution (1791 to 1804), Henri Christophe was appointed governor of the north under General Jean Jacques Dessalines, the first leader of the Haitian state after the constitution of 1805. After Dessalines’s assassination, Christophe was declared president of the State of Haiti in 1807, and in 1811 he was proclaimed King Henry I of the Kingdom of Haiti, a dominion that subsumed the Northern provinces of Haiti. Notedly, literary and intellectual pursuits were provided the utmost importance and investment within the ongoings at Henri Christophe’s palace of Sans-Souci, a site deemed as “the Versailles of the Caribbean” at its peak. Therefore, a history of Henri Christophe provides direction towards archival sources on the intellectual lives of free people of African descent in the eighteenth-century and iterations of Black Atlantic Humanism offered by early modern Caribbean theorists.
