Description:

2019-2020 Provincializing Romanticism Workshop Series Presents:

"The World of Haitian Romanticism"

Please join us for a dialogue with Marlene Daut

May 15 at 2pm CST

Via Zoom (Please RSVP to Sarah at sarah.mcginley@northwestern.edu to receive the Zoom invitation, password, and event format)

Abstract: Although the names of Haiti’s most famous romantic poets and novelists may not be familiar to the majority of readers in the North Atlantic today, in the nineteenth century the proliferative works of authors like Demesvar Delorme, Pierre Faubert, Louis Joseph Janvier, Ignace Nau, and Émeric Bergeaud, to name a few, not only circulated far and wide, but were heavily reviewed across continental Europe and the American hemisphere. Such widespread readership even earned Haitian authors international awards and recognition. Discussing the intersection of popular poetry and prose with global politics in the nineteenth century, this talk reveals how Haitian authors and politicians used romantic aesthetics to unfold, critique, and contest the romance of  democracy that had undergirded slavery, colonialism, and ultimately, white supremacy in the Americas. 
 
Speaker Bio:

Marlene L. Daut has a B.A. in English and French from Loyola Marymount University, and she earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame in 2009. She is currently Professor of African Diaspora Studies in the Carter G. Woodson Institute and the Program in American Studies at the University of Virginia. Before joining the faculty of UVA, Daut was Associate professor of English and Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She has also been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She is the author of two books: Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism(Palgrave, 2017) and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool, 2015); and the forthcoming edited collection, An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions. Her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals such as, Studies in Romanticism, L'esprit createur, Small Axe, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Comparative Literature, South Atlantic Review, Research in African Literatures, and J19. She is also co-editor and co-creator of H-Net's scholarly network, H-Haiti and curates the websites, http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com and http://lagazetteroyale.com.

This series is sponsored by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, The Graduate School; the Departments of English, Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, German; and Programs in Critical Theory, Comparative Literary Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies, and the Centers for African American History and for Native American and Indigenous Research