Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism

Marlene L. Daut

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137470676
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Prologue: On the Origins of BlackAtlantic Humanism
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Baron de Vastey in Haitian (Revolutionary) Context
• Chapter 2 What’s in a Name? Unfolding the Consequences of a Mistaken Identity
• Chapter 3 The Uses of Vastey: Reading Black Sovereignty in the Atlantic Public Sphere
• Chapter 4 Baron de Vastey’s Testimonio and the Politics of Black Memory
• Chapter 5 Baron de Vastey and the Twentieth-Century Theater of Haitian Independence
• Epilogue: Colonialism After Sovereignty: The Colonial Relation in René Philoctète’s Monsieur de Vastey (1975)
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Names of Publications (Newspapers, Journals, Magazines)
• Places