A History of Haitian Literature

From nineteenth-century antislavery pamphleteering to accounts of ecological catastrophe in twenty-first-century fiction, Haitian literature has resounded across the globe since the nation's revolutionaries declared independence in 1804. Starting with pre-revolutionary writing, including the emergence of Haitian Creole letters, extending to the long, largely francophone nineteenth century, and concluding with present-day Haitian writing in the English language, A History of Haitian Literature (Cambridge, 2024/2026) presents the political, cultural, and historical frameworks necessary to comprehend Haiti's vast literary output. Whether writing in Haiti or its wide-ranging diasporas, Haitian authors have boldly contributed to pressing conversations in global letters while reflecting Haiti's unique cultural and historical experiences. Considering an expansive array of poets, playwrights, and novelists - such as Baron de Vastey, Juste Chanlatte, Demesvar Delorme, Edwidge Danticat, René Depestre, Kettly Mars, Dany Laferrière, and Évelyne Trouillot - the contributors to this volume offer a fresh examination of a richly polyglot, transnational literary tradition that spans more than two centuries.

Guest Marlene Daut is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is a literary and intellectual historian of the Caribbean, with a focus on the history of the Haitian Revolution, literary cultures of the greater Caribbean, and racial politics in global media. Her prize-winning biography, The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025), explores the fascinating life of Haiti’s only king while delving into the complex history of a 19th-century Caribbean monarchy. Daut’s other books include Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), co-winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool, 2015), and Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave, 2017).

Guest Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, and is completing a biography, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” and an essay collection, “‘Blackness’ in French: Race Matters in Translation.” She is an award-winning translator of francophone literature, founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis, and founding co-director of In the Same Boats, an Afro-Atlantic digital cartography. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the NYPL Cullman Center.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press