An illustrated story of the life of the maroon leader, Makandal, who fought relentlessly to free Africans from French colonial rule in Haiti.

By 1791, the French Revolution had spread to Haïti, where slaves and free blacks alike had begun demanding civil rights guaranteed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. Enter Romaine-la-Prophétesse, a free black Dominican coffee farmer who dressed in women's clothes and claimed that the Virgin Mary was his godmother. Inspired by mystical revelations from the Holy Mother, he amassed a large and volatile following of insurgents who would go on to sack countless plantations and conquer the coastal cities of Jacmel and Léogâne. For this brief period, Romaine counted as his political adviser the white French Catholic priest and physician Abbé Ouvière, a renaissance man of cunning politics who would go on to become a pioneering figure in early American science and medicine. Brought together by Catholicism and the turmoil of the revolutionary Atlantic, the priest and the prophetess would come to symbolize the enlightenment ideals of freedom and a more just social order in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Drawing on extensive archival research, Terry Rey offers a major contribution to our understanding of Catholic mysticism and traditional African religious practices at the time of the Haitian Revolution and reveals the significant ways in which religion and race intersected in the turbulence and triumphs of revolutionary France, Haïti, and early republican America.

Lisette, a Saint-Domingue-born Creole slave and daughter of an African-born bossale, has inherited not only the condition of slavery but the traumatic memory of the Middle Passage as well. The stories told to her by her grandmother and godmother, including the horrific voyage aboard the infamous slave ship Rosalie, have become part of her own story, the one she tells in this haunting novel by the acclaimed Haitian writer Évelyne Trouillot. Inspired by the colonial tale of an African midwife who kept a cord of some seventy knots, each one marking a child she had killed at birth, the novel transports us back to Saint-Domingue, before it became Haiti. The year is 1750, and a rash of poisonings is sowing fear among the plantation masters, already unsettled by the unrest caused by Makandal, the legendary Maroon leader. Through this tumultuous time, Lisette struggles to maintain her dignity and to imagine a future for her unborn child. In telling Lisette's story, Trouillot gives the revolution that will soon rock the island a human face and at long last sheds light on the invisible women and men of Haitian history. The original French edition of Rosalie l'infâme received the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone, honoring a novel written by a woman from a French-speaking country which showcases the cultural and literary diversity of the French-speaking world.

Concerns about Haiti suffused the early American print public sphere from the outbreak of the revolution in 1791 until well after its conclusion in 1804. The gothic, sentimental, and sensationalist undertones of openly speculative periodical accounts were accelerated within the genre of fiction, where the specter of Haiti was a commonplace trope. Haiti was not an enigma occasionally deployed by American writers, but rather the overt bellwether against which the prospects for national futurity were imagined and interrogated. Ideological representations of Haiti infected the imaginations of early American readers in ways that have yet to be accounted for in American literary history. Unfortunately, scholars have long occluded how early Americans understood their nation as entwined with Haiti. Faherty aims to counter this tacit disavowal by registering just how obsessed early American readers were with the seismic force of the Haitian Revolution and its capacity to produce aftershocks in the American domestic sphere. In unraveling how American literary history has silenced certain historical contexts around race, citizenship, belonging, and freedom, The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters: Incipient Fevers recuperates lost textual objects while redressing a crucial blind spot in American literary history. For myriad writers in the early Republic, Haiti was both unambiguously familiar and categorically incompatible. Synchronously held fast and rejected, Haiti was the ever-present index of the United States: a distorted reflection of the Republic's past, a troubling echo of its present, and a nightmarish harbinger of divisive futures.

Collects almost five hundred entries that cover the African response to spirituality, taboos, ethics, sacred space, and objects.

A History of survival, strength and imagination in Haiti. This new perspective on Haitian history features essays that augment the historical paintings of renowned contemporary Haitian-American artist, Ulrick Jean-Pierre. Poet, playwright, and scholar Kamau Brathwaite has written the powerful Foreword to this volume, which combines scholarship, experience, and inspiration to reveal the complex history of the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. Chapters cover pre-Columbian and colonial history; critical events and people of the Haitian Revolution; the tangle of U.S.Haitian relations, including the special relationship with Louisiana; Haitian connections to South America; and the contested border with the neighboring Dominican Republic. Revolutionary Freedoms also includes an interview with the artist, a section on women in the nations history, and suggested reading. The Editors of the book, Ccile Accilien, Jessica Davis, and Elmide Mlance, have assembled a distinguished collection of writers and scholars, such as Edwidge Danticat, Max Beauvoir, Marc Christophe, Lauren Derby, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Rgine Latortue, Carolyn Morrow Long, Margaret Mitchell Armand, Richard Turits, and Philippe Zacar. 2006, Caribbean Studies Press, 266pp, 45 full-color reproductions, Hardcover. ISBN 1-58432-293-4