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Henry Christophe, one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution, was, from 1811 to his death in 1820, King Henry I of the Kingdom of Haiti, the first, last, and only King that Haiti ever had. This week we look at Christophe’s meteoric rise from being born enslaved on an island hundreds of miles from Haiti to fighting in the American Revolution to serving as a general in the Haitian Revolution to being king of all he surveyed, until it all came crashing down around him. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University and author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Maestro Walter's Brass Band, Final March - JEZI OU KONNEN,” by Félix Blume, from Death in Haiti; the audio is available under Creative Commons CC BY 3.0. The episode image is a portrait of Henry Christophe from 1816 by Richard Evans; the painting is in the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien; the image is in the public domain and is available via Wikimedia Commons.
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Professor Daut teaches courses in anglophone and francophone Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Primarily a literary and intellectual historian of the Caribbean, she writes about the history of the Haitian Revolution, literary cultures of the greater Caribbean, and racial politics in global media, especially as appears in film and television.
Her books include Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015); Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2023); and the forthcoming The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, January 2025). She is also co-editor (with Grégory Pierrot and Marion Rohrleitner) of the volume, Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA Press, 2022).
As a public scholar, Professor Daut’s articles have appeared in The New Yorker; The New York Times; The Nation; Essence Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Avidly: A Channel of the LA Review of Books; The Conversation; and Public Books, among others. Her peer-reviewed articles can be found in journals such as, New Literary History, archipelagos, Small Axe, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Comparative Literature, Studies in Romanticism, and more.
Daut is also the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti (link is external)and curates … Read More
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