Chapter 13 - Haiti as Diasporic Crossroads in Transnational African American Writing

Summary

Marlene Daut’s chapter focuses on Haiti as diasporic crossroads and argues that Haiti is both a geographical and an intellectual meeting place for African American writers at mid-century. For Daut, the stakes are at least twofold, one being to acknowledge African American writing as transnational, thereby altering the geography of American literature, and, second, what the Americas come to be when the Haitian Revolution appears at the center, as it did for these writers. The result, she argues, is to “expose the inherent Africanness of all American literature,” to consider African American literary tradition as multiple and linked to spaces beyond the nation, and finally to understand all American literature as diasporic, as determined not by borders and the geopolitical they assert but “by people and their movements.” In doing so, Daut examines Martin Delany’s Blake, Oneida Debois’s oratory, George Vashon’s and Pierre Faubert’s poetry, the first-known Trinidadian novel by Maxwell Phillip, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, “St. Domingo, Its Revolutions and Its Patriots,” John Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Baron de Vastey’s Réflexions, and the work of James McCune Smith and Henry Bibb.