Baron De Vastey And The Origins Of Black Atlantic Humanism (the New Urban Atlantic)
by Marlene L. Daut /
2017 / English / PDF
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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.
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.
