Over the weekend, Haiti was struck by the 7.2 magnitude earthquake. It has left hundreds dead, and thousands injured and displaced. This comes after an earthquake in 2010 that killed nearly a quarter of a million people. Today’s guest Marlene Daut exposes the history of Haiti and helps us understand the deep inequalities that led in part to the extreme devastation currently facing Haitians.

Marlene L. Daut specializes in pre-20th-century Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Daut is the author of Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, and Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism. She is also part of a collaborative project,  An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery). Daut is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Haiti. She also curates a website on early Haitian print culture and has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution.

Image by David Peterson from Pixabay