Campus conference, April 16-17, marks Haitian Revolution's bicentennial

Noted Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat will read from her latest book as part of a two-day conference at Cornell titled "The Haitian Revolution: A Bicentennial Celebration in a Global Context," Friday, April 16, and Saturday, April 17. Most conference events will be held in the sixth-floor conference room of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art on campus. All are free and open to the public.

Danticat will speak Friday at 7 p.m. in the Kaufmann Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall. For a full listing of speakers, discussions and film screenings during the conference, visit the conference Web site at http://www.asrc.cornell.edu/haiti/haiti_conference.html.

Two hundred years ago, the Haitian Revolution represented the first successful example of an enslaved population seizing its freedom and creating an independent state, said Fouad Makki, visiting professor at Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center and the conference coordinator. The conference explores the Haitian Revolution's influence on both the overthrow of New World slavery and the re-imagination of modernity, more generally, he said.

"Slave emancipation in Saint Domingue in turn served as a powerful inspiration to slaves throughout the Americas," said Makki. "In an age of revolutionary war, when slavery, empire and racial hierarchies were being fiercely contested, the establishment of the first black republic was a matter of intense significance in the Atlantic world."

The conference is structured around four broad themes: Revolutionary Emancipation and New World Slavery, The Black Jacobins and the Modern World, Emancipation and the Creative Imagination, and Post-Emancipation and the Wages of Sovereignty. It will conclude with a roundtable discussion that will explore the links between past and present.

"The conference is being held at a time when the misery of imperial intervention is once again being visited upon Haiti," said Makki. "As part of our bicentennial commemoration, we have assembled a remarkable group of scholars whose cumulative work gives us a richer knowledge of these momentous events."

The conference is co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, the Africana Studies Center and the departments of History, Anthropology, Comparative Literature and English, the Creative Writing Program, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and Cornell Cinema.