Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism by Marlene L. Daut

Abstract

Reviewed by: Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism by Marlene L. Daut Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism. By Marlene L. Daut. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ISBN 978-1-137-47969-3. 244 pp. $24.99/21.39€ e-book, $34.99/29.11€ paperback. An absorbing and riveting read, Marlene Daut's Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism is a scholarly feat. Organized around the question of what is at stake in reading, misreading, and rereading Vastey's life, then and now, Daut's sharp agility in distilling complex temporalities and geographies into well-argued, judicious writing allows us as scholars and pedagogues to take into consideration multiple perspectives. The book is methodologically exemplary in its comprehensive historical analysis of Vastey's life and notably his relationship to Henry Christophe (1767–1820) as Christophe ruled first as President of the State of Haiti (1807–1811) and then as King of Haiti (1811–1820). Vastey was "the most prolific secretary of early nineteenth-century Haiti's King Henry Christophe I" and the author of many publications, notably "a scathing indictment of colonial slavery entitled, Le Système colonial dévoilé (1814)" (xv). He was also at the time "an international public figure" (xv), with his works translated into multiple languages, and Daut argues that his books "became the signs and symbols of the promises of black sovereignty in the Atlantic World" (68). Daut's historical and also literary analyses of Vastey meticulously and courageously traverse the complexities of what it means to confront not [End Page 159] only extremely complex and even often misleading or erroneous archival sources but also the fraught political stakes that undergird both the archives and how they have been interpreted hitherto by scholars of Vastey. Daut begs of us that we meticulously practice our historiography not to categorize or judge Vastey but rather to scrupulously delineate the many and often necessarily contradictory gambles involved in being the secretary of King Christophe in a postrevolutionary Haitian context. In a riveting passage that draws on Edouard Glissant's call to respect opacity, even and especially in the process of historiography, Daut concludes a deliberation of recent scholarship by warning historians to reject the impulse to find certainty where ambiguity exists. We would like to know, and often think we can know, the real Vastey, in the same way that many of our attempts to historicize the era of Christophe lead us down the path of trying to determine whether his government was as despotic (or benevolent), as some reports suggest. (107) What is most striking in Daut's scholarship and her writing is that she introduces the Glissantian exigency of radical new historiography as a sort of climactic moment in her book. Given that Glissant's status as a major world philosopher remains contested among scholars outside Africana studies, Daut first proves her scholarship as worthy of the most conservative yet still powerful disciplines of academe, notably history and rhetoric, and then introduces Glissant's concepts at the end of the third chapter to reveal the crucial role of Global-Majority philosophy, literary history, and discourse analysis in proving her overarching argument: Vastey then and now is a crucial figure in helping to lay bare how history-writing continues to be conscripted into the mechanisms of empire and its aftermaths. The prologue sets the stage for two central themes of the book: first, the overwhelming prominence of Vastey's persona and writing not only in the Haitian public sphere but also in Britain, mainland Europe, and the United States, where his work was translated into multiple languages, as well as more recently in the Caribbean and elsewhere in North America, notably through the medium of theater; second, the key role that rhetoric played in his writing, as a means of countering the virulent critiques from his opponents while at the same time engaging in highly performative analyses of the systemic violence of slavery and racism, putting into play critical race theory "avant la lettre" (xviii). For example, since he engaged in formal intellectual forums, which were particularly vituperative, Vastey developed complex...