26779: Jhudicourtb (published) interview of Dubois on prize winning book (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JHUDICOURTB@aol.com


History News Network
http://hnn.us/articles/18642.html
12-05-05

Interview with Laurent Dubois, Winner of the $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book
Prize

By Nhu Vien Thi Nguyen

 Nhu Vien Thi Nguyen is an intern at HNN.


In November 2005 Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of
Slavery, Resistance and Abolition awarded the Seventh Annual Frederick Douglass

Book Prize to Laurent Dubois. Dubois, associate professor at Michigan State
University, won the prize, orth $25,000, for the book, A Colony of Citizens:
Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. According
to
the chair of the jury, historian John David Smith: "Not since C.L.R. James in
his The Black Jacobins (1938), has a scholar examined the broad nexus of
revolution, slavery and emancipation as creatively and as powerfully as Dubois.
A
Colony of Citizens is a decidedly original, path-breaking and incredibly
well-researched work that positions slavery, emancipation, re-enslavement and
then
eventual re-emancipation in Guadeloupe within an international framework and
suggests the complex fruits of emancipation in the French Caribbean and the
Atlantic World."

What's new about your approach to slavery in the French Caribbean?

 I always hesitate to claim something is "new": my approach is part of a
broad movement among historians of the French Caribbean and the Atlantic more
broadly both to focus on the experiences and actions of the enslaved and to
integrate the history of places like the Caribbean into a broader world that
includes Europe, Africa, and the rest of the Americas. Whatever contributions I
made
were influenced by and inspired by other work that read and learned about as I
was working on the book.

But the history of Guadeloupe during the revolutionary period, while the
subject of good work by historians writing in French, had not been the subject
of
any detailed studies in English before my book. In terms of approach I sought
to integrate a local story, of communities in Guadeloupe, with a larger
political narrative of the revolutionary transformations of the age. I also
sought
to bring together many different kinds of analysis, bringing together social
and intellectual history, for instance, and using a wide range of sources to do

so. And I placed the history I present in the context of contemporary
political and literary debates about how to remember and represent this period
and how
to understand its connections to the present. These are some aspects of the
approach that I think readers have appreciated and found useful, at least!

Are you surprised at how well the book has been received?

Most definitely. I had always hoped to gain an audience among historians of
the Caribbean and of France, but have been surprised and gratified to have it
acknowledged as a broader contribution to the history of slavery and
emancipation generally.

Did you always expect to turn your dissertation into a book?

I always hoped to, but I also knew that this is sometimes a challenge so I
wasn't always sure I would be able to.

What was it that influenced your decision to study Latin America and slavery?

 I became interested in Haiti as an undergraduate student (in the 1980s and
early 1990s) mostly because of current events. The political changes there, the

migration to the U.S., and the racism experienced by Haitians here all
concerned me, and so I became interested in placing these in a broader
historical
context. Once I began doing reading and research on Haiti, I was hooked, and
became interested in other parts of the Caribbean as well.

 I did also have excellent teachers, one in a course on Latin American
history named Michael Jimenez, two bibliographers at the library at Princeton,
John
Logan and Peter Johnson, and others in English, particularly Barbara Browning,
and Anthropology, particularly James Boon, who encouraged me a great deal in
these early interests. I also was lucky enough to meet Richard Price and Joan
Dayan, two important Caribbeanists, while I was an undergraduate. All of this
inspired me to continue on.

As an undergraduate I did a junior paper and senior thesis about Haiti and
Guadeloupe respectively, both focusing on the 20th century -- one on
representations of Haiti in the U.S. and the other on healing practices in
contemporary
Guadeloupe. It was actually not until graduate school, and really until I dove
into archival research in France, that I became particularly interested in the
earlier history of slavery and slave revolts which I ended up focusing on in
the book. But I ultimately understood that many of the roots of contemporary
questions that interest me lay in this period.

Why do you think the earlier period of colonization of the Americas by Spain,
Portugal, France and England has been overlooked?

It hasn't been overlooked by historians, who have written a great deal about
it, it has just been somewhat overlooked in theorizations and debates about
the history and culture of empire, which have focused on the 19th and 20th
centuries for the most part. But this has really changed a lot in the last
years

and is continuing to, thankfully.

You had two books published in 2004. Did you work on them simultaneously, or
was the publication date a coincidence?

This was basically a coincidence and a matter of different timetables for
editing and publishing by different presses. A Colony of Citizens was completed

as a manuscript several years before it came out, but was edited intensively
and carefully by the editors of the series it was in. This really improved the
book enormously! But it meant that by the time it was published I had been able

to write another book, Avengers of the New World. This latter book focuses on
Haiti rather than Guadeloupe and is more synthetic, bringing together
scholarship on the Haitian Revolution to present a narrative of the event, and
it
grew out of my work in A Colony of Citizens.

Have you felt under pressure to publish a lot of books?

 Publishing, and particularly publishing a book in the case of history, is
one of the main expectations for professors, and one of the central ways we
share our research and ideas. Once I was hired here at MSU I knew that I would
be
expected to publish a book in order to get tenure. But by that time I had
already published a short book (based on the material in Part I of A Colony of
Citizens) in French and had a book contract for A Colony of Citizens, so by
then

I felt that I was on the right track towards fulfilling these expectations.

Do you have any other books in progress or is it time for a break?

I'm working on several new projects. I have a book entitled Slave Revolution
in the Caribbean, 1787-1804: A History in Documents, which I co-authorized
with John Garrigus of Jacksonville University, which I just finished and is
coming out early in 2006. This will be published by Bedford Press and is a book
of
primary sources about the revolutionary period, most of which we translated
from French, and includes a short overview of the revolution, and is meant
primarily for students. I am also working, with Professor Richard Turits of the

University of Michigan, on a general history of the Caribbean, which is under
contract with the University of North Carolina Press. And I am starting to work

on some other potential book projects, one on the history of religion in Haiti
and another on the history of the banjo. So I am keeping busy!

 Are there any historians that specialize in African-American or Latin
American history that you would like to work with in the future?

 I have been lucky to come to know and exchange ideas with wonderful
historians in these fields, from my advisors in graduate school to others I
have
met
since -- really too many to list -- and hope to continue to work with many of
them!

 And perhaps the most important question, is this prize money marked for
celebration and relaxation, or investing in further academic pursuits?

I'm not sure yet! Some of it will certainly be spent on travelling and buying
books, which are two things I love to do! I'm still getting used to the idea
of having received the prize, which was a great surprise to me.

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