Description: The newest English translation of one of Haiti's most powerful literary voices
Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, and profoundly original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this richly textured work, Trouillot--one of the leading voices of the francophone literary world--constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of unthinkable upheaval. It is a moving, lyrical book whose strikingly realized characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between the Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon's imperial forces--a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.Brief description: Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She conducts research and teaches courses on race, gender, and citizenship in France, the Caribbean, and Africa. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (University of Illinois Press 2020), published in France as Imaginer la libération: Des femmes noires face à l'empire (Éditions Rot-Bo-Krik 2023).
Review Quotes:
From its meticulously researched historical detail to its three-dimensional characters and compelling subplots, Désirée Congo has something for everyone. Readers who know (or thought they knew) everything or nothing at all about the Haitian Revolution will be met with an epic, chest-swelling reminder of what it means, what it takes, and what's it's worth to live free.
--World Literature Today