November 6, 2005

History faculty book wins Frederick Douglass Prize

Laurent Dubois, associate professor of history, has been awarded this year's Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale for his book A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (University of North Carolina Press).The $25,000 annual award for the year’s best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance and/or abolition, is the most generous history prize in the field, and the most respected and coveted of the major awards for the study of the black experience.

David W. Blight, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, commented: “Laurent Dubois’s Colony of Citizens is a complex, fascinating story of slave resistance in the Caribbean. The book is deeply researched in French archival sources, in ethnographical and anthropological sources and even in maps and imaginative fiction. With a focus on how the Haitian Revolution spread to Guadaloupe, Dubois transforms a seemingly local story into a much larger one ­ about how the French Revolution itself was in part rooted in the slave systems of the West Indies. Dubois convincingly shows that slaves and free persons of color interpreted and converted republicanism to their own ends ­ the claim of citizenship in the French empire ­ only to have their freedom crushed again in re-enslavement.”

Commented John David Smith, the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and chair of the Frederick Douglass Prize jury: “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.”

“This gracefully written, carefully argued, and well-documented book has important implications that transcend the time period Dubois examines and the specific events he analyzes.” Smith added.

The prize will be awarded at a dinner at the Yale Club of New York on February 23, 2006, as the capstone of Black History Month.

The Frederick Douglass Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field by honoring outstanding accomplishments. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the onetime slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers and orators of the 19th century.

For an interview with Dubois about the book in the History News Network, see http://hnn.us/articles/18642.html.