Wanted! a Nation!: Black Americans and Haiti, 1804-1893 - Paperback

by Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (Author), C. Jon Delogu (Translator), Ronald Angelo Johnson (Foreword by)

Covering the whole of the nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! reveals how Haiti remained a focus of attention for white as well as Black Americans before, during, and even after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, Claire Bourhis-Mariotti argues, the Black republic was considered by free Black Americans as a place where full citizenship was at hand. Haiti was essentially viewed and concretely experienced as a refuge during moments when free Black Americans lost hope of obtaining rights in the United States. Haiti is also at the heart of this book, as Haitian leaders supported the American emigration to Haiti (in the 1820s and early 1860s), opposed the American geostrategic and diplomatic diktats in the 1870s and 1880s, and finally offered an international platform to Frederick Douglass at the 1893 Columbian World's Fair, thus helping Black people who faced discrimination at home to fight first against slavery and the slave trade, and then for equal rights.

By spanning the entire nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! presents a complex panorama of the emergence of African American identity and argues that Haiti should be considered as an essential prism to understand how African Americans forged their identity in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a variety of sources, Wanted! A Nation! goes far beyond the usual framework of national American history and contributes to the writing of an Atlantic and global history of the struggle for equal rights.

Author Biography

CLAIRE BOURHIS-MARIOTTI is a professor of African American history and the codirector of the research unit TransCrit at the University of Paris 8-Paris Lumi鑽es. She is the author of Isaac Mason: Une vie d'esclave and coeditor of Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom.