Quiet Dawn: A Novel about the Haitian Revolution

PUBLIC EVENT | 20 May 2025 | 12.45-14.15 | Wereldmuseum Leiden

“Launching the Translation of Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Quiet Dawn, a novel about the Haitian Revolution,” In Conversation with Kaiama L. Glover and Laurent Dubois

Kaiama L. Glover (Professor of Black Studies and French, Yale University) and Laurent Dubois (John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor in the History & Principles of Democracy, University of Virginia), leading scholars of Africana Studies, will join us at the Wereldmuseum Leiden on May 20th to launch their English translation of the late Jean-Claude Fignolé’s 1990 novel, Quiet Dawn.

image description: book cover of Quiet Dawn.

About the novel

Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Spiralist novel evokes complex temporalities of ancestral knowledge, moving between the late twentieth century and the turn of the eighteenth century. Duke University Press writes that “the swirling, multilayered novel provides intimate portraits of an eighteenth-century slaveholder, his wife, and their enslaved laborers set against the devastating backdrop of enslavement and revolution… interwoven with that of a present-day French nun. One of the few contemporary Haitian novels to explicitly grapple with Haiti’s revolution, Quiet Dawn foregrounds issues of race, power, the continuing legacy of historical trauma, and the unresolved tensions between the past and present.” The introduction may be read here.

With special thanks to Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, NWO funded Re/Presenting Europe Consortium, the Research Center of Material Culture at het Wereldmuseum, Duke University Press, Rachel Gillett and Wayne Modest, as well as Olombi Bois, Isabella Hall Allen, Eloe Kingma, Ilaria Obata, Clara Ramos, and Carine Zaayman.

Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. She is currently at work on a biography titled “For the Love of Revolution | René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life” (under contract with Liveright/Norton) and a series of essays, “Blackness in French | Race Matters in Translation.” Professor Glover is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction – notably, Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst, Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano, Yanick Lahens’s Sweet Undoings, and René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams and Popa Singer – and of francophone non-fiction, including Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, and Feminism and Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey, Africana the Name. Her various scholarly, translation, and digital humanities work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Laurent Dubois

Laurent Dubois is a Professor of History and Academic Director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of eight books, including Les Esclaves de la République (1998), Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004), Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010), Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012) and The Banjo: Americas African Instrument (2016). He co-edited Origins of the Black Atlantic (2010) and The Haiti Reader (2020), and has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times. He has translated works of history and theory by Jean Casimir, Achille Mbembe and Lilian Thuram into English, and recently co-translated Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel Quiet Dawn with Kaiama L. Glover. He is currently writing a history of the French Atlantic, under contract with Basic Books, tentatively titled Watershed: France & the Americas.

Joseph Sony Jean

Joseph Sony Jean is a Haitian archaeologist. He holds a Ph.D. in archaeology from Leiden University. He is an NWO-Veni fellow and a researcher at the Institute of History, Leiden University, and an affiliated researcher at KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden). His archaeological research focuses on the long-term landscape transformation of Haiti. He combines ethnographic, historical, oral history and ethnohistorical sources. He is also interested in critical heritage studies, heritage in times of ''disaster'', particularly the politics of heritage and the relationship between contemporary societies and heritage. He is the co-editor of the book Local Voices, Global Debates: The Uses of Archaeological Heritage in the Caribbean, Brill 2024.

Francio Guadeloupe

Francio Guadeloupe has been a tenured faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) since 2013, where he integrates public anthropology with a passion for teaching and conducting ethnographic research. In June 2024, he was appointed Professor by Special Appointment of Public Anthropology of Kingdom Relations at the UvA. In addition to his academic role, Guadeloupe is a senior research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV-KNAW). He previously served as President of the University of St. Martin (USM) for four years, during which the institution secured international accreditation for its associate degree programs in Hospitality and Business. His leadership also fostered collaboration with the University of the U.S. Virgin Islands, enabling USM to offer internationally accredited joint Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Educational Sciences and Business Administration.

Anastasia Kanoko Arsenis

Anastasia Kanoko Arsenis is a student at Utrecht University’s Research Master’s programme in Modern and Contemporary History. She obtained her B.A. (cum laude) in European Studies with a major in European History from the University of Amsterdam, which is where she first came into contact with the fields of cultural history and cultural studies. Interested in the role that educational systems have played in sustaining and perpetuating normative ideas about the nation-state since her undergraduate studies, she is currently researching the role that education has played in maintaining the French colonial status quo on the island of Martinique under the supervision of Dr. Rachel Anne Gillett.

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

In relationship to this event, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken’s book Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (2015) includes a couple of chapters on Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel Aube tranquille [Quiet Dawn, translated by Kaiama L. Glover and Laurent Dubois, the invited speakers of this May 20, 2025 event in Leiden’s Wereldmuseum, see above]. Benedicty-Kokken is University Docent at the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and Literary and Cultural Analysis, and she maintains an affiliation to the Center for Worker of Education at City University of New York, an institution to whose pedagogical model she is extremely dedicated. She is co-Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Haitian Studies, with Marie-José Nzegou-Tayo and a board member of the Haitian Studies Association.