In our second conference "warm-up" talk, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (Professor of History at California State University-San Marcos) discussed the Haitian Revolution in film and video games.

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was a momentous occasion in world history, the first successful revolution by enslaved Africans in the Americas. But the Revolution's memory was long suppressed in the US and Europe, prompted by fears among slaveholders that it would inspire copycat uprisings by enslaved people elsewhere, fighting for their own freedom. The Revolution's memory has been kept alive, however, in some kinds of popular culture. This talk introduced the Revolution and discussed some of the ways in which it has been depicted in global cinema and in video games. It asked: How have foreign and Haitian portrayals of the Revolution compared? And which have tended to be more accurate: cinematic portrayals of the Haitian Revolution or those in video games?

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall is Professor of History at California State University-San Marcos. She is the author of The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (U of California P, 2005) and the forthcoming Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (UP of Mississippi, 2021) and editor of Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012). Her articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Haitian Studies, the Journal of Modern History, and the Journal of American Culture.

This talk is brought to you as a collaboration between the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw, the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz, the Austro-American Society for Styria, and the Association for Research and Culture about Continental America and the Caribbean.

For the high-quality poster, click here.