Haitian Studies Association

Past Events, Photos & Videos, Videos, Videyo an kreyòl

Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The Man Who Defeated Napoleon Bonaparte (July 16/17, 2022)


View Recorded Livestream & Questions/Comments from the Audience


The Haitian Studies Association is honored to announce a 2-part event featuring Arnold Antonin’ new film, Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The Man Who Defeated Napoleon Bonaparte. Part 1 will be a film screening on Saturday, July 16 at 1 pm PT/ 4pm ET. The film is 94 mins long in French and Kreyol (with English subtitles).

Then join us on Sunday, July 17 at 11 am PT/ 2 pm ET for an interactive conversation between Arnold Antonin and Dr. Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, from the University of California – Santa Barbara about the film.

The 2-part event will be hosted on Zoom.

We hope you can join us!

About the film:

During the Haiti International Film Festival last August, Arnold Antonin was honored as the “Father of Haitian Cinema.” His film is about Haiti’s main founder — Jean-Jacques Dessalines — who was assassinated two years after the proclamation of independence. Today he is both a mythical and an unknown figure, used for better and for worse. This film reintroduces Dessalines in all his complexity and opens a debate on the Haitian crises and the colonial heritage. The film includes analysis by Pierre Buteau, Jean Casimir, Michèle Pierre-Louis, Jean Alix René, Bayyinah Bello, Vertus Saint-Louis, Jhon Picard Byron, Lesly Péan, Daniel Elie and others.


Arnold Antonin’s Website

Haitian filmmaker Arnold Antonin has made some of the best films about Haitian art, Haitian Culture and Haitian History. He is known at home and abroad for his social, political, and cultural commitment. He was honored for his work with the Djibril Diop Mambety award at the International Film Festival in Cannes in 2002. He has received many awards including the Paul Robeson best film award three consecutive times at the African Diaspora FESPACO in Ouagadougou in 2007, 2009, and 2011.


Evelyne Laurent-Perrault’s Bio

Historian of the African Diaspora in Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. Dr. Evelyne Laurent-Perrault’s research looks into the subjectivity, intellectual creativity, and the political imagination of enslaved and free women of African descent (mostly), who lived in Caracas-Venezuela, during the eighteenth century. She explores how these historical actors envisioned, aspired, and negotiated their rights, autonomy, freedom(s) papers, social and political membership, and dignity. The work seeks to unmask the reasons why most of Latin American historiography did previously dismiss the intellectual contributions these social actresses gave to the region, the Atlantic world, and beyond. While Dr. Evelyne Laurent-Perrault’s work is anchored in the eighteenth century, it is in conversation with the present, as she traces how the sequelae of implicit, insidious, and discursive forms of violence from that past, still linger and perpetuate devaluation and racialization in our present days.