Doctoral Candidates: Barbara Ceptus

(Re)membering Revolution, Imagining Blackness: The Haitian Revolution in the African American Cultural Imaginary

Dissertation Summary

My dissertation interrogates the role of silence in the historiography of the Haitian Revolution in order to examine how the ideas of silence affect the ways the Haitian Revolution is understood as a historical text. This work stems from my concern with the tendency in early texts in the burgeoning field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies to pronounce the Haitian Revolution as silenced in the history of the West. I problematize the way silence has been deployed as a framework, and offer suggestions for positioning the memory of the revolution in present day history writing. I turn to African American scholars, artists, and writers of the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century to illuminate the way histories of the Haitian Revolution were used to stake claims about the past, negotiate the present, and offer alternative futures. Specifically, I analyze African American popular and professional histories of the Haitian Revolution to reveal how narratives about Haiti and its revolution were used to articulate desires for full citizenship and argue against notions of racial inferiority.

Bio

Barbara Ceptus is Ph.D. candidate in The Graduate Group in Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. She has a B.A. in American Studies and Clinical Psychology from Tufts University. She has worked in many areas of education ranging from mentoring to administration. Ceptus worked with the Boston Public school system, as a school coordinator with an education collaborative aimed at helping high school dropouts obtain their diplomas and high school equivalency certificates. She has also worked to improve and maintain the numbers of underrepresented graduate students at the University of California, Davis as the Graduate Retention Coordinator with the Recruitment & Retention Resources Center. As a Community Educator and Research Associate with the Public Policy Program at the Applied Research Center in Oakland, California, Ceptus provided training and workshops to teach effective analysis of the impact of race neutral public policy on communities of color.

In 2008 Ceptus was the recipient of a Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. She is currently a Teaching Fellow at the University of California Washington Center in Washington, D.C.