Slave Revolt on Screen: Gaming the Haitian Revolution
Department: History
Date and Time: March 3, 2022 | 4:00 PM-6:00 PMEvent Location: HG 1010
Event Details
Slave Revolt on Screen: Gaming the Haitian Revolution
Thursday, March 3 | 4-5:50PM | HG 1010
Featuring Dr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall and her book Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games
The Haitian Revolution, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic World. However, this revolution has become less well-known—and appears less often on screen—than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black history.
Despite the general cinematic silencing of this event, an increasing number of video games have treated the subject of slave revolt in Haiti. Why do these games exist? How do they portray enslaved people and how do their storylines compare to historiography on the Haitian Revolution? What does this tell us about the future of video games as a medium for tackling silenced histories that Hollywood studios have avoided?
Speaker:
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (Ph.D., Stanford) is Professor at California State University – San Marcos, where she is a past winner of Harry E. Brakebill Outstanding Professor Award and the President’s Award for Innovation in Teaching. She is a specialist in Haitian and French history; her publications include The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (UC Press, 2005; paperback, 2021), Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012), and Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (Mississippi, 2021).