African American writer Arna Bontempss Drums at Dusk immerses readers in the opulent and brutalyet also very fragilesociety of Frances richest colony, Saint Domingue. First published in 1939, Drums at Dusk is a story of love, violence, and race set at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The novel explores the complex web of tensions connecting wealthy plantation owners, poor whites, free people of color, and the slaves who stunned the colony and the globe by uniting in a carefully planned uprising. The novels hero, Diron Desautels, a white Creole born in Saint Domingue, who belongs to the French antislavery group Socit des Amis des Noirs, attempts to spread his message of liberty, equality, fraternity in a world fraught with conflict. A new introduction by Michael P. Bibler and Jessica Adams reveals how Drums at Duskeven seventy years after its original publicationcontributes to contemporary studies of the American South as part of the larger plantation region of the Caribbean, and inspires a reevaluation of assumptions about revolution, race, and nationalism.
