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The Black Republic of Letters project was launched by Matt Robertshaw in 2024 as an outgrowth of his PhD dissertation.
Matt is a PhD candidate in History at York University. He is studying the connections between Haiti and the later French colonial empire in Africa. He has published several academic articles on language politics in Haiti and contributed to scholarly website and podcasts. He has also published multiple translations of novels by the Haitian author Fernand Hibbert, and co-translated a Kreyòl version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. He produces video essays at Sleeper Hit History on YouTube and is also an award-winning musician.Check out some of his other work below.
Video Essays:
In 2020 Matt began creating video essays on his YouTube channel Sleeper Hit History.This video focuses on reactions to Haiti and Zaire's participation in the 1974 World Cup in West Germany:
This video focuses on reactions to Haiti's participation in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal:
Podcast:
In 2022, Matt contributed an episode to Dr. Gary Girod's French History Podcast. The episode focuses on Haitians who travelled to Africa in the twentieth century and the roles they played in decolonization on the continent.Writing:
Matt published his Master's thesis as four scholarly articles:- "L’Ouverture, 1901–1915: Sylvain, the École Nationale, and the opening of a Haitian Creole debate," [Institutional access required] Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2019. — I look at the background of Haitian language and literature in the nineteenth century, and then examine how a group of poets and novelists attempted to challenges this status quo beginning around 1901.
- "Occupying Creole: The Crisis of Language under the US Occupation of Haiti," Journal of Haitian Studies, Spring 2018. — Examining the impacts of the U.S. Occupation of Haiti on the question of vernacular language right in Haiti.
- "Haitian Creole Comes of Age: Philology, Orthography, Education, and Literature in the “Haitian Sixties,” 1934–1957," Journal of Haitian Studies, Spring 2020. — A study of the growing legitimacy of the Haitian Creole language in formal contexts in Haitian society in the period between the U.S. Occupation and Duvalier Era.
- "Kreyòl anba Duvalier, 1957–1986: A Circuitous Solution to the Creole Problem?", Journal of Haitian Studies, 2019. — Tracing the growing Haitian Creole language rights movement into the Duvalier era.
- "Disentangling Memory From Truth," Africa is a Country, October 2021 — A written version of my analysis of reactions to Haiti and Zaire at the 1974 World Cup.