Julia Prest wins Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize 2024

It was announced this week that Julia Prest, Professor of French and Caribbean Studies, is joint winner of a Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize for her monograph Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

The Literary Encyclopedia awards three prizes on a biennial basis for work on literatures in English, literatures in other languages and scholarly editions of texts. Julia’s prize is in the category of ‘scholarly contributions to our understanding of literatures written in languages other than English’. Her book is concerned with the vibrant public theatre tradition in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in present-day Haiti.  It examines the relationship between public theatre and the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue – something that has generally been given short shrift owing to a perceived lack of sources. Here, a range of materials and methodologies are used to explore pressing questions including the ‘mitigated spectatorship’ of enslaved domestic servants; portrayals of enslaved people in French and Creole repertoire; the contributions of enslaved people to theatre-making and shifting attitudes during the revolutionary era. Prest demonstrates that slavery was no mere backdrop to this portion of theatre history, but an integral part of its story. She also helps recover the hidden experiences of some of the enslaved individuals who became entangled in that story.