John Wharton Lowe
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director, Program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies, Louisiana State University
“Unleashing the Loas: The Literary Legacy of the Haitian Revolution in the U.S. South and the Caribbean”
Tues., Nov. 6
3:30 p.m.
Alumni I Ballroom
George Watts Hill Alumni Center
UNC-CH campus


The James A. Hutchins Lectures are presented with support from the UNC General Alumni Association.

The Haitian Revolution sent tremors of terror through the U.S. South, which maintained a literary silence on the subject for many decades. In the Caribbean, however, and across the Black Diaspora, the insurrection inspired many celebratory and creative narratives by key writers from other islands such as Cesaire, Glissant, C.L.R. James, Carpentier, and Walcott. More recently, scholars have examined Haiti’s eventual appearance in Southern literature, which culminated in Madison Smartt Bell’s stunning bicentennial trilogy All Souls Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone that the Builder Refused. This lecture will consider the variety of approaches and genres that have considered the revolt, and will conclude with an assessment of Bell’s trilogy as a compendium and challenge, and as a striking example of the new literature of the Global South.

John Wharton Lowe was born in Atlanta, and grew up there and in Nashville. He received his B.A. from Vanderbilt, an M.A. from Georgia State University, and M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. He has taught at Saint Mary’s College (Notre Dame), Harvard University, and Louisiana State University, where is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies. For many years he directed LSU’s Summer Program in Italy, and he has held Fulbright Fellowships in India and in Germany, where he was Senior Fulbright Professor at the University of Munich in 1995–1996. He has received Fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Lilly Foundation, and the Louisiana Board of Regents, More recently he was Freehling Fellow of South Atlantic Studies at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville, and has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2008–2009 to complete his ongoing project, Calypso Magnolia: The Caribbean Side of the South  He is also completing Faulkner’s Fraternal Fury, a study of birth order and sibling rivalry (under contract with LSU Press), and has written several hundred pages for another project, The Americanization of Ethnic Humor. His other interests include racquetball, cooking, football, country music, and opera.