Assistant Professor of French Receives NHPRC-Mellon Planning Grant to Create Digital Edition of Global Antislavery Periodical

The Revue des Colonies was published in France between 1834 and 1842.

By ARHU Staff

Maria Beliaeva Solomon, assistant professor of French and Francophone studies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, has received a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC)-Mellon Planning Grant to support her work to create a digital scholarly edition and translation of the Revue des Colonies, a French abolitionist journal published between 1834 and 1842. The two-year, $119,996 grant, for “Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History and Ethnic Studies,” seeks to broaden the publication of historical and scholarly digital editions.

The grant will support “essential planning activities for the compilation of the edition, including public events and initiatives in the continental US, continental France, and the Caribbean, and generate a range of opportunities for student and community involvement, such as training in digital editing practices and archival research,” Beliaeva Solomon said.

She is working on the project with technical director Raffaele Viglianti, senior research software developer at UMD’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and an international and interdisciplinary team of collaborating scholars and graduate students. The digital edition aims to provide searchable, bilingual access to the journal’s entire print run alongside a selection of contemporaneous material, including original English language sources, correspondence, pamphlets and petitions.

Printed in Paris, the Revue des Colonies was the first French periodical directed by people of color, reporting on politics, economics and society in the French colonies and beyond. It also circulated and promoted Black literature on a global scale. In 1837, the Revue published the first known work of fiction by an identified African American author (in French), New Orleanian Victor Séjour's “Le Mulâtre” ("The Mulatto"). Throughout its print run, it also featured writing by contemporaneous Haitian authors and French translations of major Black American and British authors such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano.

“A global antislavery venue, connecting and amplifying abolitionist discourse worldwide, the Revue des Colonies offers an essential counterpoint to institutional histories of the Atlantic world, enabling new understandings of the making of the modern Americas through the lens of Black Francophone history, politics and culture,” Beliaeva Solomon said.

Beliaeva Solomon is currently a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and a recent Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.