The introduction presents the methodology used in the book and offers a brief outline of Rwanda's pre-mid-nineteenth century history.

This chapter focuses on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose writings appeared in Haitian print culture in the 1830s. Among the Cénacle’s political aims was the development of a unique national literature structured around a democratic romanticization of Black and Indigenous figures. While scholars have traditionally historicized the Haitian Cénacle as merely imitative of French romanticism, this chapter argues that the writings of the Cénacle instead reveal the limitations of idealized European romantic citizenship. In particular, Haitian romanticism’s engagement with Vodou, and specifically Vodou as practiced by women and gender fluid people, offers a different way of imagining collective historical memory, albeit one that cannot be fully embraced by the writers of the Cénacle. Through readings of Haitian print culture, this chapter demonstrates how the Cénacle mobilized Haitian Vodou practices in order to reshape the nation’s political future, and in doing so, attends to the unnamed Vodouwizans abandoned in the margins of romantic history.

This chapter examines the conditions for revolution, its premises and accelerators, and its unravelling. Between 1959 and 1961, Rwanda made the transition from a Tutsi-dominated monarchy to a Hutu-dominated republic, creating the conditions for the armed return of the Tutsi exiles discussed in Chapter 6.

This chapter proposes Haitian song and opera as untapped sources for literary analysis and important forerunners in the development of Haitian literature. It demonstrates how the early writers of Haiti used music to challenge the country’s foreign detractors and showcase its artistic achievement, preserving regional vernaculars, offering social commentary, and eloquently heightening the irony of Haiti’s freedom in a world of ‘enlightened’ enslavers. It looks at the contributions of Juste Chanlatte (1766–1828), a prominent Haitian statesman and writer whose many songs and two operas left an indelible mark on early Haitian music and letters. Next, it expounds on the popularity and political expediency of a particular musical-literary genre: the contrafactum. Created by setting original Haitian lyrics to preexisting French melodies, the genre enjoyed a remarkable efflorescence in early Haiti with over one hundred examples published from 1804 to 1820. Through analyses of two musical works by Chanlatte, the chapter shows how early Haitians gave topical relevance to the music of their former French oppressors and literary expression to the ambitions of their nation.

This chapter covers Haitian periodical culture in early nineteenth-century Haiti (1804–1843) and the spirited, fraught process of national literary formation under Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. It considers early periodicals and their engagement in political combat and partisan confrontation, within Haiti and in the broader Atlantic world. Early Haitian writers refuted European racial pseudoscience that sustained slavery and engaged in internal polemics on the nature of Haiti’s independence; the best form of governance for the nation’s survival; and the meaning of freedom, civilization, and literature. The chapter argues that these aspects of early periodical culture were central to the development of Haitian literature. It traces the development of an idea of Haitian national literature in that culture. Whereas earlier newspapers presented ‘literature’ as the inclusion of occasional verse and creative poetic production in their pages, newspapers, magazines and eventually specialized journals began to theorize the existence of a national Haitian literature national literary culture—an idea that would become fully realized by the late 1830s.

In the three decades from the uprising of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue in 1791 to the recognition of Haitian independence by France in 1825, even amid the bitterest struggles, theatrical productions never fully stopped. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence, many of the officers surrounding him were directly involved in the theatre, as playwrights, actors, or both. Looking at figures such as Juste Chanlatte, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, Pierre-Charles Lys, Antoine Dupré and Jules Solime Milscent, this chapter makes a case for the importance of the theatre in the early years of Haitian independence as a reflection of the country’s evolving society, but also as a mirror and vector of domestic and international politics. A source of public entertainment and information designed and utilized for the most part by the country’s elites, the theatre was a prime tool in shaping and projecting idealized representations of the new nation and its leaders, within the country and to the outside world.

Haitian poetry experienced a shift, beginning as early as the 1870s, away from nationally inspired themes toward a greater insistence on poetic form and a penchant for contemplative verse. Poets often pondered abstract notions like the passage of time or the mysteries of nature. Other times they chose to write from the anguish of personal experience, mourning the loss of love to death or betrayal. Their melancholic reflections were not necessarily devoid of politics. Poets Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire composed their own eclectic poetry years before contributing to the famous journal La Ronde. Theirs is a poetics of ‘disenchantment’, a term that permeates the pages of the journal and characterizes their reactions to Haiti’s distressing domestic and international political situation. I offer an assessment of these three key poets and of the journal, affirming and going beyond the idea of the ‘understated political aspect’ of the movement. I demonstrate that the politics occasioning and emanating from this poetry embody distinctly Haitian calls for literary perseverance, a prescient battle for national preservation to which La Ronde is dedicated.

How, this chapter asks, does twentieth- and twenty-first-century Haitian theater shed new light on Haitian history and ask burning questions of the nation’s present? Turning to drama has enabled many Haitian dramatists to reach out to wider audiences including illiterate or semi-literate people, as they straddle the divide between oral and written, as well as French and Creole. Many of the dramas explored here retell Haitian origin tales of dismemberment and reassembly. I identify a tradition and dynamics of adapting, remaking, reworking, and remixing that span much Haitian theater. Haitian drama often not only remakes the original material itself but also changes ways of seeing the world from a Haitian point of view. Haitian dramatists’ approaches to translation, adaptation, remaking, and remixing sometimes change the original language, or shift the political and cultural contexts to a Haitian worldview. These acts of rasanblaj often reflect on Haitian history, culture, and current events through a process of constant remaking and call-and-response collaborative interaction. Haitian drama portrays the Haitian people as the main actors and agents in their own stories.

While Jacques Roumain’s classic novel Gouverneurs de la rosée foregrounds the possibility and necessity of return to Haiti, in many other literary versions of Haitian exile such a reconnection is never achieved. The returning wanderer can never just pick up where they left off, and the exile is definitive, unending. The chapter argues that exile for Haitian authors of the twentieth century is not merely a question of space or place; it has temporal dimensions that can compound the sense of separation or loss. Following a consideration of nineteenth-century exile-related poems, the chapter engages with some of the most prominent essayists, poets, and novelists whose works serve as chronicles of the multi-generational experiences of separation from Haiti before, during, and after the Duvalier dictatorships. As the examples show, experiences of exile vary widely and are determined by many factors, including personal circumstance, the place and conditions of exile, changing realities in the homeland, and evolving notions of exile itself, and of the ways in which it is written by successive generations of authors.

This chapter addresses the concrete application of the regime of indirect rule in Rwanda. As seen in Chapter 2, Belgium started from a vague and general concept that from the outset contained the germs of its central contradiction: respecting indigenous political institutions and practices while simultaneously adapting and using them in its ‘sacred mission of civilisation’. The introduction of this policy was to induce profound modifications to the functioning of the indigenous authorities and their relations with the population.

Radio Haïti-Inter, Haiti’s most prominent independent radio station and the first station to regularly broadcast news, reportage, and interviews in Haitian Creole, is best known for its investigative journalism, political analysis, and pro-democracy activism under its famous director, Jean Léopold Dominique. But Radio Haiti was also a place where artists of all kinds, especially literary writers, presented, discussed, and declaimed their work to a wide public over the airwaves. In fact, there is no clear line between Radio Haiti’s political content and its literary content. Many of Radio Haiti’s journalists, including Dominique himself and his daughter, novelist Jan J. Dominique, were also literary writers. A literary sensibility suffused much of their content; discussing art or literature allowed them to talk about the country’s social and political situation in a hostile realm; and much of the literary work contains implicit or explicit political meaning. Creating a platform that allowed a wider audience to experience literary works through programs like Radio Haiti’s “Entre Nous” was a political, revolutionary act.