Since the bicentennial of Haitian independence in 2004, the field of Haitian literary and cultural studies has expanded considerably. It is no longer possible to claim with the same degree of urgency that Haitian history and literature are being ignored in North Atlantic academe. Not only have Haitian literature panels become a central part of the often social science-focused Haitian Studies Association (which has been in existence for more than thirty years), but numerous conferences and colloquia on both sides of the Atlantic have now been devoted almost singularly to the topic of Haitian literary studies.Footnote ¹ We are witnessing, in fact, something of a revival in Haitian literary studies. Various scholars from both French and Francophone Studies, as well as English, History, and American Studies, are turning their attention to Haiti’s robust literary culture. Despite the fact that Haitian scholars, poets, and novelists have been studying and publishing critical studies of Haitian literature since the mid-nineteenth century, and several anthologies of Haitian writing in translation have been published more recently in the United States, to date there is no full-scale history of Haitian literature published in the English language.Footnote ² A History of Haitian Literature seeks not simply to fill this void, but to offer crucial insight into the aesthetic, political, cultural, linguistic, and historical frameworks necessary to comprehend Haiti’s vast literary history, both as a part of the Caribbean archipelago and as a distinctly sovereign nation.

To think about Haiti and its rich literary tradition is necessarily to consider the twinned matters of storytelling and sovereignty. Since the nation’s formal declaration of independence from France in January 1804 through to its present-day struggles for equitable consideration and treatment on the global stage, Haitians have faced the seemingly endless challenge of self-determination. In thinking about how a veritable history of Haitian literature might be structured, we have kept the question of literal and literary independence front of mind. How, we ask, have Haiti’s writers engaged – for better or worse – with competing nationalist projects? How have they responded to the incursions of North Atlantic imperialism or with the predatory economic, social, and political practices of their former colonizer, France? How have these authors contended with and how do their writings exhibit conflict or, alternatively, collaboration with various heads of the Haitian state? And how have the writings of Haitian authors reflected and inflected the complex social and political realities that make up the nation’s history? These questions, taken up implicitly and explicitly by the authors of the chapters in this volume, ultimately revolve around the notion of narrative.

There is hardly a twenty-first-century project concerning Haiti’s image on the world stage that fails to take into consideration Gina Athena Ulysse’s poignant exploration of why “Haiti needs new narratives.”Footnote ³ That being said, undergirding the very premise of this volume remains the insistence that radical, insightful, and aesthetically dazzling narratives of Haiti have long existed. From nineteenth-century antislavery and anticolonial pamphleteering to denunciations of racialized disaster capitalism in twenty-first-century fiction, Haitian writers have always told their own national story. If there are new narratives of Haiti to be created, looking to the past and present of Haitian cultural production is not in tension with this quest. To carefully unfold and rigorously examine Haiti’s wide-ranging and long-standing literary tradition from a historical standpoint and for an Anglophone readership is the aim of this volume.

While this history of Haitian literature is committed to foregrounding Haiti’s long-standing and enduring tradition of storytelling, we recognize nonetheless to what extent Haitian literature – like all national literary traditions – has evolved in light of or, perhaps more accurately, in the shadow of both internal and external influences and pressures. As such, our conceptualization of this volume is largely undergirded by our understanding of the dramatic impact and protracted resonance of various capital events in world history: the French and Haitian Revolutions, nineteenth-century Latin American independence movements, the early twentieth-century United States Occupation of Haiti, the so-called Parsley Massacre in the Dominican Republic, the First and Second World Wars, the rise and fall of the Duvalier and Aristide governments, as well as the 2010 earthquake. The chapters begin in the eighteenth century with the pre-revolutionary period, then move through a long nineteenth century before spanning the pre- and post-Occupation twentieth century, concluding in the present day. Our contributors’ nuanced approaches to the diverse temporalities embedded in these rough intervals have, we hope, kept any reductive teleological implications at bay.

Every chapter in this collection presents standalone arguments, histories, and theories, but each chapter is also necessarily linked to every other in the volume. Such connections emerged organically due to the tendency of Haitian authors to work across generic literary boundaries. That so many of Haiti’s writers developed equally rich corpora of prose and dramatic fiction, poetry and journalistic writing, and historical and scientific treatises defies any effort at rigid categorization. The overlapping presence of several of these genres by writers in multiple chapters instead provides a robust connective tissue. Be it in the nineteenth century or in the twenty-first, in journals or volumes of poetry, in works by women or by men, in texts produced in Haiti or in its many diasporas, Haitian writers have emphasized geographical rootedness while insisting with equal vehemence on Haiti’s contributions to politics, art, and culture on a global scale. In this and other respects, we can certainly characterize Haitian literature as engaged, as Jacquelin Dolcé, Gérard Dorval, and Jean Miotel Casthely contend in their landmark 1983 volume, Le Romantisme en Haïti.Footnote ⁴ While we do not shy away from this descriptor, we have made it a point throughout this history to foreground Haitian writers’ attentiveness to grounded and innovative aesthetic choices, too. Ultimately, we do not seek to defend Haitian writers from the charge of being too political, nor are we overly concerned with narratives that dismiss their work as imitative or otherwise less-than. Rather, we are interested in tracing the ongoing development of a Haitian literary tradition that was founded and exists on its own terms. In so doing, our hope is that this volume will amplify and illuminate the literary goals, desires, and choices of Haiti’s writers. We seek to understand why they wrote what they did, when they did, and to consider who they believed they were writing for and to.

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French-claimed Saint-Domingue had a rich culture of theater, pamphleteering, and newspaper publishing. Haitian revolutionaries from Jean-François and Georges Biassou to Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and from André Rigaud to Julien Raimond, availed themselves of the printing press to transmit messages about everything from the trajectory of the Revolution to the perils of color prejudice, to the duplicity of the colonists vis-à-vis British and Spanish invasion, and from the horrors of slavery to their yearnings for a new society free of slavery and racism.Footnote ⁵ It is perhaps because Saint-Domingue was already dominated by a culture of theater and print that the Haitian literary tradition began in earnest at the start of the country’s independence from France in 1804. Poets like Antoine Dupré and Jean-Baptiste Romane, for example, immediately began to compose odes and other homages to Haitian freedom.Footnote ⁶ The printed version of the 1804 Haitian Declaration of Independence, in fact, contained the lyrics to a song in rhyming couplets called “Hymne Haïtien,” written by Juste Chanlatte. The refrain after every stanza reads:

In 1804 Haiti also saw its first play printed, Pierre Flignau’s L’Haïtien expatrié, comédie en trois actes et en prose (The Exiled Haitian, Comedy in Three Acts and in Prose). By the 1810s, during which time northern and southern Haiti were ruled separately, under Henry Christophe and Alexandre Pétion, respectively, Haiti had its own national newspapers: the Gazette officielle/Gazette royale, in the north, and Milscent’s L’Abeille Haytienne, along with the state-run Le Télégraphe and Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s L’Observateur, in the south. Each of these newspapers regularly published poetry and plays, in addition to news from around the world.

So robust was the print culture of Haiti that by 1819 Haitian literature, as such, had already been recognized as its own national genre. In a two-part article called “De la littérature haïtienne” (On Haitian Literature) published in the Revue encyclopédique out of Paris in 1819, French critic and historian Antoine Métral described in meticulous detail the tremendous scope of early Haitian letters. Evoking Dessalines’s and Christophe’s constitutions, along with the writing of Juste Chanlatte, Jules Solime Milscent, François Desrivières Chanlatte (brother of Juste), and Baron de Vastey, among others, Métral characterized the prolific literary output of Haitian authors as filled with “sublime ideas of poetry and eloquence,” which he said, “delve deeply into the most profound abstractions of metaphysics.”Footnote ⁸ Haitian authors had long published their texts in the prevailing literary magazines and newspapers of the day in Haiti, but in the decades following Métral’s positive assessment they found an unlikely audience in metropolitan France. Ignace Nau, Coriolan Ardouin, and Beauvais Lespinasse, for instance, published short stories, poems, and plays, respectively, in Cyrille Bisette’s Parisian Revue des colonies; one of the most well-known Parisian publishers of the nineteenth century, E. Dentu, posthumously published the first novel written by a Haitian, Stella, penned by Émeric Bergeaud shortly before his death; and Pierre Faubert’s play, Ogé, ou Le Préjugé de couleur (Ogé, or Color Prejudice), first performed in Port-au-Prince in 1841, was published in France in 1856 by the Parisian publisher C. Maillet-Schmitz.Footnote ⁹

Yet despite wide circulation of Haitian writing in France and much acclaim from the literary magazines of the day, by the middle of the century, pro-slavery and pro-empire French apologists began decrying the existence of Haitian literature. In a two-part article tellingly called “Yellow Literature,” French critic Gustave D’Alaux wrote that the Haitian poet and playwright Antoine Dupré had been merely “imitating or guessing at Molière.” D’Alaux’s contemporary Alexandre Bonneau, for his part, unabashedly charged, “Haitian thought can only be formulated in the French language.”Footnote ¹⁰ Such claims continued into the later nineteenth century with Edgar La Selve, who asserted in his 1875 Histoire de la littérature haïtienne, depuis ses origines jusqu’à nos jours (History of Haitian Literature from Its Origins to the Present Day),

La Selve followed this statement up with a question: “Haitian literature, then, has its growth been stunted?” His response: “To this rather embarrassing question, it would be natural to reply, ‘No, it is making progress’.” “But to this very day,” he continued, “anything that we could appropriately call literature in Haiti, only represents a French point of view.”Footnote ¹¹ La Selve’s unflattering contention, that Haitian literature was derivative and unoriginal, came to inflect some early twentieth-century literary criticism. A similar assessment can be notably glimpsed in the Haitian novelist Frédéric Marcelin’s unfavorable characterization of Stella as imitative of the French romantic tradition and in Jean Price-Mars’s charge that Haitian intellectual and political life in the generations preceding his could be characterized, in general, as operating under a “bovarysme des collectivités,” or “collective bovarysme.”Footnote ¹²

In their introduction to Poetry of Haitian Independence, Doris Y. Kadish and Deborah Jenson have urged a more broadly historicized method for understanding nineteenth-century Haitian literature, one that can help us to move beyond Jean Price-Mars’s famous charge. Kadish and Jenson have written, “Although Price-Mars was advocating a cultural rediscovery of African forms at the heart of Haitian heritage, the notion of a Haitian bovaryism signals a long-standing tendency of prescriptive and exoticizing assessments.”Footnote ¹³ For, while “imitation of French models unquestionably exists in the poetry of Haitian independence,” it would be a mistake, they argue, to “draw … attention primarily – or, indeed, only” to this element of the poetry. Instead, readers should pay attention to the fact that, as in the Chanlatte poem we cited earlier, Haitian poets “pay homage to Haiti’s founding fathers: Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer,” while also exhibiting a “strong association with Africa.”Footnote ¹⁴ Our volume similarly challenges past and present claims of imitation and unoriginality by putting nineteenth-century Haitian letters into the historical, aesthetic, and formalistic genres that are appropriate to understanding their emergence. This has meant recognizing and thinking critically about the global political context within which Haiti, a lone antislavery state in the heart of the enslaving Americas, found itself precariously situated during the better part of the nineteenth century.

Early Haitian literature firmly demonstrates the hyper-awareness nineteenth-century Haitian authors had of their country’s and their own precarity. They knew that their words would circulate both inside and outside Haiti and that the national literature of the country could be used as a weapon against their vulnerable nation or as a tool to help secure its independence. Jules Solime Milscent, poet, playwright, and editor of the periodical L’Abeille Haytienne (1817–20), for example, encouraged all Haitians to undertake their own personal development for the good of the nation when he wrote, “both the sword and the individual talent should only have one goal: that everyone in the country contributes to it.” By “establishing among us all of the elements of civilization,” Milscent insisted that Haitians could “impose silence on ill will.”Footnote ¹⁵ With the stakes of sovereignty contingent in large measure on proving Haiti’s status as a ‘civilized’ nation, the literary sphere became a crucial battleground on which Haitian claims to legitimate humanity were fought. As such, Haitian letters very much served a rehabilitative function. The unfortunate tendency, particularly outside of Haiti, to label the writings of nineteenth-century authors as alienated or Francophile, thus fails to account for the nation’s fraught and threatened position in a world dedicated to undermining its very existence.

Throughout the early nineteenth century, newly independent Haiti had to repeatedly stave off threats of “restoring Saint-Domingue” coming from the ex-French colonists and Napoléon Bonaparte’s empire. Once restored to his throne, Louis XVIII followed in Bonaparte’s stead with missions aimed at paving the way to reinstate slavery in 1814 and 1816, respectively. Louis XVIII’s brother, Charles X, who succeeded him in 1824, issued the disastrous 1825 indemnity whereby the Haitian government under President Jean-Pierre Boyer was manipulated into an agreement to pay 150 million francs as the price of Haiti’s liberty and independence. Charles X’s successor, cousin Louis Philippe, oversaw the 1838 revision to that agreement which, while reducing the total amount to 90 million francs, forced Haiti to take out high-interest loans to pay the “debt.” Boyer, for his part, passed repressive laws to force Haitians to cover the payments.Footnote ¹⁶ Boyer’s 1826 Code rural transformed all non-elite, non-military Haitian citizens into laborers and eventually led to Boyer’s overthrow and exile in 1843.Footnote ¹⁷ Nineteenth-century post-Boyer Haiti saw a corresponding rise of a Haitian literati forced into exile due to repeated political upheavals and numerous attempts by Haiti’s various rulers to suppress free speech.Footnote ¹⁸

The Haitian politician and author Demesvar Delorme is one such later nineteenth-century writer who fled to France in the 1860s in order to escape political repression. Known for his spirited critiques of the Haitian government and searing takedowns of US imperialism, in works like Les Théoriciens au pouvoir (Theorists in Power, 1870) and La Démocratie et le préjugé de couleur aux États-Unis (Democracy and Color Prejudice in the United States, 1866), Delorme also authored two novels, Le Damné (The Damned One, 1877) and Francesca: les jeux du sort (Francesca: The Games of Fate, 1872). Even though its setting is fifteenth-century Italy, Delorme’s Francesca addresses many of the themes that became central in Haitian literature of the twentieth century. With Francesca, Delorme offered a powerful allegory about life, spirituality, death, racial prejudice, and political buffoonery in Haiti and beyond. Francesca also implicitly defends the Vodou religion, with its character Djem, who provocatively declares to Francesca that what matters most is faith in God, not in religion:

Likewise, Louis-Joseph Janvier’s Une chercheuse (A Woman Seeking Love, 1888) is not only allegorical like Francesca, but also makes arguments about political exile. Yves Chemla has argued that the tragic plotline, whereby a woman in France falls in love with a homesick Egyptian medical student, could be overtly related to Janvier’s long exile in France and his own inability to return to Haiti because of political turmoil. Writing of the character Edriss’s proposed return to Egypt, Janvier inserted a statement that might have echoed his own feelings about the Haitian government that exiled him: “The government is rotten with prejudice; it especially hates those who have the misfortune of being young; it hates thinkers and writers.”Footnote ²⁰

The way that nineteenth-century Haitian authors engaged with the Haitian physical and political landscape through romantic literature did not undergo reassessment until taken up by mid twentieth-century Haitian literary critics. Dieudonné Fardin defended Stella, in particular, when he characterized Bergeaud as “before his time.” Although Bergeaud’s novel “was deeply engaged with the world,” according to Fardin, “it would not be until the second half of the twentieth century that we would learn to appreciate [him].” Fardin also believed Bergeaud’s novel stood at the origins of Marvelous Realism in Haiti. “Bergeaud’s Stella,” Fardin continued, “is the ancestor of the marvellous realism of which Jacques Stephen Alexis dreamed.” Fardin further concluded that the fictional writings of Delorme and Janvier, like that of Bergeaud, “firmly aligned with contemporary Haitian literature, which seeks no longer to be local, but global.”Footnote ²¹

Our assessment of the history of Haitian literature is indebted to the important work done by early twentieth-century Haitian anthologists and encyclopedists like Fardin, Dantès Bellegarde, Louis Morpeau, Ulrick Duvivier, and Duraciné Vaval. These critics not only demonstrated the problems with the claims of imitation and lack of originality that by the early twentieth century had become rampant in literary criticism about Haiti, but they firmly contested them. To that end, the early twentieth-century Haitian critic Louis Morpeau, himself a poet and anthologist explained,

Dogged by – and often compelled to respond to – both the damaging charge of derivativeness lobbed by French critics and material challenges to their sovereignty from France (in the nineteenth century), the United States (in the twentieth century), and later by the United Nations (in the twenty-first century), it is unsurprising that Haiti’s writers sought to defend their originality while also detailing the ongoing challenges to their national sovereignty. To push back against the at once literary and political accusations that Haitians remained incapable of self-mastery and self-governance, Haitian authors began, ironically, to insist on their exceptional francité, on the one hand, and on the fact that they had transformed the French language to fit a Caribbean context, on the other. As Amy Lynelle shows for her chapter in this volume, the poets of the turn-of-the-century La Ronde generation, for example, often proudly touted their linguistic virtuosity in French to dispel any claims of intellectual, political, or creative inferiority.

Similarly, an elite turn to the nation’s (creolized) francophone origins was a strategy some Haitian authors adopted in earnest during the American Occupation (1915–34) to stave off US cultural and political domination. Haitian writers who emerged during the Occupation often pushed back against the vulgar racism of the invading “Yankees” by exalting their cultural alignment with the supposed greater sophistication of France and Europe. Others lamented an apparent declining respect for Haiti’s sovereignty and independence among the populace even before the Occupation. In Justin Lhérisson’s La Famille des Pitite-Caille: les fortunes de chez nous (The Family from Petite Cayes: Our Cherished Homeland, 1905), the character Eliézer exalts France while in despair over the Haitian political situation. Yet another character, Boutenègre, intervenes to warn him, “Don’t go any further with your France … France is France, Haiti is Haiti” (N’allez pas pli loin avec votre la France … La France, cé la France, Haïti cé Haïti). Later, another character, M. Voum, tells Eliézer almost prophetically, “Make yourself French, German, or American. That is the only way to be respected and protected on the territory of Haiti.” “Become a foreigner, alas,” he continues, “and Haiti will become for you an exquisite paradise.”Footnote ²⁴

As debates over Haiti’s future as a francophone nation raged on, the early twentieth century saw the rise of a contrary ethos. Several major intellectuals, foremost among them Jean Price-Mars, turned decisively away from Euro-North American standards and values to seek cultural connection with Africa. From the late 1920s through to the later years of the Occupation, Haitian writers invested in rehabilitating a rural peasant “folk” tradition as a cultural counterpoint to North Atlantic ethnocentrism. These years saw the rise of the Indigenist movement and, later in the century, its Janus face, Noirisme. Both Indigenisme and Noirisme emphasized the crucial importance of establishing a national identity capable of valorizing Haiti’s Afro-descendance. Yet, whereas the Indigenists envisioned this cultural turn as a counterpart to a (Marxist-based) political empowerment of the Haitian masses, the Noiriste Griots at times simultaneously deployed race as a category of alienation and dispossession, as in Carl Brouard’s poem “Thibaut de Champagne”:Footnote ²⁵

Yet with the eventual departure of the US Marines in 1934 and a wistful hope for the return of political sovereignty, many of Haiti’s writers began imagining the nation differently.

Several of the works written during the 1940s and 1950s present a notable change in viewpoint – eschewing the perceived insular, Africa-focused nationalism of the Indigenist writers in favor of more universalist, cosmopolitan perspectives. During this period, Haitian writers turned to both communism and surrealism as ideal intellectual platforms upon which at once to express local social and aesthetic values and to understand Haiti as a dynamic contributor to international progressive currents. In novels, poetry, and periodicals, mid twentieth-century Haitian authors increasingly articulated both the plight and the promise of Haiti’s citizenry within an unbounded global frame. Yet some of those very global realities – most notably the fraught politics of the Cold War – limited the possibilities for radical societal transformations. That so many of the writers and intellectuals of the period embraced socialism as Haiti’s most viable way forward grew untenable in the US geopolitical sphere.

Jacques Roumain emerged as absolutely central to the evolution of Haitian letters during this period, as several of the chapters in this volume attest. Renowned for his anthropological and militant socialist contributions as well as for his groundbreaking, internationally acclaimed works of prose fiction, including the 1944 novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew), Roumain became a singular point of reference, if not to say reverence, for engaged Black writers throughout the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. His writing and activism set a standard for politically informed art and performance, inspiring a generation of writers who, in the wake of the Second World War, stood staunchly committed to the principles of anti-imperialism and human rights that appeared to have triumphed over fascism on the global stage.

Among these writers, many of whom came of age during the US Occupation, Jacques Stephen Alexis and René Depestre stand out. Both men were leaders in the week-long student-protests-turned-national-strike of January 1946, known in Haitian history as the 1946 Revolution or the Five Glorious Days, and both went on to participate in socialist projects in eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and beyond, bringing their decidedly Haitian worldview to a diffuse extra-insular constellation of literary and political arenas.Footnote ²⁹ Both also came up against the rising tide of Black fascism that had begun to overwhelm their homeland and eventually came to dominate the Haitian state by the late 1950s, culminating in François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s ascension to the presidency for life. Alexis ultimately became a victim of the regime, murdered by the tontons macoutes in 1961, and Depestre spent the entirety of his adult life in a near-unbroken series of exiles.

The three decades of Duvalier governance were unequivocally destructive, terrorizing, and brutal. At the same time, they were marked by an extraordinary flourishing of literature. Whether living in Haiti or in what former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide later referred to as its diasporic “Tenth Province” in the United States, Canada, Europe, or South America, Haitian writers proved impossible to silence.Footnote ³⁰ Novelists, poets, playwrights, and journalists from the 1960s to the 1990s wrote provocatively about Haiti and the world. Their work makes plain the devastating consequences for the nation’s citizens of the North Atlantic world powers’ meddling in Haitian political affairs. Dany Laferrière’s partly autobiographical Pays sans chapeau (Down among the Dead Men, 1996), which is set in 1996, ten years after the fall of the Duvalier regime, offers searing political commentary about the punitive and insulting measures forced upon Haiti by the world powers after the 1991 military coup that forced into exile Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Along with UN “peacekeepers,” a comical cast of foreign investigators arrive to study why the people of the northwestern town of Bombardopolis can live for months at a time without eating. The foreigners conclude that it is because they are all plants, and not human beings. The irony of course is that foreign meddlers are the ones who have caused the starvation. “Hunger remains the most effective weapon,” one bystander wryly remarks.Footnote ³¹ Such writers at the same time fearlessly denounced the social inequality and human rights abuses of the twentieth century as so many iterations of a pathological relationship between State and Nation, dating back to the colonial era, that two centuries had yet to fully resolve. Footnote ³² This period also saw a remarkable surge of writings by women, whose works highlighted the dangerous public/political incursions into the private/domestic sphere under Duvalier. In both prose fiction work and journal essays, as Marie-Denise Shelton’s chapter for this volume illustrates, women writers in Haiti and in the diaspora narrated the extraordinary measures taken by Haitian mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives to respond to this largely gendered challenge.

The political fallout occasioned by the coup d’état that unseated President Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986, and whose ramifications are still being felt in Haiti today, could not dampen Haitian literary production. As throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Haiti’s writers continued to engage both national and international political realities. Notably, since the turn of the twenty-first century, we have seen increasing circulation of Haiti’s writers on a global stage – movement both out of and onto the island that has permitted different sorts of engagements with the wider world. Local concerns remain central, but these are placed very much in ongoing and mutual relation to the preoccupations of diaspora and contemporary global geopolitics.

Among these local politicized concerns there has long been the question – the choice, the challenge – of language. Writing in Haitian Creole has traditionally been read as an act of defiance, whereas writing in French has most often been tacitly considered a kind of “necessary evil” – assimilationist but inevitable. However, understanding Haiti’s complex linguistic situation – a diglossia with both French and Haitian Creole as official languages – requires greater nuance. Despite lacking an official orthography for Haitian Creole for most of the country’s existence, Haitian authors have been expressing themselves in Creole in literature and essays since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Juste Chanlatte, as the Comte de Rosiers (sometimes spelled Roziers), penned two operas and one play in 1818, 1819, and 1820, respectively. Chanlatte’s operas, L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale (The Return of the King to His Capital, 1818) and La Partie de chasse du roi (The King’s Hunting Party, 1820), are innovative, in that some of the dialogue is presented in Creole. Making a kind of “metalinguistic statement” about Haiti’s status as a primarily Creolophone country, the character Marguerite in L’Entrée complains that she cannot sing a tune to the air of “vive Henry IV,” or “long live Henri IV,” because “li pa en criole,”or “it is not in Creole.”Footnote ³³ While not using any Creole words specifically, Chanlatte’s counterpart, Baron de Vastey, implied a deliberate creolization of his own writing when he insisted that he was giving his French grammar a “Haitian turn” so that more of his compatriots could understand him.Footnote ³⁴ Later in the century, Ignace Nau more formally and deliberately incorporated Creole terms into his two short stories about the Revolution, “Le Lambi” (The Conch Shell, 1837) and “Un épisode de la Révolution” (An Episode from the Revolution, 1837), as well as in his novella, Isalina, ou une scène créole (Isalina, or a Creole Scene, 1836).Footnote ³⁵ The insistence that Creole words and Creole linguistic formations remain a feature of literature in Haiti, as in everyday life, continued throughout the century, not only with the well-known poetry of Oswald Durand, but with the less examined writings of Henri Chauvet, who formulated his own creolized spellings that resemble modern Creole/Kreyòl orthography in his play, Fille du Kacik, drame en cinq actes et en vers (The Kacik’s Daughter, Drama in Five Acts and in Verse, 1894); and famously, Georges Sylvain adapted French poet Jean de La Fontaine’s fables into the Creole-language Cric? Crac! in 1901. At the turn of the twentieth century, Haitian novelists also began to formally incorporate Haitian Creole words into their texts, most notably perhaps in Justin Lhérisson’s Zoune chez sa ninnaine (1906), literally “One at His Godmother’s House,” and La Famille des Pitite-Caille (1905).

It is partially because authors and politicians who have sought to use Creole in their publications had to more or less invent their own spelling systems that in the 1940s several efforts emerged to develop an official orthography for Haitian Creole. The state-sponsored literacy campaign that took place from the mid to late twentieth century resulted in the creation of a standard spelling for the Haitian language, independent of French orthography.Footnote ³⁶ This was designed to combat the historical devaluation of Creole that resulted in a partial linguistic diglossia, whereby one language was considered “high” and the other “low.” The success of the standardization of the Haitian language is marked by the fact that Haitian Creole (now spelled “Kreyòl” in Haiti) joined French as an official language of the Republic of Haiti in 1987. The publication of the first novel written in Creole, Frankétienne’s Dezafi (1975), as well as the first full-length history of the Haitian Revolution published in Creole, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Ti Dife Boule sou Istwa Ayiti (Burning Debates in Haitian History, 1977), undoubtedly contributed to Haitian leaders taking this crucial step.Footnote ³⁷

We hope that the detailed glosses of the relationship between nineteenth-century Haitian literary emergence and twentieth-century Haitian Creole-language publications contained in several of the chapters in this volume will make obvious that gaining familiarity with pre-twentieth-century Haitian letters and understanding the linguistic complexities of Haitian society are vital to properly contextualizing the history of Haitian literature. The presence of Creole in nineteenth-century Haitian literature soundly challenges the notion that Creolophone literatures in the Caribbean primarily emerged in the twentieth century. At the same time, the fact that most Haitian literature continues to be published in French defies facile understandings of the relationship of the Haitian populace to the language of its former colonizers and brings to the fore the thorny social issues of literacy and social inequality. While a not inconsiderable number of Haitian authors, such as Frankétienne, Maude Heurtelou, Félix Morisseau-Leroy, and others, as detailed in Frenand Léger’s chapter for this volume, composed entire plays and novels in Haitian Creole, the majority of late twentieth-century and contemporary Haiti’s most famous authors – including French Académie inductee Dany Laferrière, Prix Renaudout winner René Depestre, and Prix Goncourt winner Makenzy Orcel – continue to write exclusively in French, albeit while adopting the tradition of incorporating Creole words throughout their works. Furthermore, diasporic migration patterns flowing in the direction of the United States have created a context wherein some Haitian novelists from the Haitian diaspora now write in English, as is the case with Edwidge Danticat and Myriam J.A. Chancy.

In this volume, we have tried to attend to the many linguistic nuances of Haitian literature – published both at home and abroad – beyond rupture and assimilation, exile and alienation, francité or créolité. Louis Morpeau’s 1925 collection Anthologie d’un siècle de poésie haïtienne (1817–1925) (Anthology of a Century of Haitian Poetry) – with sections titled “Haitian Poetry in French Expression” and “Haitian Poetry in Creole Expression” – demonstrates the complexity involved in understanding Haitian literary output and its relationship to the linguistic multiplicity that marks the country’s history and culture. Morpeau’s own words perhaps best capture the dynamism of the infinitely complicated heteroglossia that characterizes Haitian letters:

The plurality of languages in Haitian literature itself tells the story of the nation’s richly creolized past.

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Since Haitian independence, anthologists and literary historians from Haiti have compiled numerous French-language compendia of Haitian literature. These publications have primarily taken the form of encyclopedic and bibliographic anthologies, as with Ulrick Duvivier’s Bibliographie générale et méthodique d’Haïti (General and Methodical Bibliography of Haiti, 1941); Dantès Bellegarde’s Écrivains haïtiens: notices biographiques et pages choisies (Haitian Writers: Biographical Notes and Selected Excerpts, 1950); Louis Morpeau’s Anthologie d’un siècle de poésie haïtienne (Anthology of a Century of Haitian Poetry); and Pierre-Raymond Dumas’s more recent two-volume Anthologie de nouvelles haïtiennes (Anthology of Haitian Stories, 1991). Some of the earliest works of what we might properly call Haitian literary criticism are Liautaud Ethéart’s Les Miscellanées (Miscellanies, 1858), Frédéric Marcelin’s Autour de deux romans (Concerning Two Novels, 1903), and Duraciné Vaval’s Histoire de la littérature haïtienne ou “L’âme noire” (History of Haitian Literature or “The Black Soul,” 1933). But the pages of twentieth-century Haiti’s famous periodicals, including La Revue indigène and Revue de la société haïtienne d’histoire, de géographie et de géologie, as well as Haiti’s longest running newspaper Le Nouvelliste, are also rich with articles about and reviews of Haitian authors and the various literary themes found within their writings.

In the mid twentieth century, a more systematic output of Haitian literary criticism emerged, however. In 1959, for example, the ethnologist Jean Price-Mars published De Saint-Domingue à Haïti: essai sur la culture, les arts et la littérature (From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: An Essay on Culture, Art, and Literature), a formal work of cultural criticism that also included a study of Haitian literature. In 1960, Ghislain Gouraige published a similarly titled volume, Histoire de la littérature haïtienne de l’indépendance à nos jours (History of Haitian Literature, from Independence until Our Time); in 1975, Raphël Berrou and Pradel Pompilus published a multivolume Histoire de la littérature haïtienne, illustrée par les textes (History of Haitian Literature, Illustrated by Texts), aimed at high school and college-age students; and in 2002 Dieudonné Fardin and Hérard Jadotte published their own multivolume Histoire de la littérature haïtienne. Prolific US-based French theorist of Haitian literature Léon-François Hoffmann published several works of literary criticism throughout his career, including Le Roman haïtien (The Haitian Novel, 1962), Haitian Fiction Revisited (1983), Essays on Haitian Literature (1984), Haïti: lettres et l’être (Haiti: Literature and Existence, 1992), and Littérature d’Haïti (Literature of Haiti, 1995). Hoffmann also published an invaluable Bibliographie des études littéraires haïtiennes, 1804–1984 (Bibliography of Haitian Literary Studies, 1992), a compilation of articles and other works concerning Haitian literature organized by author. Other significant volumes addressing more genre-specific concerns in Haitian literature are Jean Fouchard’s Plaisirs de Saint-Domingue: notes sur sa vie sociale, littéraire et artistique (The Pleasures of Saint-Domingue: Notes on Its Social, Literary and Artistic Life, 1955), Langue et littérature des Aborigènes d’Ayiti (Language and Literature of the Aborigines of Ayiti, 1972), and Le Théâtre à Saint-Domingue (Theater in Saint-Domingue, 1988), as well as Robert Cornevin’s study of the longue durée of Haitian theater in Le Théâtre haïtien des origines à nos jours (Haitian Theater, from Its Origins until Today, 1973). More recent considerations of the Haitian novelistic tradition include Marie-Denise Shelton’s Image de la société dans le roman haïtien (Image of Society in the Haitian Novel, 1993) and Jean Jonassaint’s Des romans de tradition haïtienne: sur un récit tragique (Novels of the Haitian Tradition: On Tragic Storytelling, 2002).

English-language volumes of Haitian literary criticism have tended to be more thematic than holistic. This is the case with J. Michael Dash’s Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Myriam J.A. Chancy’s Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997), Marie-Agnès Sourieau and Kathleen Balutansky’s edited collection Haïti: écrire en pays assiégé/Writing under Siege (2004), Martin Munro’s monograph, Exile and Post–1946 Haitian Literature (2007), Valerie Kaussen’s Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and US Imperialism (2007), Kaiama L. Glover’s Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2010), John Patrick Walsh’s Migration and Refuge: An Eco-Archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017 (2019), and Régine Jean-Charles’s Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022).

A History of Haitian Literature takes inspiration from these prior volumes and studies in offering what is potentially the first global treatment of both Haitian literary criticism and Haitian literary history to be published in the English language. Constrained neither by time period nor thematic or genre-specific parameters, the chapters in this volume attend as rigorously to the theoretical as to the historical and are as attentive to the aesthetic as to the political, often considering all of these elements in essays, novels, poetry, songs, theater, and other forms of performance. Insofar as the individual chapters provide both broad overviews and original research and analyses, the volume, we imagine, will be useful in the undergraduate and graduate classrooms, as well as for specialists and newcomers to Haitian Studies.

While the Haitian Revolution did result in rupture in many ways – for example, with the style of governance that existed in the colony prior to independence – it did not immediately create a different literary culture. In fact, the colony’s main literary output, theatrical production, is integral to understanding the development of the Haitian literary tradition. In the first chapter of the present volume, “Literature as Loot,” Laurent Dubois discusses Haitian scholar Jean Fouchard’s contributions to our current understanding of literature and literacy in Haiti as tied to theater and performance in Saint-Domingue. Dubois stresses how Fouchard made the study of literature, theater, and other forms of writing and performance in Saint-Domingue vital to any consideration of Haitian literary culture’s long-term development. To illustrate the connections Fouchard made, Dubois focuses on several of his key works, showing how Fouchard delved into previously unexplored aspects of the relationship between Saint-Dominguan and Haitian culture. In so doing, Dubois notes that Fouchard unveiled indigenous legacies found in contemporary Haitian culture, argued for the centrality of the performing arts, and brought to light handwritten texts by enslaved and free African-descendant people on the island.

Grégory Pierrot’s contribution, “Theater in Early Independent Haiti,” demonstrates that from 1804 to 1825, despite ongoing political struggles, theatrical performances persisted in newly independent Haiti. While Jean-Jacques Dessalines was in Gonaïves declaring Haiti’s independence, for example, many of the officers around him were actively engaged in theater, as writers or actors. Military and journalistic personalities like Juste Chanlatte, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, Pierre-Charles Lys, Antoine Dupré, and Jules Solime Milscent, all contributed to theater as a site of culture and politics in Haiti’s first two decades of independence. Pierrot shows how the theater served as both a reflection of societal changes and of local and global politics.

In his chapter, musicologist Henry Stoll introduces readers to early nineteenth-century Haitian songs and opera as reservoirs of literary insight. He positions early Haitian music, particularly under the reign of King Henry Christophe (1811–20), as a precursor that significantly shaped the trajectory of later nineteenth-century Haitian poetics. The Haitian literary tradition, Stoll argues, can be traced back to the nation’s earliest musical endeavors. Stoll thus examines how the literary pioneers of Haiti harnessed the power of music to counter foreign criticisms, exhibit artistic excellence, uphold local languages, and convey social observations, all while poignantly underscoring the paradox of Haiti’s liberty in a world still entrenched in bondage. Central to Stoll’s argument is the eminent statesman and writer Juste Chanlatte (1766–1828), whose numerous songs and operas indelibly enriched the landscape of early Haitian artistic expression. In his analysis of two of Chanlatte’s early nineteenth-century musical compositions, Stoll considers how early Haitian songwriters bestowed thematic relevance upon the music once employed by their former French oppressors, ingeniously weaving their nation’s aspirations into literary melodies that echoed through time.

Chelsea Stieber’s chapter examines periodical culture in early nineteenth-century Haiti (1804–43) during the reigns of Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. Stieber analyzes how what she names the “paper war” waged in early to mid nineteenth-century Haitian periodicals became emblematic of political disputes within Haiti. At the same time, she argues that Haitian newspaper editors and writers of this era challenged European racial theories undergirding slavery, engaged in debates about national governance, and worried about Haiti’s survival as a sovereign nation. Stieber asserts that such overtly political aspects became crucial to Haitian literary development, as she walks readers through the links between early national Haitian literature and periodicals of the period.

Marlene L. Daut’s contribution, “History, Politics, and Revolutionary Romanticism in Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s Voyage dans le nord d’Hayti (1824) and the Anonymously Published L’Haïtiade (ca. 1826),” draws on the works of Dolcé, Miotel, and Casthely in Le Romantisme en Haïti, to consider the emergence of a distinctly Haitian version of romanticism that defies traditional European and American periodizations. Daut’s chapter examines the convergence of art and activism in Haitian culture, where art serves as a “call to action.” First discussing the origins of the verb lugubrer in the Haitian Declaration of Independence, she explores how it became a powerfully poetic symbol of the nation’s early struggles. Then, focusing on the poets Charles Hérard-Dumesle and the anonymous author of an epic poem titled L’Haïtiade, Daut highlights how these works merged romantic poetics and political analyses to create a revolutionary Romanticism deeply intertwined with Haiti’s historical consciousness. The study culminates in a reevaluation of L’Haïtiade and the challenges in attributing its authorship. Ultimately, the chapter sheds light on the development of Romanticism in Haiti, arguing that it must be understood both alongside historical narratives of the Revolution and literary aesthetics.

Continuing with poetry, Mary Grace Albanese concentrates on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose literary contributions surfaced in 1830s Haiti. While prevailing scholarship often construes the Haitian Cénacle as a derivative of French Romanticism, Albanese asserts that the Cénacle’s writers exposed the inadequacies of an idealized European romantic notion of citizenship and sought to craft a distinctive national literature characterized by the romantic portrayal of Black and Indigenous worlds. Albanese contends that paying attention to Haitian romanticists’ interaction with Vodou, and their portrayals of women and gender-fluid individuals, can provide readers an alternative perspective for understanding collective historical memory in Haiti, albeit one perhaps only unwittingly embraced by the Cénacle’s writers. By deconstructing symbols and allegory in Haitian romantic print culture, Albanese insists that writers from the Cénacle harnessed Haitian Vodou practices to reshape the nation’s political trajectory. In so doing, these artists placed the Vodou religion’s practitioners, once relegated to the periphery, at the center of Haiti’s engagement with Romanticism.

Claudy Delné takes us to one of nineteenth-century Haiti’s more well-traveled romantic texts by embarking on a renewed examination of Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859), the first Haitian novel. Stella has been rightly hailed as the one of the most allegorical and symbol-laden Haitian-authored literary representations of the Revolution. Delné shows that this nineteenth-century novel, penned by Bergeaud while he remained in exile, contains rich thematic intricacies that call for further consideration. By yoking the Haitian and French Revolutions together, Delné argues that Bergeaud elided the revolutionaries’ agency in favor of a more providential lens. This is epitomized by the character of the white heroine, Stella, a seemingly heaven-sent French luminary. Delné thus offers a counter reading of Bergeaud’s abstract depiction of the Revolution, highlighting the tensions involved in the novel’s artful juxtaposition of two prevailing perspectives: that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

In “The Predicament of Civilization: Revisiting Late Nineteenth-Century Haitian Novels,” Bastien Craipain also asks us to reconsider prevailing assumptions about the relationship between the emergence of the novel in Haiti and francophone postcolonial studies. Craipain first directs our attention to the historical quandary that compelled nineteenth-century Haitian scholars and writers to embrace western narratives of civilization and modernity. The chapter commences with a chronological exploration of the Haitian novel’s evolution, spanning from its inception in the mid nineteenth century to its prolific output in the early 1900s. In subsequent sections, Craipain focuses more directly on Demesvar Delorme’s Francesca and Louis-Joseph Janvier’s Une chercheuse, novels that he contends reveal the intellectual aspirations of two of nineteenth-century Haiti’s most storied literary luminaries, both of whom artfully navigated within a Eurocentric realm of letters.

Amy Lynelle’s chapter reevaluates the poets of the “génération de La Ronde,” named as such because of the writers who created Haiti’s renowned literary review, La Ronde (1898–1902). Lynelle sheds light on the review and its contributors’ oft-dismissed detachment from Haiti’s political context. Examining the writings of poets like Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire, Lynelle delves into their politics and poetics of “disenchantment,” which she says is rooted in the gap between their literary and intellectual aspirations and Haiti’s grim realities. These dynamics, Lynelle contends, shaped not just La Ronde’s content, but Haitian poetic output at the turn of the century.

Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo similarly considers nineteenth-century Haitian poetry, but her chapter primarily tackles poems and other works written in the Creole language. Tying the literary to the anthropological, Nzengou-Tayo asks us to consider new ways of understanding the development of Haitian Creole as a literary language. While the famous Haitian poet Oswald Durand’s poem “Choucoune” is often regarded as the first literary work written in Haitian Creole, Nzengou-Tayo reminds us that earlier instances exist, thus calling for reconsideration of the chronology of Haitian Creole letters. Glossing the history of Haitian poetry written in Creole, beginning in the early nineteenth century, she ultimately turns to Georges Sylvain’s famous 1901 rewritings of the fables of French author Jean de La Fontaine in the first known collection of poems in Creole published by a Haitian author, Cric? Crac! Her in-depth analysis of Sylvain’s poetry brings to the fore several of its distinctive innovations and shows its intertwined relationship with Haitian popular culture.

In his chapter, “Some Causes of the Underdevelopment of Haiti’s Creole-Language Literature,” Frenand Léger takes readers even further into one of the central conundrums of Haitian literary heritage: a rich, but predominantly French-language tradition stemming from the colonial era and a more limited yet significant body of Creole texts dating back to the eighteenth century. The evolution of Haitian Creole letters, Léger insists, can be categorized by two main phases. The emergent era spans from French colonial rule to the mid twentieth century and includes religious, administrative, and political texts created by those in power and aimed at Creole-speaking enslaved or otherwise politically marginalized individuals. During the same time period, however, Haitian Creole literary expression emerged in both songs and poems. The second phase, he tells us, in contrast, is marked by a more autonomous Creolophone tradition and the standardization of written Haitian Creole. This later twentieth-century period has led to a flourishing of Creole literary output across genres today, including poetry, short stories, novels, and theater.

Theater, in both Creole and in French, is the subject of Rachel Douglas’s chapter, “Performing Rebellion and Re-membering Haiti’s Past and Present in Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Theater.” Douglas considers how drama, as a popular medium that forges a bridge between the oral and the written and between Creole and French, has provided an effective mode of engaging non- and semi-literate Haitians in their own cultural patrimony. Her chapter makes use of anthropologist and performer Gina Athena Ulysse’s theorizations of rasanblaj to identify a specific dimension of Haiti’s theatrical tradition, notably the processes of gathering, adapting, translating, reworking, and remixing that temporally and spatially destabilize and expand the worlds created by the various playwrights she considers. Looking especially at rewritings and stagings of Antigone, Douglas unearths a decidedly feminine and feminist element of rasanblaj that is too often overlooked in considerations of Haitian political and aesthetic traditions.

Concerned also with the impact of literature on the formation of a coherent cultural identity, Linsey Sainte-Claire’s contribution, “Haitian Writers and the Forging of a National Voice through Periodicals in the Twentieth Century,” focuses on the complex stories of literary review culture during key historical moments. Her chapter explores how publications in this genre both reflected and markedly influenced Haiti’s sociopolitical and intellectual life. Sainte-Claire highlights the tension between the aesthetic and the political aims of several literary reviews that explicitly sought to lay the foundations for a Haitian national voice. Sainte-Claire argues that publications in this specific genre differed from other twentieth-century literary works by the fact of their rich diversity. In reviewing works of prose fiction, poetry, art, and music, Haitian authors took up crucial local issues, from the scientific to the sociopolitical, while also engaging consistently with an international literary scene.

Even more pointedly concerned with voice, Laura Wagner’s chapter takes us to a literature-adjacent medium: radio. The Haitian radio station Radio Haïti-Inter, renowned for its investigative journalism and pro-democracy advocacy, was led in its most famous iteration by Jean Léopold Dominique. Wagner writes of how, under Dominique’s guidance, the station served as a bastion of political discourse and a haven for diverse artists, particularly literary writers, to share their creations with the public, such that the station’s literary and political dimensions intertwined seamlessly. Many of its journalists, including Dominique and his daughter, novelist Jan J. Dominique, bridged the realms of literature and politics. Their literary expressions often carried nuanced social and political commentary, as the station’s contributors utilized art to address the nation’s challenges within an increasingly repressive environment. As Wagner outlines, programs like “Entre Nous” transformed literary presentation into a revolutionary political endeavor. By hosting performances and readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and theater, the station fostered a broader platform for cultural and political dialogue and helped Haitian literature to circulate around the country.

In her chapter concerning literature that emerged in Haiti during the United States Occupation, Nadève Ménard attends to a time in Haiti’s history when the revolutionary import of literature stood at the forefront of intellectual cultural production. Contrary to conventional claims that authors of literary works published during the nearly two decades of American rule were primarily concerned with resistance to the Yankees, Ménard contends that many works from the period do not engage with the Occupation at all, focusing instead on historical events, domestic dramas, or romance. In addition to this undeniable thematic diversity, she argues, works published during the Occupation present a great variety of genres and formal structures, from periodicals to poetry to essays to short stories and novels. Turning her attention most pointedly to what she names “occupied novels,” Ménard offers close readings of works that attest to the political tragedy of their time while also grappling with broader human matters of race, class, gender, and other social relations.

Several of the political tragedies and traumas of the first part of the twentieth century implicate Haiti’s eastern neighbor, the Dominican Republic. In her contribution to this volume, Sophie Maríñez examines works by Haitian and Haitian-descended writers who have evoked Haiti’s long political and historical relationship to the Dominican Republic. Bookended by the 1937 massacre of Dominicans of Haitian origin and migrant Haitians living in the border region between the two nations and the 2013 Dominican Constitutional Court ruling 168–13, which denationalized thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent, Maríñez considers how discursive constructions of Hispaniola’s past have had significant implications for potential solidarities in the present day. Her chapter begins with a rigorous analysis of Roumain’s celebrated 1944 novel Gouverneurs de la rosée and then attends with equal rigor to works produced in the decades since – by authors both male and female, Haitian and Dominican, in Hispaniola and in the United States, in the twentieth and in the twenty-first centuries. Maríñez moves through and beyond Marxist perspectives on the troubled relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic to show how matters of race, color, and gender have been increasingly taken up by Haitian, Haitian-American, and Haitian-Dominican writers.

In “Marxism and the Moun Andeyo,” Valerie Kaussen considers politically oriented works by Jacques Stephen Alexis, Edris Saint-Amand, Anthony Lespès, and Jacques Roumain, all communist writer-activists who came of age during the US Occupation and who were committed to the twinned ideologies of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Their Indigenist writings make explicit the connection between literature, Marxism, and the so-called folk, advocating for the embrace of Haiti’s African cultural origins, as expressed through the traditions of the peasantry. The authors discussed in Kaussen’s chapter evince egalitarian, communalist political perspectives in their fictional and non-fictional writings, drawing particular attention to the myriad ways in which the Haitian state has consistently failed in its relationship to the Haitian nation. Not only do these writers put forward meaningful and incisive critiques of the existing social order, Kaussen observes, but they also present a wide array of imagined alternatives. Her chapter emphasizes the idiosyncrasies of Haitian socialism, noting the points of both intersection with and diversion from Franco-European political models.

Yves Chemla’s contribution, “Jacques Roumain, from Indigenism to Nationalism,” confirms socialist intellectual Roumain’s significance as a creative writer and political activist whose shadow looms large over twentieth-century Haitian letters. Looking closely at Roumain’s singular position as an internationally circulating witness to and participant in critical moments in both Haitian and global history, Chemla offers a thorough accounting of Roumain’s astonishing impact on literary modernity. He argues that while Roumain wrote of the specific context of the US Occupation and the rise of Indigenism, the insights and perspective that mark his essays and prose fiction likewise anticipated the fascist, colorist statecraft of the Duvalier regime from its origins in the Indigenist perspectives and racialized thinking of the late 1920s. Chemla places Roumain at the center of an extended network of thinkers, writers, and political actors in France, the United States, and throughout the Caribbean.

Expanding outward into the Haitian literary world that both set the stage for and followed Roumain’s contributions, Jean Jonassaint considers modes of national self-determination by Haitian writers during the first half of the twentieth century in his chapter, “For a History of the Novel of Haitian Tradition: 1901–61.” Jonassaint posits revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s January 1, 1804 proclamation, “The General in Chief, to the people of Hayti,” as the primary textual source of Haitian tragic writing, in all its diversity, through the mid twentieth century. The chapter moves from the publication of Frédéric Marcelin’s Thémistocle-Épaminondas Labasterre, Justin Lhérisson’s La Famille des Pitite-Caille, and Fernand Hibbert’s Séna in the early part of the century, through the decline of the novel as a genre in the wake of the US Occupation of Haiti, to the relative Golden Age of Haitian prose fiction during the 1930s and 1940s, during which time writers like Jacques Roumain, Pierre Marcelin, and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin become internationally renowned, to the 1950s, which marked the rise of Jacques Stephen Alexis. Focused on the presence of two main elements – warning and clarification, both evident in Dessalines’s discourse – in the corpus he considers, Jonassaint makes the case for the existence of a decidedly coherent branch of the Haitian literary tradition.

Martin Munro takes Jacques Roumain’s classic 1944 novel, Gouverneurs de la rosée, as point of departure for a sustained meditation on representations of migration in twentieth-century Haitian literature. Munro argues that, for Haitian authors of the twentieth century, exile is not merely a question of space or place, but of time as well. Exile, in Munro’s analysis, is a historical process that references a range of interconnected phenomena, including the Middle Passage, psychological alienation, economically coerced migration, and the forced displacement of numerous writers and intellectuals in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Moving from a corpus of nineteenth-century poems in which exile is evoked, to works by celebrated twentieth-century novelists, essayists, and poets, the chapter focuses primarily on narratives that address the mass migration of Haitians under and following the successive Duvalier regimes (1971–86). Munro’s close readings show how Haiti’s writers have not only experienced but also theorized exile in ways that illuminate a specifically Haitian and widely human condition.

Kaiama L. Glover furthers the discussion of exile and resistance in her chapter “The Zonbi as Episteme in Haitian Prose Fiction.” Glover argues that the figure of the zonbi has served many of Haiti’s twentieth-century prose fiction writers as a valuable trope through which to account for and contest the horrors of everyday life under and in the wake of Duvalierism. Glover offers close readings of a corpus of autofictional novels that, in their ensemble, reveal how Haitian authors have deployed the zonbi, an idiosyncratically Afro-diasporic cultural phenomenon, as a unique source of broad humanist understanding. Glover looks at the literary configuration of the zonbi from three distinct yet interrelated perspectives: as a figure of immanent and even imminent revolt; as a lens through which to reckon with gender in Haiti and beyond; and as a metaphor for the alienation and trauma of exile. Her chapter calls for an appreciation of the zonbi as a popular cultural figure whose inherent ambivalence has allowed Haiti’s writers to embrace the unresolved tensions of the nation’s oft-evoked resilience in the face of seemingly relentless tragedy, both within the island and across its diasporas.

Resilience and resistance are key elements of Cécile Accilien’s chapter, “Living Vodou: Representations of Power and Resistance in René Depestre’s Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien.” In her close reading of Depestre’s epic 1967 prose poem, Accilien lays out the religious and cultural importance of Vodou to anti-racist and anti-imperialist resistance throughout Haiti’s (literary) history. Beginning with a discussion of Vodou’s pivotal role in the revolutionary origin story that is the Bwa Kayiman ceremony of 1791, Accilien’s chapter posits Depestre’s poem as a contemporary evocation of the power of the gods to contest European and US political hypocrisy and to imagine alternative humanist modes of being.

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken also considers modes of being in and thinking the world through idiosyncratically Haitian perspectives. She queries the epistemological possibilities that reside in twenty-first-century poetry, notably by Port-au-Prince-based poets writing across the myriad (un)natural disasters and political tragedies that have determined the contours of everyday life in Haiti over the last several decades. Her chapter considers the deployment of Vodou lwa Papa Loko and his avatars (the butterfly and the wind) as an ambivalent trope of healing in poetic works by James Noël and Lyonel Trouillot. Her analysis posits what she terms a Lokoian ethics, a non-absolute moral positioning grounded in non-predatory human relation and a refusal of binaristic thinking around staying in or leaving Haiti.

In “Partisan Politics and Twentieth-Century Fictions of the Haitian Revolution,” Natalie M. Léger reads twentieth-century fictions of the Haitian Revolution, including Depestre’s Un arc-en-ciel and works by Marie Chauvet, Évelyne Trouillot, and Jean-Claude Fignolé, to show the complexities of contending literarily with a subject that has been put to exploitative political use by so many of Haiti’s state leaders. Léger considers how Haitian novelists have grappled with the fraught sociopolitical discourses surrounding Haiti’s war of independence, crafting narratives that lament the calculated silences and manipulations of the Revolution in service to the repressive agendas of unscrupulous leaders. Significantly, Léger draws attention to Haitian women writers who have pointedly written women into the revolutionary narrative. Her close readings shed light on the inextricable links between aesthetics and the politics of both race and gender in Haitian letters, offering insights into legacies of 1804 that have persisted well into the twentieth century.

Marie-Denise Shelton’s chapter, “Haitian Women’s Fiction,” similarly insists that writings by women and about women’s lives are crucial to understanding Haiti’s historical, social, and political realities. Her chapter explores the uneven representation and recognition of women in Haiti’s history – the undeniable presence of women in key moments from the precolonial to the putatively postcolonial past and their paradoxical exclusion from accounts of Haitian colonial and revolutionary history. Acknowledging the diversity of her vast corpus, Shelton nonetheless proposes a thorough account of francophone Haitian women’s literature. She traces the evolution of prose fiction writing in French by Haitian women from the late 1920s to the 1990s, offering readings of over a dozen more and less well-known works that comprise a magnificent genealogy of women’s contributions to the Haitian literary tradition.

In “Haitian Uses of the Erotic: Feminist Genealogies and Geographies,” Régine Michelle Jean-Charles looks closely at novels by francophone Haitian women writers Emmelie Prophète and Kettly Mars to illustrate how their representations of same-sex desire trace feminist landscapes. Jean-Charles begins her chapter with a consideration of how the erotic has been represented in twentieth-century women’s literature in Haiti, examining works by Cléante Valcin, Paulette Poujol-Oriol, and Marie Chauvet. She then goes on to show how twenty-first-century authors Prophète and Mars foreground the relationship between the body, intimacy, and identity in their depictions of women-loving women. Relying explicitly on Black Caribbean feminist methodologies, Jean-Charles queers and queries narratives of quotidian experience to show how contemporary women’s writing reveals non-spectacular but nonetheless powerful liberatory possibilities.

Nathan Dize considers literary works written by contemporary Haitian writers in his chapter, “Archiving Narratives of Maternal Loss and Queer Life in Haitian Fiction in the Wake of the 2010 Earthquake.” Dize considers the archival quality of post-earthquake prose fiction writings, highlighting two specific thematic preoccupations that emerge from this corpus, notably Haitian mothers searching for their lost children and the lives of queer and gender-creative Haitians living in Port-au-Prince. Reading closely works by Makenzy Orcel, Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, Kettly Mars, Emmelie Prophète, and Gary Victor, Dize shows how fiction can constitute cultural archives for Haiti’s most marginalized citizens as they work to survive in the wake of (un)natural disaster. Dize’s attention to gender, sexuality, and the aesthetics of resistance makes plain how Haitian literary production continues to inflect, represent, and contest difficult social realities in times of crisis.

While the crises of the past are certainly threaded through the vast and diverse corpus of Haitian letters under study in this volume, just as present and as significant are the powerful and singularly creative responses to those crises engendered by Haiti’s writers. Throughout A History of Haitian Literature, we have endeavored to account for and honor those responses, with the volume’s contributors providing both expansive and finely tuned reflections on more than two centuries of literary history. Though by no means exhaustive, the scholarship featured in these pages reflects a wide range of expertise, across disciplines, generations, institutions, and national origins. Our volume is indebted to the work of past and present researchers and aims to make a meaningful contribution to bringing that work forward. Indeed, this collection is meant, in large part, to present a hopeful counter to the limiting stereotypes that naysayers have attached to Haiti and its people over the course of the nation’s history. The principal aim of this volume is, in the end, constructive dialogue – that is, to offer greater insight into Haiti’s extraordinary literary tradition and to expand the foundations of the growing field of Haitian Studies.