...J. Michael Dash This article challenges the notion of Haitian cultural exceptionalism, and the ways in which in the postindigenist era the peasant novel in general and Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée in particular became yardsticks for judging Haitian writing. Evoking contemporary...

... should always be read in the context of global modernity.15 The instinct of Marxists such as Jacques Roumain was to look outward, to place Haiti, as Firmin (and others like Janvier) had hoped in the nineteenth century, in the vanguard of progressive nations. In September 1927, Roumain writes in La...

..., say, Edwidge Danticat, who deals with questions of history, memory, and exile in a distinctly serious, earnest way, and who sees her work as a continuation of a Haitian tradition that began with the mid-twentieth-century fi ction of Jacques Roumain and Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Laferrière’s...

... seeking to avenge it. Not surpris- ingly, the tropes of revenge and hatred figure prominently in the classics of Haitian literature, most memorably perhaps in Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée and Marie Chauvet’s Amour, Colère, Folie, the former being a parable of forgiveness and unrequited...

... that of more politically visible figures such as Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, and René Depestre. Chauvet's exceptionalized status has much to do with her nonparticipation in the gender-bound political culture of her time. This essay seeks to tease out how this pointedly nonaligned woman writer fits...

... what the Haitian writer and diplomat Frédéric Marcelin had in 1904 called the country’s tradition of “civil strife, fratricidal slaughters, social miseries, economic ignorance and idolatrous militarism.”3 Jacques Roumain, whose 1943 novel Gouverneurs de la rosée remains one...

..., Jean Price-Mars¹⁷ who, in 1928 with Ainsi parla l’Onclee (So Spoke the Unclee) eff ected an overview and reorientation of the literature. Th is was followed years later in 1944 by Jacques Roumain’s¹⁸ posthumously published Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Deww). Th en I came...

... and Indigenist movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, our privileging of a novel of blood and ground like Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew smacks of the persistent desire to fashion Haiti in terms of a cultural politics of racial 7. Anténor Firmin, Th e Equality of the Human Racess (New York...

... l'histoire d'Haïti were first published in Paris from 1853 to 1860, rereleased in Haiti by Chéraquit between 1924 and 1930, and reprinted in a Haitian edition in 2005. 32 Notably, however, indigenist Roumain would later become a founding member of the Haitian Bureau of Ethnology and author articles...

... and radical labor activists of the Mouvement ouvrier paysan (MOP); the pages of newspapers and journals such as Le Centre, La Nation, and La Ruche; and the disquieted, furrowed brows of radicals such as Jacques Roumain, Max Hudicourt, and Daniel Fignolé lay a major (re)source to oppo- sition...

... poetic sequences may have been more apropos of the poeticist mode, given their density of oxymoronic metaphors and juxtaposed sensory perceptions. Also appro- priate as illustrations of this imaginary are the transforming experiences of the Haitian peasantry in Jacques Roumain’s Maîtres de la Rosée...

... haitianas y cubanas que se encontraban en circunstancias diferentes pero reflexionaban sobre cuestiones comunes: en Haití reflexionaban sobre el movimiento indigenista, fundado por Jacques Roumain durante el proceso de ocupación estadounidense; y en Cuba en favor de un arte y una literatura nacionales con...

... into consciousness, both as a past grandeur and as a loss, a “splinter in the wound,” as Jacques Roumain calls it, opened by the slave trade, the institution of chattel slavery in the Americas, and the false principles inculcated by colonial ideologies. 23 Here, Césaire avails himself of the surrealist project...

..., in 1931 Haitian critics tried to diminish the achievement of Jacques Roumain’s peasant novella La montagne ensorcelée by arguing that Roumain borrowed heavily from Jean Giono’s Colline (1929). Later, Martinican Marxist Réné Ménil could see no fundamental difference between Joseph Zobel, the author...

... translation of the great Haitian author Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew . 20 Hughes is not quite as removed from Claude McKay’s global circuits as might be implied in The Sound of Culture , and I would dare go so far as to call him—as an artist whose mode of being black was fluid, circulatory...

... political history and closing with a strategic quote from Jacques Roumain's novel Gouverneurs de la rosée , which powerfully evoked the Haitian proletariat as the ultimate catalysts of political change and social justice. By channeling Roumain, whose death barely a year prior had deeply affected Haitians...

... that would appear in The Ways of White Folks . Years later, Hughes would spend a good deal of time with the Huiswouds in Paris, where they were part of the coterie of Black radicals from around the diaspora. In 1937, the Huiswouds joined Thyra Edwards, Jacques Roumain, and Louise Thompson Patterson...

... literary texts alongside historical and sociological works, and his approach was Pan-Caribbean, so we ended up reading a mélange of writers and scholars—Jacques Roumain, Jean Price-Mars, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, Raymond T. Smith, M. G. Smith, Sylvia Wynter, and Frantz...

... artist, as he enters into another phase of his artistic practice. He is currently col- laborating with writer and novelist Carl Hancock Rux and composer and musician Daniel Bernard Roumain on an opera that is “loosely based on Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World.16...

... present in the works of countless other Caribbean artists, from novelist Jacques Roumain to painter Wifredo Lam, and from musician Bob Marley to designer Peter Minshall. But, alas, replacing a Caribbean picturesque with a Caribbean sublime is an altogether different discussion, and too complicated...