Preface

Summary

Such a spiral is human being! Within this spiral, nothing but self-inverting dynamisms. One no longer knows if one is rushing towards the center or escaping from it. That which characterizes the spiral is, therefore, the fact that it obeys no predetermined order and, perhaps even more so, the fact that this figure describes only one specific instance of disorder.

—Gaston Bachelard

If someone needed a visual explanation, a graphic picture of what the Caribbean is, I would refer him to the spiral chaos of the Milky Way, the unpredictable flux of transformative plasma that spins calmly in our globe's firmament, that sketches in an “other” shape that keeps changing, with some objects born to light while others disappear into the womb of darkness—change, transit, return, fluxes of sidereal matter.

—Antonio Benítez-Rojo

First black republic in the world, first independent country in Latin America, and first autonomous non-European state to carve itself out of Europe's universalist empires, Haiti has been central to the very concept of socio-political modernity. Its profoundly hybrid people and traditions, represented over the past two centuries by an exceptionally prolific community of writers and artists, affirm its relevance to cultural and aesthetic conceptions of modernity as well. From Indigenism and marvelous realism to the implementation of a politicized practice of Surrealism, the Haitian aesthetic tradition has been marked by a fearless capacity to imagine alternatives—alternatives that recall the revolutionary origins of the island nation and that firmly insist on Haiti's presence on a global stage.