Chapter 19 - Jacques Roumain, from Indigenism to Nationalism

Summary

This chapter considers 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 American 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.