Literature and Ideology in Haiti, 1915-1961

The most sustained work of Anglophone literary criticism on Haitian letters from the U.S. Occupation through the beginning of the Duvalier period, treating Haitian literature as an original engagement with the central questions of twentieth-century world culture rather than an exotic footnote to French letters. Dash traces a series of unresolved contradictions — between poetic autonomy and ideological commitment, cultural nationalism and cosmopolitan solidarity, realist documentation and mythopoeic impulse — through the indigénisme movement of the 1920s-30s, the contested reception of Négritude, and the emergence of Marvellous Realism in Roumain and Alexis. The epilogue documents the catastrophic effects of Duvalierism on Haitian literary life and the split between exile literature and encoded interior production.