The Northern récit paysan

In a revisionist reading of the Haitian peasant novel, this article addresses the short shrift given to Haiti's regionalism in scholarship, a lacuna that social geographer Georges Anglade attributes to ‘les effets d'occultation propre à la structure dominante centralisée’. Contrary to Port-au-Prince-centric renderings of Haitian literary history, which locate the elaboration of the modern peasant novel in the elite (read: Port-au-Princean) intelligentsia's quest for a more authentic national identity, I show that the modern peasant novel emerged in the pages of the northern literary magazine Stella (Cap-Haïtien, 1926–30) out of a primarily regional context. Through a close reading of several short and virtually unstudied récits paysans published in Stella , I argue that northern writers deployed the peasant novel genre as a regional response to the process of centralization and regional ‘occultation’ by the centralized nation-state apparatus. In particular, I examine how the lived experience of dramatic demographic and economic decline in the north informed the specific contours of this new literary expression

Archaeology · Economic geography · Ethnology · Geography · Peasant · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History

• “Camelots du roi ou rouges”

  Chelsea Stieber•Contemporary French Civilization•2020

  Add to list

• The Political Lives of Haiti's Marron Inconnu

  Claire Antone Payton•Radical History Review•2025

  Add to list