Slaves, Viejos, and the Internationale : Modernity and Global Contact in Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee

This article analyzes the depiction of contact and revolutionary politics in Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944). While this novel is often interpreted as participating in a narrow cultural nationalism, I show the ways that Roumain, in fact, represents a liberatory internationalism that connects the demands of Haiti's rural populace to the larger context of the Marxist-influenced decolonization struggles of the World War Two era. Revisiting the more political aspects of Edouard Glissant's theories of creolization and revealing their similarities to another recent analysis of "global modernity" and proletarian internationalism, I argue that Roumain's novel could be seen as corresponding with rather than opposing current notions of hybridity and cultural heterogeneity in the Caribbean. I thus analyze the novel's main character, a migrant sugarcane cutter, as a figure of creolization that grounds cultural creolization in the economics of one specific moment of US imperialism in the Caribbean.