Faithless Sight: Haiti in the Kingdom of This World

This essays reads Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Kingdom of This World against his theorization of American modernity, the marvelous real, to argue that, although Carpentier can use Haiti to depict the marvelous-ness of the Americas through the spirituality of Haitians, he cannot see beyond Haiti’s dire post-revolutionary state. By the narrative’s end, Carpentier deliberately elides Haiti’s postcolonial present and the people whose spiritual sensibility enabled the revolution to better disclose the potential and exception of the Americas. In doing this, he undermines a key tenet in his theory of the present: the new artistic and intellectual tradition, distinct from the West, which the marvelous real is intended to exemplify. As a result, Carpentier returns to the conceptual bounds he sought to move beyond with the West remaining singular and worthy of replication.