Cruel Destiny (Cruelle Destinée) and The White Negress (La Blanche Négresse) are the first and second novels published by a Haitian woman, Cléante Valcin. Translated to English now for the first time by Jeanne Jégousso, these novels offer an incisive perspective on the fate, romance, and reversals of characters in Haiti, the Pearl of the Antilles, during the 1920s and 1930s.
Cruel Destiny (Cruelle Destinée) and The White Negress (La Blanche Négresse) are the first and second novels published by a Haitian woman, Cléante Valcin. Translated to English now for the first time by Jeanne Jégousso, these novels offer an incisive perspective on the fate, romance, and reversals of characters in Haiti, the Pearl of the Antilles, during the 1920s and 1930s.
CLÉANTE VALCIN (1891-1956) was a Haitian novelist and activist who co-founded the journal Voix des femmes (Voice of women) and served as president for the country’s leading feminist organization La Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale. After publishing the poetry collection Fleurs et Pleurs (1924), she wrote the first two novels ever published by a Haitian woman. JEANNE JÉGOUSSO is an assistant professor of French at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where she specializes in Francophone literatures from the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. She co-edited the volume Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts, and is the co-director of the digital project The Library of Glissant Studies. ADAM NEMMERS is an associate professor of English at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, whose research focuses on multi-ethnic American literature. He is author of American Modern(ist) Epic: Novels to Refound a Nation and the coeditor of Yours in Filial Regards: THe Civil War Letters of a Texan Family. MYRIAM J.A.. CHANCY is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She is the author of multiple academic works and novels, including Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers University Press), From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and What Storm, What Thunder.
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Foreword by Myriam J. A. Chancy Introduction Translator’s Note Cruel Destiny The White Negress Acknowledgements
