Marlene Daut’s chapter focuses on Haiti as diasporic crossroads and argues that Haiti is both a geographical and an intellectual meeting place for African American writers at mid-century. For Daut, the stakes are at least twofold, one being to acknowledge African American writing as transnational, thereby altering the geography of American literature, and, second, what the Americas come to be when the Haitian Revolution appears at the center, as it did for these writers. The result, she argues, is to “expose the inherent Africanness of all American literature,” to consider African American literary tradition as multiple and linked to spaces beyond the nation, and finally to understand all American literature as diasporic, as determined not by borders and the geopolitical they assert but “by people and their movements.” In doing so, Daut examines Martin Delany’s Blake, Oneida Debois’s oratory, George Vashon’s and Pierre Faubert’s poetry, the first-known Trinidadian novel by Maxwell Phillip, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, “St. Domingo, Its Revolutions and Its Patriots,” John Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Baron de Vastey’s Réflexions, and the work of James McCune Smith and Henry Bibb.

While US military and economic interventions in the Caribbean as well as the protectorates of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands link these regions, categorizing the writing of Caribbean immigrants to the US is less clear. Contemporary Caribbean-American writing remains an amorphous category bounded by issues of language and ethnicity. Higher education and publishing practices frequently group Caribbean writers by their linguistic heritage or former European colonizer than by their status as migrants to the US. In addition, racial or ethnic identities mean that some writers are subsumed under an established racial category, like African American, while writers with Asian ancestry fit uneasily within established frameworks for Asian American literature. Despite these divisions, Caribbean-American writing shares many commonalities including critiquing US neo-imperialism, addressing the racism experienced by immigrants, and innovative uses of form and genre.