Haitian poetry experienced a shift, beginning as early as the 1870s, away from nationally inspired themes toward a greater insistence on poetic form and a penchant for contemplative verse. Poets often pondered abstract notions like the passage of time or the mysteries of nature. Other times they chose to write from the anguish of personal experience, mourning the loss of love to death or betrayal. Their melancholic reflections were not necessarily devoid of politics. Poets Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire composed their own eclectic poetry years before contributing to the famous journal La Ronde. Theirs is a poetics of ‘disenchantment’, a term that permeates the pages of the journal and characterizes their reactions to Haiti’s distressing domestic and international political situation. I offer an assessment of these three key poets and of the journal, affirming and going beyond the idea of the ‘understated political aspect’ of the movement. I demonstrate that the politics occasioning and emanating from this poetry embody distinctly Haitian calls for literary perseverance, a prescient battle for national preservation to which La Ronde is dedicated.

This chapter considers politically oriented works by Jacques Stephen Alexis, Edris Saint-Amand, Anthony Lespès, and Jacques Roumain, all communist writer-activists who came of age during the US occupation and were committed to the twinned ideologies of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Kaussen shows how their Indigenist writings make explicit the connection between literature, Marxism, and the so-called folk, advocating for the embrace of Haiti’s African cultural origins, as expressed through the traditions of the peasantry. Not only do these writers put forward meaningful and incisive critiques of the existing social order, Kaussen observes, but they also present a wide array of imagined alternatives. Her chapter emphasizes the idiosyncrasies of Haitian socialism, noting the points of both intersection and diversion from Franco-European political models.

This chapter provides a political-sociological study of the authoritarian police tradition in postwar Japan through an analysis of the organizational change, career paths, and retirement patterns of elite police bureaucracy. It assesses the organizational impact of the sweeping democratization reforms of the police bureaucracy implemented during the US Occupation, as it also pays attention to the persistence and revival of some important institutional and cultural legacies of the prewar police in spite of the regime change. The evolving institutional ties of the police bureaucracy with other state institutions, political parties, and socioeconomic actors are analyzed throughout the era of the political contestation that followed in the 1960s and 1970s, the neoliberal turn of politics and economy in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally, the renewed polarization of politics and society since the 2000s to date.

Chapter 2 explores the decade and a half following the Cuban War, noting how anarchists emerged and evolved across the region. In Cuba, the visit by Errico Malatesta and the creation of ¡Tierra! helped anarchists build Havana into the network hub. Meanwhile, anarchists in Florida and Puerto Rico developed dual relationships by working with the anti-anarchist American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions on the ground while communicating with and funding ¡Tierra! as their newspaper. By the early 1910s, anarchists in Florida abandoned the AFL associations and forged the first Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Locals in the network. In Panama, anarchists migrated to the construction project shortly after it began, organized anarchist groups throughout the Canal Zone, linked themselves with Havana, and in 1911 created the isthmus’s first anarchist publication. Throughout all of this, anarchists – no matter where they were – attacked US intervention, capitalism in the region, oversight of the canal, and US-designed political systems then being developed across the Caribbean.