Rosa Guy, Haiti, and the Hemispheric Woman

This chapter examines Rosa Guy's Black feminist and queer engagement with tropes and discourses of twentieth-century radical literature about Haitian Revolution generated by the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1918–1934) and interwar anticolonialism. Although Guy is a little-known figure of the post-World War II Black Left, she cofounded two of its influential institutions: the Harlem Writers Guild and the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage. Over thirty years after the height of this activism, Guy reflected on the limitations of Black nationalism and its Left articulations in her novel, The Sun, The Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995). Guy's novel revises Black masculinist messianism, and in representing the ongoing history of American military intervention in the Caribbean, makes critique of U.S. imperialism central to Black feminism.