This essay explores the early work of Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain in Congo. Despite Comhaire-Sylvain being renowned as Haiti’s first woman anthropologist, her life and extensive scholar-ship in Africa have been largely overlooked. Given her unique positionality and formal training in Europe during a period when ethnology relied on empire to assert its utility to the state, Comhaire-Sylvain’s work unfolded along colonial fault lines, a dimension this essay seeks to tease out.

This essay reflects on Haitian radicalism by looking at the life and the works of novelist Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–73). Though increasingly a subject of interest for scholars of Haitian women's literature and of Haitian feminism, Chauvet's work is only rarely considered alongside that of more politically visible figures such as Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, and René Depestre. Chauvet's exceptionalized status has much to do with her nonparticipation in the gender-bound political culture of her time.