An Introduction to The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined

By Lesley A. Wolff 

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This exhibition showcases works in painting, print, photography, film, and sculpture, by eleven contemporary artists, each of whom respond to writer Alejo Carpentier’s magical realist tale The Kingdom of This World (1949). The book takes an imaginative dive into the volatile epoch of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), when an extraordinary uprising, led by enslaved and freed people of color, transformed the French colonial territory of Saint Domingue into the liberated nation of Haiti. As the first successful revolt by enslaved laborers and the first free Black nation in the Americas, the Haitian Revolution’s impact was felt across the imperial globe—invigorating emancipatory fights while inciting a brutal and persistent backlash—with effects that ripple across the Caribbean and its diaspora to this day.

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The renowned artists in this exhibition present work that responds to Carpentier’s stylized retelling of Haiti’s profound history through the literary genre known as lo real maravilloso [the marvelous real]. In the book’s prologue, written in 1948, Carpentier famously asks, “For what is the history of the Americas, if not a chronicle of the marvelous in the real?” To Carpentier, the shared heritage of this hemisphere is marvelous, if uneasy. The marvelous recalls the extraordinary traumas imposed on the subjugated people of Saint Domingue and across the colonial territories, as well as the awe-inspiring efforts required to persist amid and strive to overcome such injustices, inequities, and silences. In the 80 years since its publication, Carpentier’s interpretation of events has been debated, derided, and fêted; indeed, the Swiss-born Cuban émigré’s prose evokes the fraught voice and politics of his circumstance as a foreign, white writer reflecting on Black liberatory history during Surrealism’s apogee in the Caribbean. Yet, as the artworks in this exhibition attest, this book persists today in the Caribbean imagination as a touchstone of a historical and ongoing fight for sovereignty that imperial forces and historical records have systemically silenced.[1] In this way, The Kingdom of This World, for all its flawed and gratuitous depictions of gendered and racialized violence, stands as a significant literary work from which we can begin to unravel the layered representations of the Haitian Revolution and its global Caribbean legacy.

 

In many ways, The Kingdom of This World provokes questions aligned with scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recent writings about the notion of potential history. Azoulay defines potential history as “a form of being with others, both living and dead, across time, against the separation of the past from the present, colonized peoples from their worlds and possessions, and history from politics.”[2] For Azoulay, potential history represents the pathway that helps us to “unlearn” the singular, official, and overdetermined narratives of the state and move toward the multivocal realities that have been hidden from view, but that have nonetheless been integral sites of community building and cultural inheritance for marginalized groups. Potential history means to speculate about worlds otherwise, to unlearn the linear narratives of the Western historical canon and to consider how to make space for those people, places, and events that have been stifled across the centuries. This twenty-first century charge thus builds upon Carpentier’s desire, one century earlier, to approach the monumental, if suppressed, history of the Haitian Revolution through the framework of the marvelous—an outsized expression of presence capable of revealing and rupturing oppressive epistemes by inviting deeper consideration of how we embody and visualize potential in the kingdom of this world.   

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This exhibition likewise takes up Azoulay’s charge by reimagining Haiti’s revolutionary history through the speculative lens of Afro-Caribbean mythology and spirituality. By unsettling the relationship between history and mythology, these artists profoundly shift our perception of the Caribbean from passive, tropical paradise to dynamic nexus of unbounded revolutionary potential. Like The Kingdom of This World, the works in this exhibition hinge on the recognition of revolution as a radical, if cyclical, turning over of the world order. These artworks, produced by an international cohort of artists, attest to the historical and ongoing impact of the singular event of the Haitian Revolution as a process entangled with broader Caribbean and global histories of diaspora, enslavement, migration, liberation, and sovereignty.  In the context of this exhibition, then, revolution is not only exemplified by the war that birthed the nation of Haiti, but also through the ongoing process of reassessing and reimagining that inheritance in the present. In short, revolutions never fully break from their pasts; they quietly flow into the here and now, carrying ancestors and phantoms over the threshold into the dawn of a new age.

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The artists contributing to this exhibition—including Dudley Alexis, Chesley Antoinette, José Bedia, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Scherezade García, José García Cordero, Simryn Gill, Leah Gordon, Roberto Juarez, Maggie Steber, and William Vazquez—produce work that considers how marvelous reimaginings can help bridge ancestral knowledge with contemporary experience. In so doing, they manifest a vision of Haitian and Afro-Caribbean history and heritage that refuses Eurocentric narratives, revealing revolution as not simply a cycle of histories we are doomed to repeat, but rather a persistent negotiation of intergenerational knowledge and the sovereignty that comes from reframing histories to cultivate future possibilities. Though varied in media and style, these artists share in a desire to foreground Afro-Caribbean history as the beating heart of modern visuality, illuminating Haiti’s extraordinary role as a liberatory model and a nation forged out of unthinkable circumstances. Together, these artists grapple with what it means to envision the marvelous in our present-day moment, a moment rife with reckonings of racial and civic justice in which we seek to pave new and interconnected paths toward sovereignty, liberation, and belonging. 

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Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (b. Lausanne, Switzerland, December 26, 1904 - d. Paris, France, April 24, 1980) was a Cuban scholar, novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, and musicologist whose work proved formative to 20th century literature throughout the Americas. Most renowned among all his endeavors has been the fictionalized tale The Kingdom of This World (first published as El reino de este mundo in 1949; first English-language edition published in 1957) about the profound political and social impacts of the Haitian Revolution.

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As an émigré born in Switzerland, raised in Cuba, and later finding refuge in places such as France and Venezuela, Carpentier’s itinerant life led him to interrogate the role of liberty and belonging in art and politics. Whether fiction, journalism, or ethnography, Carpentier’s work tackles subjects of displacement, cultural fusion, exile, and redemption, often through the lens of Caribbean history and the lessons it offers about revolutionary cycles as extraordinary portals through which we can glimpse the ebbs and flows of past, present, and future. Carpentier’s most celebrated book, The Kingdom of This World, is a fictionalized re-telling of the events surrounding the Haitian Revolution, which follows the trials and tribulations of Ti Noël, an enslaved laborer on a colonial sugar plantation in Saint Domingue. After Ti Noël’s confidante, Makandal, loses his arm in a violent accident in the sugar mill, forcing him to flee the plantation, the events surrounding the Revolution are set into motion.

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Both a real-life figure and a fictionalized character in The Kingdom of This World, François Makandal (b. date unknown, Africa – d. 1758, Cap-Français, Saint Domingue) has long been immortalized in Haitian lore as a formative 18th century rebel leader whose resistance, which indeed began on the plantation of a M. Lenormand de Mézy—as it does in The Kingdom of This World—helped set the stage for the Haitian Revolution. In real life, as in Carpentier’s text, a violent accident on the colonial sugar plantation where Makandal was enslaved resulted in the loss of his left arm. Makandal fled, finding refuge as a Maroon hiding among Saint Domingue’s lush, mountainous landscape, where he learned to craft potions and poisons that would come to be used against the French colonial plantocracy. Makandal was eventually captured, though he briefly evaded execution, which further immortalized his acts of resistance. It is said that he escaped certain death by transforming from his mortal body into non-human, insect form—a national myth that Carpentier adopted as a central plot point in The Kingdom of This World. In reality, Makandal could not escape the brutal hand of his French captors, who burned him at the stake in January 1758. 

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Carpentier’s character of Ti Noël is based on the supposedly fictionalized individual of the same name who first appeared in the Haitian play Le Torrent in 1940, just three years prior to Carpentier’s sojourn to northern Haiti that would inspire him to write The Kingdom of This World. This celebrated, nationalist play dramatized the late 18th century “torrent” of revolutionary insurgency and striving for Black freedom that ushered in Haiti’s birth. In the play, Ti Noël is an African-born enslaved laborer in colonial Saint Domingue who, having fled the plantation, goes on to lead the Black insurgency as a maroon, forging the path for a free nation.

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In The Kingdom of This World, however, Ti Noël acts not as a revolutionary protagonist, but rather as the reader’s eyes and ears, granting us access to the extraordinary historical events of the time, while remaining somewhat frustrated by his incapacity to transcend a lonely fate. During this volatile era of upheaval, Ti Noël journeys to find a place for himself as a free man on an island where he was once enslaved. We see him almost as a martyr as he carries the reader across landscapes and decades.[3] As the Revolution’s impact is felt across the region, Ti Noël struggles to find fulfillment and community amid such monumental social change.

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Carpentier cleverly weaves these profound political shifts into the marvelous tale of Ti Noël’s many spiritual and physical transformations during his impossibly long life (one of the many marvelous rhetorical elements in the book). Along the way Ti Noël encounters important landmarks and figures across the north of Haiti, including Makandal, with whom he was enslaved on the plantation of M. Lenormad de Mézy, and the revolutionary leader-cum-self-appointed monarch King Henri Christophe, who imprisons Ti Noël and sentences him to hard labor constructing the formidable stronghold of Citadelle Laferrière, today a UNESCO World Heritage site. Although Ti Noël witnesses a time of great political change in Haiti, he remains a perpetual outsider in The Kingdom of This World, shuffled from one circumstance to the next, one monarchy to another, finding lasting peace and contentment just beyond his grasp. Ultimately, the book ends with Ti Noël contentedly succumbing to death, though his search for belonging is left unresolved. Carpentier’s interpretation of the Haitian Revolution thus walks a complex and rich line between a unique era of political transformation and the timeless, universal struggles for freedom, community, and justice that resonate across the ages, particularly in post-colonial contexts. 

 

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In July of 1944, five years before he published The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier wrote a column for the Gaceta del Caribe lauding the work of painter Wifredo Lam for his countryman’s ability to render a convincingly “tropical atmosphere” on the canvas.[4] For Carpentier, the “tropics” best revealed themselves after the artist’s “prolonged absence” from Cuba, wherein he returned to his homeland with fresh eyes (the artist spent over 10 years working in Europe, much like Carpentier, who, after residing in Cuba since infancy, fled his adoptive homeland for Paris from 1928 to 1939). Carpentier perceived this journey as a wayfinding affair, one that sharpened Lam’s Caribbean aesthetic with more pronounced use of lush vegetation, Afro-Diasporic spirituality, and motifs related to plantation and post-plantation ecologies. In Carpentier’s view, achieving a persuasive artistic “atmosphere”—however nostalgic, even magical the notion—was thus a product of distance, a process that unfolds through migration; as an émigré with a peripatetic lifestyle largely necessitated by his political opposition to Gerardo Machado’s Cuban regime, Carpentier was perhaps speaking to his own life of exile and how it afforded newfound perspective on how to re-present, or re-imagine, lands once left behind.  

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​Fittingly, Carpentier published these remarks mere months after his first trip to Haiti in 1943. While there, Carpentier “breathed in the atmosphere of Henri Christophe,” in the writer’s own words, traversing the fabled kingdom of the revolutionary Black monarch on a sojourn that would inspire him to write The Kingdom of This World. Combing through the archives, Carpentier found the revolutionary documents he encountered to reveal a “marvelous reality,”[5] which was equally informed by the ways in which the contemporaneous literary, political, and artistic movements of Négritude and Surrealism were radically foregrounding anti-colonial and Afro-Diasporic voices in the region. While today Carpentier’s rhetorical framework, what he called lo real maravilloso [the marvelous real], sits somewhat restlessly in a space between nostalgia, speculative fiction, and ethnography, it was, in its moment, part of a significant groundswell of pan-Latin American and Caribbean voices telling revolutionary stories.[6] Carpentier’s “marvelous” interpretation—a re-imagining of Haitian history through a diasporic lens unbound by linear time or realism—soon became adopted as a progenitor of what would become known as Magical Realism, a vital literary horizon that was uniquely by and of the Americas.[7]

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Each artist in The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined harnesses Carpentier’s vision of Haiti’s revolutionary “atmosphere” as a point of departure to explore how the Caribbean’s past—with its long history of subjugation, resistance, and rebellion—reasserts and reinvents itself in the present. For these artists, time need not be linear to be true; a radical questioning and unsettling of narrative is not only possible but can also be more real than the stories inscribed in Eurocentric histories. Just as The Kingdom of This World broke free (however romantically) from the dogmas of European literary realism in search of silenced truths, so, too, do the artists in this exhibition manifest spectral worlds that help us to see Haitian history and its global impact anew today.

 

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Artist Edouard Duval-Carrié first introduced me to The Kingdom of This World, a book that has been lesser-distributed in the United States, but that is widely read throughout the rest of the hemisphere in its Spanish, French, and English editions. For Duval-Carrié, the novel proved a formative lens into his own Haitian heritage; he initially read the book as a child living in Puerto Rico after he and his family fled the authoritarian political regime of then Haitian president François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. According to the artist, Carpentier’s book was his “first contact with Haiti,” a homeland from which he became distanced in his youth. Ever since, the novel’s vivid imagery and hyper-stylized presentation of historical events has resonated with Duval-Carrié’s artistic and diasporic imagination.

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Duval-Carrié began directly working with Carpentier’s text in 2014, through his Plexiglas etchings of vignettes from The Kingdom of This World. Each of the 15 panels in the series is inspired by a particular passage from the book, and when viewed in sequence the work carries us from the book’s beginning to end. But Duval-Carrié also offers the viewer an experience distinct from and transcendent of the textual narrative. Formally composed like windows into another world, the plates are mediated through multiple layers of framing—the heavyset wooden frames that Duval-Carrié physically constructed for the panels as well as the etched trompe l’oeil borders rendered in a whimsical French Rococo style that encase each scene—which position the viewer at a mediated distance from the tumultuous subjects at hand. Duval-Carrié’s composition reminds us that we are producers and products of storytelling, of histories narrated from and remembered at a distance.  

 These panels are poignant meditations on the follies of memory, visuality, globalization, and history, which Duval-Carrié then further complicates by replicating these scenes in multiple modalities, including as an artist’s book of the series (composed of printed plates from the Plexiglas etchings), and in the form of mixed media paintings on aluminum that give further color and texture to the same vignettes. No one version is original or authentic; rather, the series gathers meaning, complexity, and symbiosis with each rendering. Like the fabled myth of Makandal’s mysterious transformations or the fictionalized and impossibly long life of Ti Noël, Duval-Carrié’s works based on this book become iterative, with scenes and motifs that grip our imagination and vividly construct a new perception of the crucible out of which Haiti and other Caribbean nations have been formed.

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In many ways, this exhibition, The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined, emerges from Duval-Carrié’s model of engagement with Carpentier’s text. The artworks in this exhibition may vary widely in style and content, but each artist shares in the desire to craft a visual vernacular that reimagines Haiti’s revolutionary history in ways that are more rooted in Caribbean communities, realities, and visualities.[8] For Duval-Carrié and all of the artists in this exhibition, the Caribbean is not just a geographic region; it is also an idea, forged through the perpetual knitting together of seemingly disparate sites, cultures, languages, and ecologies, each entangled with the other through a radical rethinking of what a “tropical atmosphere” entails.

 

NOTES

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[1] See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

 

[2] Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 43.

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[3] For a discussion of Ti Noël as a “figura Christi,” see González Echevarría, Pilgrim at Home, 144.

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[4] Alejo Carpentier, “Reflexiones acerca de la pintura de Wifredo Lam,” Gaceta del Caribe (La Habana, Cuba), no. 5 (July 1944): 26–27. ICAA, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston – Record ID 1125607. Recently, curator María Elena Ortiz has centered African and Caribbean diasporas, including Suzanne Césaire’s mid-century ecopoetics in Tropiques, in Surrealist discourse and history in the exhibition Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940 (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2024).       

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[5] Alejo Carpentier, De lo real maravilloso americano (México: DF: UNAM, Dirección General de Publicaciones y Fomento Editorial, 2003), 11. This publication emerged from Carpentier’s initial writings for the first edition prologue of El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of This World], in 1949.   

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[6] Carpentier was not alone in his efforts to recount the events of the Haitian Revolution in the mid-twentieth century. His work was likely directly inspired by two particularly notable publications, in addition to many other works dedicated to Black liberation, anti-colonial rhetoric, and Caribbean history. In 1938, Trinidadian historian CLR James published The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, which argued that the Haitian Revolution was a feat of the “modern proletariat” overcoming colonial oppression. Additionally, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire authored the three-act play Et les chiens se taisaient [And the Dogs Were Silent] in 1943, the same year Carpentier traveled to Haiti, which dramatizes events surrounding the Haitian Revolution.

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[7] It was not until the 1960s that Carpentier would be credited as a “precursor” and “practitioner” of magical realism. See Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 108.

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[8] Duval-Carrié—like Carpentier, Lam, and many of the artists in this exhibition who speak from a place of emigration and diaspora—mobilizes his transnational context into a new visual language of the “global Caribbean,” a concept he used as inspiration for the “Global/Borderless Caribbean Exhibition Series,” an initiative he began in 2009 as Director of the Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance in affiliation with the Little Haiti Cultural Center, in Miami, where The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined, was initially staged. The goal of this initiative and, by extension, the notion of the “global Caribbean,” is to position Caribbean subjects in relation to global histories as a way of dismantling the siloed nature of Caribbean art and better cultivating networks to tackle present-day issues.

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Lesley A. Wolff, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art and Design, specializing in global modern and contemporary Art History and Museum Studies, at the University of Tampa. Wolff’s scholarship engages the intersections of visual culture and foodways in 20th and 21st century Mexico, the Caribbean, and the US. She is the author of Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art (University of Texas Press, 2025). Her work has also appeared in numerous international publications, such as Gender & History, African and Black Diaspora, Humanities, International Journal of Heritage Studies, and Food, Culture & Society. Most recently, she co-edited the volume Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art (Yale University Press, 2024) as well as the special journal issue of Arts dedicated to “Rethinking Contemporary Latin American Art.” Wolff is also an active curator committed to revisionist art histories of the Americas and has collaborated with museums and galleries across the US. Her next exhibition, a solo show of work by Tampa Bay artist and writer Camilo Loaiza Bonilla, will take place at the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery in Fall 2025. For more: www.lesleywolff.com    

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