La Revue Indigène reclaims a word the occupiers used as an insult

The magazine that gave indigenism its name was founded during the American occupation, and Perry separates it sharply from Price-Mars's version. Its preface justified the title by explaining that since the word indigène was being made into a kind of insult, the writers would claim it as a title and speak from the point of view of the indigène. Perry reads this as a coded reference to the occupation's own vocabulary, since natives is omnipresent in documents such as the 1922 report to the Senate, and Haitians stripped of nationality by the abrogation of sovereignty had become an all-purpose other subject to colonial discipline. The magazine was cosmopolitan rather than ruralist, advocating rapprochement with Latin America on the basis of comparable postcolonial situations and the exile of Bolívar and Miranda in Haiti, and it published Roumain's translations of Cuban and Mexican poets. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Perry argues that the close association of indigenism with Price-Mars obscures a version of the appeal to indigeneity that is political rather than essentialist, and she notes that Price-Mars displaced the aboriginal associations of the name Haiti onto Quisqueya, a word that gained currency in the Dominican Republic after independence from Haiti in 1844.

Half a million black Americans had already left the rural South for northern factories during the First World War. When Congress choked off European immigration in 1924, northern industry needed new hands, and by the end of the decade another million African Americans had left the old slave states for the Northeast and the upper Midwest, along with about half a million Mexicans, who were exempt from the new quotas. They found work in metal shops, car plants and packing houses. Only about a hundred thousand black Americans lived west of the Rockies. The political effect showed in 1928, when the Chicago alderman Oscar De Priest became the first black member of Congress since Reconstruction and the first ever from a northern district. The same quota law and the same factory demand shaped where Caribbean migrants could go in these years.

A commercial and professional class in British West Africa founded the National Congress of British West Africa. It ran branches in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. Through the 1920s it extracted the concession of elected African members in the territorial legislatures, most effectively in the coastal towns where this class had matured. The Congress produced offshoots, among them the West African Students' Union, which gave young West Africans in London a place to argue and introduced them to pan-African ideas. Its leaders thought regionally on a practical calculation, since no single colony could face Britain by itself. Many of them held that organising along colonial boundaries made no sense, those boundaries having been drawn by Europeans for European convenience. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria carried the argument. British officials meanwhile regarded their tropical African possessions as mere geographical units and saw no reason to worry about nationalism in them. Within one generation those units were sovereign states, governed by men who had been students in London.

Ainsi parla l'Oncle, essais d'ethnologie, was printed at Compiegne in France in 1928, four preliminary pages and 243 pages of text. Its preface is dated Petionville, 15 December 1927, and states the aim: to raise the value of Haitian folklore in the eyes of the Haitian people. Haiti had then been occupied by the United States for thirteen years, and educated Haitians had spent a century trying to be coloured Frenchmen, in a country where the word African was the most humiliating thing one could say to a compatriot. The book took the beliefs, songs, tales, dances and ceremonies of the peasantry, traced them to Dahomey and the Kongo, and handled them with the apparatus of ethnography. It gave a generation of Haitian writers a defensible reason to look at their own country. A second edition appeared in New York in 1951, a Spanish translation in Havana in 1968, a third edition in Montreal in 1973, and an English translation in Washington in 1984.