Caribbean authors have the challenge of narrating stories which can encompass the histories of genocide, slavery, indentured labor and colonialism. Alejo Carpentier, in his introduction to The Kingdom of This World (1949), is inspired by the ruins of the Sans-Souci Palace in Haiti, to imagine, in the ruination of the colonial past, a miraculous new future. His ideas spawned a genre that helped formerly colonized peoples decolonize by revaluing formerly subjugated knowledges.