Troubled Island is an American opera in three acts composed by William Grant Still, with a libretto begun by poet Langston Hughes and completed by Verna Arvey.

Set in Haiti in 1791, Troubled Island portrays Jean Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806) and the Haitian Revolution.

In all, Troubled Island had more of the souffle of operetta than the soup bone of opera.”[7] John Briggs of the New York Post opined, “one was never sure one was hearing a first-rate performance of an inferior work or a second-rate performance of a good one,” while Miles Kastendieck, writing for both the New York Journal-American and the Christian Science Monitor, said of Still’s music: “the result is a mixture of styles signifying talent and a feel for opera but achieving little more than a suggestion of it.”[8] Years later, Judith Still, the daughter of Still and Arvey, said that the New York critics intentionally panned Troubled Island due to racism.

In those days, critics had that kind of influence.” [9] Following its premiere, New York City Opera staged two additional presentations, on April 1 and May 1 of 1949.

To date, New York City Opera has never revived the work in full; however, a 60th-anniversary concert production of excerpts was presented by the company in March 2009 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.