A collected volume returns to Jean Price-Mars to weigh his thinking and his legacy again, and to ask what his ideas mean now, amid a culture of political correctness, the unfinished problem of race and racism, and continuing imperial dominance.

Contributors take up the several roles Price-Mars occupied at once: historian, anthropologist, cultural critic, public intellectual, scholar of religion, pan-Africanist, humanist. Four lines of inquiry organize the book. It examines what he contributed to Haitian history and culture; it follows his quarrel with Western historical writing and the racist narrative embedded in it; it reads his ties to Black Internationalism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Negritude; and it sets out his bearing on postcolonial thought, religious studies, Africana Studies, and Pan-Africanism.

The editors connect this reassessment to renewed academic attention to Haiti and Haitian Studies in North America, and to questions about the place of contemporary Africa in the world.