Three concerns organize Bongie's book: the consolidation of francophone postcolonial studies into a field over the preceding decade and its uneasy relation to literary study; the recent turn in postcolonial theory away from culture and back toward the properly political; and the insistence, in France and its Caribbean departments, on a duty to remember discharged through commemoration.

He takes seriously the charge that the field has been politically weightless and has averted its eyes from its own place in a global market for postcolonial writing, treating Hallward's dismissal as a hypothesis worth pursuing to the end. On memory he stays deliberately divided, skeptical of remembrance organized as a governmental imperative yet unwilling to pretend that something purer is available.

Its historical center is the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath — the country split between Pétion in the south and Christophe in the north after Dessalines was killed — read as a test of whether taking sides remains possible.