Written jointly by an anthropologist and a Haitian-born scholar who met when he walked into her office to tell her that her dissertation had it wrong -- Haitians, he said, never stop thinking about Haiti -- this book grows out of a 1996 trip and 109 interviews, most of them with people who had little money and no power.

Its subject is what the authors call long-distance nationalism: an ideology that keeps a territorial homeland and its state at the centre while refusing to let borders settle who belongs to the nation. Emigrants, their children and those who stayed behind are bound into a single transborder citizenry, justified by talk of shared descent and blood, and it produces actions rather than only sentiment.

Haiti supplies the case. Remittances prop up the economy; Aristide named the diaspora a tenth department and created a ministry for Haitians abroad, while American opinion still expects immigrants to pick one country.