Haiti occupies a large place in how the western hemisphere is imagined, and the images attached to it pull in opposite directions. Is it a country defined by tyranny, or the site of the only successful slave revolution? Given over to devilish practice, or devoutly religious? Does being the hemisphere's second independent nation give it something to teach about life after colonialism, or is the lesson one of failure?

The essays gathered here come from several disciplines and take up three tasks: assessing Haiti's influence across the hemisphere, placing its successive representations in context, and reading Haitian cultural expression on its own terms.

Getting anywhere, the editors suggest, means first cutting through a thick layer of stereotype: Haiti as the region's low point of poverty, political dysfunction and savagery, and as a dependent unable to govern or provide for itself. The collection aims at accounts adequate to a more complicated history.