Essays from a 2010 conference at Florida Atlantic University, gathered around the claim that Haiti has long served as a crossroads of the hemisphere and that the record of responses to it deserves reconstruction. Dalleo's introduction states the problem: Haiti reaches other Americans through a thick screen of stereotype, as a byword for poverty, disorder and savagery, most recently in earthquake reporting that cast the country as unable to govern itself. The contributions work across history, art history, film studies, literary criticism and political theory. They follow Bolivar's refuge in the young republic, Haitian and Cuban political collaboration, the Pan-African circuits linking Antenor Firmin and W. E. B. Du Bois, an African American officer posted to Port-au-Prince as military attache, fiction and painting from the years of United States occupation, and the humanitarian and hip-hop cultures of the present.