Anti-Haitian feeling in the Caribbean is usually studied one territory at a time, and Zacair and Reinhardt argue that this is why it remains poorly understood. The Dominican Republic has drawn sustained attention; Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Jamaica and the Bahamas far less, and for French Guiana there is almost nothing in English. Their volume assembles historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and sociologists so that the comparison can finally be made.

The essays examine how host societies imagine Haitian migrants and how migrants absorb those images: a televised campaign of slander in Guadeloupe and the trial that followed, the stereotype of clandestine invasion in French Guiana, Jamaica's retreat from an initially generous response to refugees after Aristide's ouster in 2004, and the competing languages of human rights and humanitarianism in Dominican border clinics.

A second section turns to interviews and first-person accounts, in which Haitians abroad describe that same marginality from the inside.