Chris Bongie opens with a planter's deposition taken at Port-au-Prince in December 1791 and with the lines from Voltaire's tragedies that leaders of the free coloured insurrection quoted to display their learning and press a claim to equal citizenship, an uprising that meant to keep slavery in place and whose habits of hierarchy, he argues, shadow Haitian writing after 1804. Mary Grace Albanese sets the calenda, an Afro-Caribbean dance, beside calenture, the shipboard fever that made European sailors see meadows on the water, and finds in Vodou an idea of personhood that Romantic writing had no room for. Theresa Kelley reads Toussaint Louverture as a subject built in public print. Five more essays work through C. L. R. James and Wordsworth, Kleist, Hugo, Frances Watkins Harper and Emerson. Kuiken and White bind these together with a claim about language: the vocabulary available in 1791 could not measure what was happening, and the strain fell on figurative writing.