Stieber begins where many accounts stop. After 1804, Haitian sovereignty faced a challenge from inside, a civil conflict between monarchy and republic that was carried on with weapons but equally with printed matter, in newspapers and periodicals, in books, broadsheets, and fliers.

Out of that record she assembles a literary history of the young nation. Reading what Haitians wrote once independence was secured, she finds freedom itself under dispute in public argument, and that dispute supplied the ground for the guerre de plume, a contest over opinion and over what Haiti was to mean. The rival claims made for liberté, for writing, and for civilization expose how loaded those categories are and how closely literature and politics were bound together.

The effect is to break up a uniform picture of Haiti, drawing out competing conceptions of the nation that persisted deep into the twentieth century and bearing on how Haiti figures in black radical, black Atlantic, anticolonial, and decolonial thought.