Chancy returns to the 2010 earthquake and refuses to file it under natural disaster. The essays move between analysis and memoir: casualty figures that kept changing month by month, camps that were never dismantled, a relative dead and friends left with a trauma they described as ordinary, and her own retreat from the grant proposals and institutional projects the catastrophe generated.

The political argument is that Haiti's condition has been manufactured rather than inherited. Reconstruction plans drawn up abroad ran directly against the traditions of communal self-governance the society was founded on, while the removal of tariffs from the 1980s onward wrecked domestic agriculture and left cheap labour and proximity to the United States as the country's only marketable assets.

A second line of attack falls on scholarship. Cold War surveys of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic made American tutelage the measure of success, while Latin American studies has repeatedly dissolved Blackness into hybridity and mestizaje.