Writing after the 2010 earthquake, Glick Schiller notes how readily reporters now speak of the Haitian diaspora as a settled fact, and how recent and contested that assumption is. Disaster, epidemic and collective stigma pull people into a shared identity that many would otherwise decline.

Her foreword takes up the puzzle running through the volume it opens: contributors insist on the plurality of Haitian settlement, from Boston and Michigan to the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe and Paris, while still invoking a single diaspora. She resists the choice between a model in which diasporic consciousness circulates uniformly and one in which local experience is primary, arguing that localities and nation-states are neither bounded nor separable from the circuits running through them.

Racialization in a Paris suburb or a Dominican batey is shaped at once by local politics and by global narratives about blackness, and Haiti's revolutionary history remains part of the contest over those narratives.