Jean-Charles builds a framework she calls a Black feminist ethic and tests it on contemporary Haitian fiction, principally novels by Kettly Mars, Évelyne Trouillot and Yanick Lahens. Her title is deliberate: seeing the world through women's eyes, a phrase she takes from Myriam Merlet, is where the work starts rather than where it ends, since the point is to imagine other worlds and eventually to build them.

Thinking ethically, in her account, has four moving parts: the internal logic of a novel, the thinking its characters do, what happens in readers as a result, and what all of this discloses about the worlds the authors make. She draws on Spivak's definition of ethics as inquiry pressed from below and on recent Black feminist writing about care, reading closely and always intersectionally.

Alongside the novels she analyses visual, popular and sonic work by Haitian women, keeping the study anchored in the present and in ordinary life.