For a state no other government would recognize, print was not decoration but diplomacy. Garraway examines the earliest published writing of independent Haiti, and particularly of Henry Christophe's northern kingdom, as a sustained attempt to make sovereignty real by declaring it in public.

Benedict Anderson's account of nations imagined through vernacular print fits Haiti badly, she argues: literacy was limited and the audience that mattered lay outside the country's borders. Haitian writers addressed foreign readers, argued their case in the terms of international law and of Enlightenment and Christian morality, and insisted not on Haiti's difference but on its equality with European states. In a country of former captives whose enslavement had been justified by an alleged incapacity for letters, publishing was itself an act of defiance.

Such writing also reached past the nation, speaking for people of African descent everywhere, and it had first to conjure the public it addressed.