Each year Rara fills Haitian streets, and its marchers, who follow the Afro-Creole religion Vodou, make noise in public on purpose. McAlister reads the festival as political work rather than as spectacle alone.

Her account rests on ethnographic material she gathered herself. The bands, she shows, draw on two reservoirs of power, the Vodou spirits and the people who have died recently, and use them to send messages out into public hearing.

Those messages are coded rather than stated outright. Read closely, they carry claims about Haitian history, about relations between men and women, and about the ties binding Haiti to Haitians living abroad.