How Haitians have commemorated their own founding is, Zavitz argues, a subject no one had studied at length. Her dissertation supplies the first extended interdisciplinary account, running from independence to the present and drawing on national holidays, historiography, literature, oral tradition and interviews conducted in Port-au-Prince.

Following Trouillot on how silences are produced, she looks for what commemoration omits as much as what it asserts, and for the counter-memories that press against the narratives of the powerful, reshaping them over time. The first of January 1804 anchors the account: she traces a century of Independence Day observance and the making of Dessalines as its presiding figure, showing officials drawing on symbols from France, Africa and the Americas.

Later chapters follow the rival mulâtriste and noiriste legends through Haitian letters, and the successive waves of indigénisme that brought the peasantry, Kreyòl and Vodou into a contest over who made the nation.