Jackson recovers a migration that has dropped out of two literatures at once. After Congolese independence in 1960 the United Nations recruited French-speaking professionals to staff the new state, and hundreds of Haitian teachers, engineers and doctors went. By 1962 they formed the second largest national contingent among UN experts there, with Haitians heading a UNESCO division, a WHO medical team and, by 1963, the ONUC military command.

Scholarship on postwar pan-Africanism, she argues, keeps to Ghana, Kenya and South Africa and carries an anglophone bias; where Haiti figures at all it is frozen at 1804, its bond with Africa taken as symbolic. Africa enters the study of Haitian migration mainly through epidemiologists and the discredited claim that returning Haitians brought AIDS to the United States.

Borrowing a phrase from Trouillot, Jackson calls this a failure of categories -- exile, brain drain and expatriate all mislead -- and asks what those silences do to the making of Haitian history.