Fatton sets Haitian and American exceptionalism side by side, asking where each came from and following how a story of uniqueness has governed dealings between them from their first years of independence to the present.

Every nation's founding narrative rests on something like this, in his account. Exceptionalism scrubs the injurious parts out of history and replaces them with innocence and distinction. It also binds people together as a chosen fellowship, which means it necessarily shuts out those judged unfit to belong on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, or class.

The narrative is not fixed. Being a social invention, it shifts over time, though never outside the boundaries laid down by its original premises. How far it can be remade depends on the hegemony the ruling class has achieved and on whether that class commands the infrastructural power to absorb, by degrees, the groups it once kept out.