Assembled after the 2010 earthquake, this collection interrogates the word new in every promise of a new Haiti. Polyné's introduction argues that the promise has a lineage: reconstruction framed in neoliberal terms restates the imperial development schemes of the 1940s, and functions likewise as an assertion of the Global North's authority over what counts as progress.

Set against that is evidence, drawn partly from ethnography of peasant organisations and their pointed songs, that Haitians have taken up the language of development on their own terms — as a claim to participate in hemispheric affairs, not as deference. Contributors come at it from urban planning and photography, from religion, literature and the study of governance.

Underneath runs the problem of Haiti's fixed place as the region's designated other, which Polyné traces through nineteenth-century European, American, Vatican and Latin American refusals to credit the black republic, and finds again in coverage that measured Haiti's disaster against Chile's.