Trouillot begins by quoting, without attribution, a lush paragraph about Haiti's beauty, cruelty and apartness — then identifies it as the opening of a sensationalist history by a Marine colonel who had advised Duvalier. The passage performs exactly what he wants to expose: it asks how Haiti is to be explained, then answers with a list of particulars that adds up to nothing but singularity.

Every society is unique, he observes, and nobody keeps repeating the point about Paraguay or Madagascar. The insistence on Haitian exceptionalism therefore serves other ends, and its pedigree runs back to nineteenth-century racist writing. Against it he sets the Haitian scholars of that same period, who defended the country in a hostile world by asking specific questions informed by international debate. Haitian studies cannot move until it drops the fiction that the country lies beyond comparison. The oddity belongs to the doctrine, not its object.