Johnson writes the American Revolution as a story with two theatres, setting rebellion in the thirteen colonies alongside acts of resistance by free and enslaved people in French Saint-Domingue. The method is contextual rather than causal: events five hundred miles apart, with no documented connection between them, are read together to reveal a shared Atlantic situation after the Treaty of Paris of 1763.

Newspapers do much of the work. Reports from Port-au-Prince and Cap-Français are placed in conversation with those from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and Savannah, whose editors and correspondents told readers about escapes from slavery and about colonial defiance of imperial power alike.

The result folds free and enslaved Afro-Caribbean life into the history of early United States foreign relations, and rereads founding documents against the diplomacy surrounding them. Johnson disclaims any exhaustive treatment, offering the book as an invitation to keep connecting the early republic to its Caribbean neighbours.

Léger asks who is missing from the Caribbean writing that made the Haitian Revolution canonical. Her answer is the African and Africanised captives, the bossales, whose Ginen thought and Vodou practice she treats as what actually drove the Revolution to succeed. Canonical texts instead populate it with creole revolutionists, above all the affranchi generals, and so leave standing the colonial framework they meant to overturn.

Reading the country as Ayiti Ginen and its people as Ginen, she describes a praxis that declines the master's demand for recognition rather than struggling for it — reflecting, refusing, moving on. Chapters clear the conceptual ground granted to Louverture, then take up Carpentier's Kingdom of This World and his marvellous real, Césaire's Christophe read beside Pontecorvo's Queimada on colonial time, and finally Danticat's short stories, whose women carry the Revolution's unfinished future.

Refusal, in her account, is what these works transmit, and what reactionary violence has always worked to convert into consent.

Henry Christophe, born in 1767 and dead by 1820, was famous across the world in his own lifetime and remains one of the most puzzling figures the Americas have produced: rebel, traitor, and the only man ever to rule Haiti as king.

Daut's biography works at that unresolved puzzle, which the publisher presents as the essential account of a man whose reputation is still contested.

Edited by Daut and Glover, this volume gathers contributors to map Haitian writing from before independence to the present. Its span runs from pre-revolutionary texts and the first stirrings of letters in Haitian Creole, through a long nineteenth century conducted largely in French, to work being written today in English.

The organizing idea is that Haitian literature cannot be read without its political, cultural, and historical scaffolding, and the chapters supply that context alongside the readings. Coverage takes in poets, playwrights, and novelists working in Haiti and across its far-flung diasporas, among them Baron de Vastey, Juste Chanlatte, Demesvar Delorme, René Depestre, Dany Laferrière, Edwidge Danticat, Kettly Mars, and Évelyne Trouillot.

What emerges is a portrait of a tradition that is multilingual by nature and transnational in reach, running from antislavery pamphlets of the 1800s to fiction about ecological ruin, and engaged throughout with the wider conversations of world letters.

Johnston follows more than a decade of foreign money into Haiti and comes back with a different question than he set out with. Tracking the roughly ten billion dollars pledged after the January 2010 earthquake through contracting databases and NGO reports, he found he could learn more from an office in Washington about the reconstruction than Haitians could on the ground, and that the deeper puzzle was not where the funds went but why.

His answer is the aid state: a governing arrangement in which Haitian institutions answer to donors and a small domestic elite rather than to Haitians, the latest in two centuries of outside attempts to manage the country. He traces it from the militarized relief operation of 2010 through the assassination of Jovenel Moise and the international backing of an unelected prime minister.

Talk of a failed state, he argues, obscures the point. Intervention never paused; the only real choice is whether it continues.

Greer traces a line of Black women's political leadership running from Fannie Lou Hamer through Barbara Jordan to Stacey Abrams. Hamer's organizing work in Mississippi and across the South forms one starting point; Jordan's rise is the other: she reached the House as only the second Black woman to win a seat there, and the first ever sent to Congress from the US South.

What those two built, in Greer's account, made room for Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 and again in 2022 and assembled the electoral operation credited with helping deliver the 2020 presidential win and a Senate majority to the Democrats.

The argument Greer adds to existing scholarship is that Black women have been central to bringing new voters into the Democratic Party, to the workings of American democracy, and to the political development of Black communities in the South.

Geggus replies at length to three critiques of his Kongomania essay, from John Thornton, Christina Mobley, and James Sweet.

The response works through the evidence behind the various claims and hypotheses at issue, with demographic figures and the inference from them to cultural influence at its center. Disputed ground includes how ethnonyms such as Creole, Congo, and Mondongue should be used, how Vodou came into being, what weight to give the Vocabulaire Congo of Baudry des Lozieres, and how the uprising of 1791 and the Haitian war of independence were organized and what they aimed at.

Planning for this collection began in 2019; ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, and the volume ended up documenting the aftershocks. Its subject is less artificial intelligence as depicted in fiction than what generative systems have done to authorship, literary creativity and criticism.

Slocombe and Liveley organize the ground with a short typology of how the West has imagined artificial minds: animated objects, automata, androids, and then algorithms with no body beyond their code, sorting the world's data and perhaps positioned to govern it. To these they add a fifth figure thrown up since 2022, the machine as author, apparently able to write poems, jokes, scripts and criticism, though whether that counts as creativity is disputed, not least by working writers.

Readers wanting studies of AI characters in novels and films are pointed elsewhere. The chapters gathered here work the overlap between two concepts, asking what studying, researching and writing literature now mean.

Between the end of the Seven Years' War and the outbreak of revolution, a loose coalition of reformers tried to build something new in France's Caribbean colonies: a patriotic community held together by honor and civic virtue as the Enlightenment understood those terms. Harvey examines that attempt.

They were not an organized party but a scattered and frustrated set of enlightened figures. Defeat by Britain had wounded French pride, and they saw the renewal of empire as the remedy: steadying the Antillean colonies, strengthening them, and binding them more tightly to the metropole.

In January 1822 the Haitian president replied to four Greek expatriates in Paris who had written to him seeking support for the rising against Ottoman rule. Sideris and Konsta present that letter in English translation, with a short account of its recipients and of how it survived.

Boyer declines to send money, explaining that the treasury is exhausted and that absorbing the eastern part of the island has proved ruinously expensive. What he offers instead is recognition: a people who broke their own chains cannot be indifferent to others fighting the same fight, and he closes by invoking Leonidas, Miltiades, Marathon and Salamis.

The editors note that the text comes down through a Greek translation preserved in a revolutionary secretary's papers, and read the classical allusions as a deliberate pairing of the citizen-soldier of antiquity with the volunteers of Haiti and of the Greek revolt.

Haitian Vodou holds that its lwa come from twenty-one spiritual nations, and Daniels reads that count as a record of who was carried to colonial Saint-Domingue. The nanchon amount to a confederation of spirits assembled by enslaved Africans of many origins, and devotion to them lets Haitians and other Africana practitioners claim a continental inheritance rather than a single ancestral line.

She works outward from Andre Pierre's painted pantheon, whose figures appear largely in ritual order along a winding path, then offers a religious genealogy of the four best-known nanchon: Rada and Nago, Gede and Petwo-Kongo, with briefer treatment of the less-studied nations. Rada is traced to Allada and Dahomey, and the Fon roots of Vodou vocabulary are set out in detail, from the word Vodou itself to the terms for priest, initiate and sacred drummer.

The argument that results is for a Pan-Africanism lodged inside Haiti's national religion.

Daniels begins from a saying often repeated in Haitian Vodou: the lwa come from twenty-one spirit nations. Those nanchon, the essay holds, register the African diversity present in early colonial Saint-Domingue, an inheritance devotees carried into what they established there.

The abstract available for this piece breaks off mid-sentence, so the argument that follows cannot be reported from it.

Ehret assembles archaeological and historical linguistic evidence into a continuous account of Africa from the deep past to the early centuries CE, arguing that the continent belongs inside world history rather than at its margins, a misplacement he traces to the catastrophes of recent centuries.

The chapters on technology make the case concretely. Africans invented ceramics more than eleven thousand years ago, wove cotton earlier than anyone else, and were smelting iron at least four thousand years back, with women prominent among the innovators. Agricultural invention followed between the ninth and seventh millennia BCE, and on balance Africa exported more of it to Eurasia than it took in, including a dozen staple crops and the domesticated donkey.

Later sections take up long-distance trade and the merchant class it produced, the African foundations of Egyptian culture and belief, early Christianity on the continent, and how a revised periodisation might carry all of this into global history.

Daut places Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the celebrated alongside the obscure, inside the global history of ideas, treating their frameworks of knowledge and interpretation as central to the Age of Revolutions.

The revolution she describes struck at slavery and colonial rule together, and those who fought and wrote pushed antislavery, anticolonial, and antiracist commitments into the working vocabulary of modern politics. Haiti became the first state in the Americas to end slavery permanently, ban prejudice by color, and prohibit colonization, and it did so surrounded by slaveholding societies and by foreign powers that attacked its sovereignty again and again. Haitian writers and officeholders held the independence they had won and set down ideological foundations for egalitarian statehood.

Where modern freedom and equality are usually traced to the French or United States declarations, Daut names a closer source: the 1804 Principle, the claim that no person should ever again be enslaved or colonized.

This chapter tracks Haitian currency through the decades after independence and reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: by the 1840s, every additional sack of coffee Haitians grew and shipped was enriching the private holders of their country's sovereign debt.

The hinge is France's demand that the 1825 indemnity be settled in francs rather than in gourdes. Instead of treating Boyer's 1827 paper issue as a doomed expedient and the currency's collapse as the natural consequence of deficits, the author asks who engineered that collapse, and recasts the paper experiment as an attempt to make coffee serve as money.

The argument runs from the silver that colonial Saint-Domingue exported alongside sugar, through Christophe's and Boyer's use of coffee as an international currency, to a forged-banknote scandal of the 1840s. Consuls, merchants, bankers and counterfeiters together kept a cash crop from being spent as cash.

Alexander recovers a story that has gone largely untold: how free and enslaved Black people in the United States moved to defend the young Caribbean republic against those determined to keep slavery and white supremacy intact. The arrival of a sovereign Black nation, the book argues, gave Black communities across the African diaspora a source of hope.

Placing Haiti at the center of Black internationalism's history, Alexander traces how the island's independence shaped Black thought and Black action in the United States. Haiti was what white society dreaded most, since it proved that a revolution by enslaved people could end in victory. Black activists responded by claiming a shared identity with Haitians and treating the two peoples' futures as one struggle. The book ties the revolution to a wider pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.

Bulamah takes Sidney Mintz's 1985 study of sugar as a point of departure, a book that showed how a single commodity tied together labor, capital, and what people ate, but shifts the frame of the question.

His interest is ecological: the entanglements binding animals, humans, and other beings in the early Caribbean. The available text stops before that argument develops, though the title marks the movement from marrons to Kreyòl as the arc under study.

Fitch Solutions forecasts a fifth consecutive year of contraction for Haiti's economy in FY2023, with real GDP falling 0.3 percent as protracted security and humanitarian crises keep economic activity from functioning normally.

Growth of 1.0 percent is projected for FY2024, which the analysts treat as a meagre result given how low the statistical base has fallen. Political and security risk is expected to stay elevated through 2023, with little room for an elected government to be re-established, and lawlessness and violence continuing without foreign troops arriving to stabilise matters.

For households, the outlook is severe: high inflation, food shortages and mounting humanitarian pressure in the months ahead.

Janvier's polemic appears here in English translation, framed by an introduction that reconstructs the world it was answering. Byrd and Stieber trace the long aftermath of independence: Boyer's Rural Code of 1826, which placed country people under a legal regime of their own and kept them from active citizenship; the treaty that bought French recognition for 150 million francs and left a debt that compounded across generations; and the continuing refusal of the United States to recognise the republic at all.

They also recover Janvier's argument about the island's territory, setting it against the Dominican nationalist story of Haitian invasion and alongside evidence of cross-border peasant solidarity in the nineteenth century.

Janvier's own case is against foreign concessions. Egypt, he writes, let outsiders build its docks, canals and railways and woke up under British rule; Haitians have more capital of their own than they realise, and should not be urged to repeat the lesson.

Chancy returns to the 2010 earthquake and refuses to file it under natural disaster. The essays move between analysis and memoir: casualty figures that kept changing month by month, camps that were never dismantled, a relative dead and friends left with a trauma they described as ordinary, and her own retreat from the grant proposals and institutional projects the catastrophe generated.

The political argument is that Haiti's condition has been manufactured rather than inherited. Reconstruction plans drawn up abroad ran directly against the traditions of communal self-governance the society was founded on, while the removal of tariffs from the 1980s onward wrecked domestic agriculture and left cheap labour and proximity to the United States as the country's only marketable assets.

A second line of attack falls on scholarship. Cold War surveys of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic made American tutelage the measure of success, while Latin American studies has repeatedly dissolved Blackness into hybridity and mestizaje.

Cave and Dihal put together this collection against a lopsided picture. Across the anglophone West and well outside it, ordinary understanding of artificial intelligence arrives by way of Hollywood, while the people actually building the technology are drawn disproportionately from one narrow group: American, white and male.

The volume sets that picture beside the many other places where thinking machines have been imagined. Long before anyone could construct one, they were already appearing in religious and philosophical thought, in fiction and on film, in traditions scattered across the world. Contributors from scholarship and from the arts follow what happens where those local stories meet digital technology and the dominant Western versions of it, and how fresh imaginaries emerge from the collision, varying sharply from one setting to another.

Some of the resulting chapters speak directly to debates in AI ethics: how Chinese and American conceptions of the technology diverge, and what neo-colonialism looks like in digital form.

Haitian films have won awards in recent years, but basic information about them is hard to come by, which keeps audiences small. Coogan and Vargas Zuleta describe the multilingual website they built in response, Kreyol gade, kreyol konprann, whose name plays on the proverb Kreyol pale, kreyol konprann, a phrase that signals both belonging and the language barriers running through and around Haitian communities.

The site catalogues films with synopses and details such as director, language, and where a title can be found. It adds a blog of reviews and interviews, a bibliography gathering sources in various formats and languages, and an invitation to collaborate.

Kreyol, French, Spanish, and English speakers can all use it. Reaching people in the Caribbean mattered to the designers, so graphics and typography were kept spare for places with slow connections. The audience imagined is film enthusiasts, researchers, and anyone curious about the industry.