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.

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.

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.

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.

Rotberg traces how colonial rule was undone across southern Africa, first in the northern territories and then in the settler strongholds that became Zimbabwe and, last, South Africa. Country by country, the chapters follow routes to independence that were rarely straight, taking in the failure of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and the eventual end of apartheid.

More than half the book asks what the new states did with the freedom they had won. Several, Rotberg argues, dismantled democratic protections soon after independence, hardened into one-party rule, closed their economies, curtailed rights and liberties, and traded growth for central planning and sheltered domestic industry. Corruption spread nearly everywhere. Botswana is the exception he singles out for democratic practice and sound government.

Later chapters turn to the present, where much of the region is working its way back, unevenly, toward the standards of honest administration it once let go. Rotberg reads that recovery as a resurgence worth marking.

Critics have long passed over the place of Haiti in early American writing. Faherty argues the reverse of neglect: anxiety about the Haitian Revolution ran all through the print culture of the young republic.

Writers of the period, he shows, treated Haiti as at once entirely recognizable and impossible to accommodate, grasped and pushed away in the same motion. Haiti served them as a warped mirror of the United States: a version of its own past, an uncomfortable rhyme with its present, and a warning about the futures that division might bring.

The book asks how American literary history came to write that centrality out, and in answering it recovers texts that had dropped from view, correcting what Faherty takes to be a significant blind spot in the field.

Sacchi and Ravano follow what became of plantation labor during the Haitian Revolution and in the years after it, treating that question as central to how revolutionary citizenship was understood on both sides of the Atlantic.

Their method is to track where the regulation of labor changed and where it held, which brings out the durability of the plantation complex. That complex operates in two registers at once: as a bond of dependency tying laborers to masters, and as a systemic arrangement flowing from production aimed at export.

The chapter also asks how modern individual citizenship could be squared with coerced labor at all. The answer it pursues lies in the paired terms autonomy and dependency, put to work by legal doctrine and political economy alike. Citizenship then appears at a crossing point — between juridical breaks such as the abolition of slavery and national independence, and the social relations that plantation production continued to impose.

Boaz traces the word voodoo to the United States of roughly two centuries ago and treats it, from the start, as a slur. The term allowed anyone so inclined to compress a whole set of fears about people of African descent into a single utterance: that they were uncivilized, credulous, sexually excessive, violent, even cannibals.

The book follows how public understandings of voodoo shifted over time, fastening onto different religious communities and different practices as ideas about Black people changed. Boaz keeps the emphasis on how tightly those stereotypes were bound up with arguments about race and about human rights.

The evidence comes from material written for general readers: newspapers, magazines, travel writing, and books.

Sexual violence committed by someone other than an intimate partner is the subject here, from outright rape to the quieter coercion known as "Banm Prèv," directed at children and adults alike. The authors tie its reach in Haiti to recurring disasters, imperial habits of racism and colorism, severe poverty, and gender inequality, and to conditions on the ground: gang violence, weapons that are easy to obtain, and law enforcement that does not function.

Injury from these assaults runs long and wide, touching victims' bodies, minds, social lives, and spiritual lives, while services for them remain thin. The chapter presents the problem as one of public health and human rights together, warranting urgent attention rather than silence.

After surveying the forms this violence takes and who is likely to suffer it, the authors propose syndemics as a framework for understanding the pattern and for designing both prevention and repair.

Rich and Jean-Charles survey mental health and the psychological professions in Haiti, opening with a compact portrait of the country: its racial and ethnic groups, its population and cities, and a history carrying both proud heritage and present standing as the hemisphere's poorest nation. Religion gets its own treatment — Catholic and Protestant Christianity alongside Vodou — as do crime, poverty, joblessness, substance misuse, and the weight of the 2010 earthquake and other disasters.

The chapter then follows behavioral health services from their origins to the current state of mental hospitals and psychiatric units, dwelling on how few psychiatrists, doctoral psychologists, and master's-level social workers there are, while noting growth in formal training programs and the stigma that still attaches to seeking care.

Considerable space goes to traditional healing, which matters most in rural areas where clinicians are hard to reach: the varieties of healer, and conditions bound to or shaped by culture. A closing section weighs challenges against opportunities.

Crystal Eddins tracks how captive Africans carried to colonial Saint-Domingue drew on inherited religious practice, kinship and social ties, and skills learned in labor and warfare to endure conditions designed to break them. Out of those resources, she argues, came something more than survival: durable connections linking African-born and creole fugitives, people still held in bondage, and a thin layer of free people of color.

Ritual life and marronnage are the two threads Eddins follows most closely, treating both as machinery for building the racial solidarity that made a successful revolt possible. Her evidence comes largely from archival material historians have left aside, including newspaper notices posted for people who had fled slavery; read together, these fragments show recurring shapes of refusal and signs of a shared political awareness among the enslaved.

The study is offered as a corrective to gaps in the existing scholarship on the revolution that produced the hemisphere's only free Black nation.

Two centuries of Dominican hostility toward Haiti rest, Yingling argues, on a past that was edited after the fact. Across the Age of Revolutions the people of Hispaniola cooperated far more often than they fought, joining together in antislavery and anti-imperial revolt and arriving in 1822 at a cross-island unification that was among the least violent settlements of independence anywhere in Latin America.

Reading the archive for kinship, belief and belonging rather than for fixed racial or political labels, the book follows Dominicans who went on calling themselves Haitian long after independence, and who wanted the citizenship and the markets that the hemisphere's first universally free country offered.

Later insistence on permanent incompatibility is treated as a whitewashing with consequences: elites who had once welcomed Haitians recast them as an antimodern threat, and that story was then used to excuse persecution. The epilogue carries the argument into present-day cultural politics.

Firmin is the organising figure of this collection, which sets his work against both the Western intellectual tradition that dismissed it and the Black Atlantic tradition it helped to found.

One group of chapters recovers his part in early Pan-Africanism, including the years of correspondence and planning with his compatriot Benito Sylvain and the Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams that produced the London conference of 1900, and measures his insistence on the equality of the races against the self-determination politics later associated with Du Bois, Garvey and Malcolm X. Another follows the argument about the African origins of ancient Egypt from Firmin to Cheikh Anta Diop, asking why it is Diop rather than Firmin whose name Afrocentrism remembers.

A closing section reads Firmin philosophically. Comtean positivism let him dismantle scientific racism by appeal to universal law, yet its unilineal model of history was itself hostile to difference, a tension the contributors examine rather than resolve.

Screen portrayals of the Haitian Revolution are Sepinwall's subject, among them Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and the earlier rebel Makandal.

Part of the chapter is about money. Sepinwall asks why certain stories from Black history never reach the screen at all, and locates an answer in how film funding is distributed — a pattern she ties to the trouble former slaveholding nations, the United States and France in particular, have had in confronting slavery.

She then turns to video games, which she treats as an increasingly powerful force in shaping what the public remembers of the past. Games set during the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue already exist, and the chapter's claim is that they deserve study on the same footing as anything on film.

Dessalines led Haiti as the first head of the independent state, and the editors' headnote sketches how he got there. Embittered as a young man by the extreme brutality visited on enslaved people in what was then a French colony, he rose to command after the French betrayed and seized Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Having declared the country independent in 1804, he ordered the mass killing of French settlers, in which between three and five thousand people of every age and sex died. That September, generals of the revolution proclaimed him Emperor Jacques I. He was assassinated. The text introduced by this headnote is his proclamation of 28 April 1804.

Davis takes up a question decolonial thought usually approaches with suspicion: whether the language of human rights is any use to people trying to change how wealthy societies live. He grants the objections at length. The 'human' of human rights was invented by Christian Europe; responsibility has been repackaged as development and as justification for military intervention; corporations recast structural harm as an individual carbon footprint.

Borrowing Stuart Hall's account of ideological terrain, he answers that rights remain the moral vocabulary in which enormous numbers of people actually reason, and so can be rearticulated rather than abandoned. His anchor is Glissant's claim to a right to opacity, from which he draws duties: joining coalitional protest of the kind gathered at Standing Rock in 2016, then reconsidering food, work, clothing, travel and kinship.

A final chapter on Du Bois's own retreat from rights language marks where the strategy stops working.

Dupuy sets out to explain why Haiti has remained underdeveloped from the late seventeenth century onward.

The framing draws on the models that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s to explain why underdevelopment took hold across Latin America and the Caribbean and why it lasted. The available abstract stops short as it turns to that body of theory, so the book's own argument cannot be described further from it.

A shoal slows a ship. Sailors could not see the sandbars beneath them and had to feel their way, and the formation itself drifts and reassembles, belonging neither to land nor to sea. King takes this as a method for reading between Black and Native studies.

She begins at 1441, when Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador and returned with captives and gold, rather than at 1492, in order to check the momentum that carries colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial studies toward familiar starting points. Her claim is that land and labour alone cannot account for conquest in this hemisphere, and that Blackness has mediated its relations throughout.

Working with Wynter, McKittrick, Brathwaite, Glissant and Pacific scholarship on seafaring and Indigenous mobility, she treats Black thought, movement and aesthetics as friction against the normal flow of Western theory, and looks for the shifting places where Black and Indigenous life have met.

A small revolt by free men of color in the Grande Anse in 1791 gives Geggus the material for a microhistory, built on archival sources barely used before and set within a wider argument about class relations during the revolution.

The rising itself is obscure, though an atrocity story attached to it has echoed through discussion of the revolution ever since. Working outward from it, Geggus reaches the questions it touches: how rumor moved, how slaves came to be armed, how the races dealt with one another, and where the free colored population's wealth and origins lay. That group, long the least understood part of Caribbean society, is on his account central, since its position in Saint-Domingue was anomalous and its activism began the colony's unraveling.

The Grande Anse held to slavery and white supremacy longer than anywhere else in the colony. Geggus takes the case as evidence that a regional approach is the most promising way forward.

In the late 1970s a small Haitian sailboat put into Guantanamo Bay and was met with food and assistance before continuing toward Miami; those who reached Florida were locked up in detention centres. Kahn opens with that contrast and then tells how the water between Haiti and the United States was made into a border.

Interdiction, begun in 1981, was designed as jurisdictional arbitrage: processing asylum claims aboard Coast Guard cutters in international waters kept the procedure clear of judicial review. Within a decade it had grown into a standing fleet of cutters, long-range aircraft, helicopters and a tethered surveillance balloon, while Guantanamo itself became a camp of razor wire and guard towers with a quarantine for detainees who tested positive for HIV.

Kahn reads this as an expression of a tension inside liberal constitutionalism, between binding the state by law and wanting to slip those bonds, and as a template since exported across the global North.

Written in two voices that stay deliberately separate, this book sets out what its authors mean by decoloniality and how it differs from the decolonization struggles of the mid-twentieth century. The horizon is not sovereign statehood, nor solely a fight with capitalism, but the habits that the modern/colonial matrix of power has planted in everyone, and the knowledges and world senses it continues to deny.

Quijano's concept of coloniality is the shared anchor: decoloniality, they contend, was born at the moment coloniality was named, as the Cold War ended and neoliberal global designs opened. It is offered not as a new paradigm but as an option, a standpoint, an analytic and a praxis, plural and bound to context.

Reading the present through it, Walsh and Mignolo find right-wing nationalism, neoliberal globalism and progressive governments funded by extractivism all continuing coloniality by different means.

Two estates on the northern plain of Saint-Domingue supply the subject: Haut-du-Cap, where Toussaint was born around 1745, and its larger sister plantation at Plaine-du-Nord. Geggus begins by testing what is actually known about his connection to them.

Documents published in 1977 show him already free by the 1770s, owning a slave and renting land at Grande-Rivière, which sits badly with the many contemporaries who took him for a slave in 1791 and with the silence of the estates' own correspondence. Geggus proposes that Bayon de Libertat bought and freed him before becoming the absentee count's attorney, and that Toussaint stayed nearby, perhaps supervising during Bayon's absences.

The second half turns from the man to the people around him. Both estates were unusually African, with Africans making up three-quarters of the adult population at Haut-du-Cap, and their age, sex and origin profiles are set beside those of the surrounding sugar plantations on the eve of the revolt.

Mintz asks, seriously rather than rhetorically, whether enslaved people on Caribbean sugar estates can usefully be called proletarians, and refuses a quick answer in either direction. His starting point is Marx's distinction between formal freedom and the sale of labour-power, which makes clear that a free labourer is not automatically a member of the proletariat.

Slavery, he insists, varied too much by colony, crop, period and demography for a single characterisation to hold; his own discussion narrows to the sugar estates of the Antilles across four centuries. What the enslaved shared with wage workers was subordination to a capitalist world market; what they lacked was any freedom to sell their labour at all.

Following Wallerstein, he suggests the two categories only make sense in relation to the whole system that produced both, and closes less with a verdict than with a warning that the terms themselves, and the adjectives free and unfree, are abstractions in need of repair.

One sugar plantation on the plain outside Port-au-Prince, and the aristocratic family that owned it, carry Cheney's account of what French colonial capitalism actually was. The Ferronnays papers, seized when family members emigrated after 1789, contain 220 letters from Jean-Baptiste Corbier, the manager on the ground, and an unusually reflective correspondent for this kind of source.

Saint-Domingue was the most advanced experiment mercantile capitalism had yet managed, but Cheney shows it growing out of Old Regime France rather than away from it: crown, nobility and merchants working together, privileges reshuffled rather than markets freed, sugar barons crowding out planters of modest origins until the coffee boom opened a cheaper door for petits blancs and gens de couleur.

Corbier's misgivings about cruelty and its waste can be stitched into something resembling abolitionism, but Cheney calls that an optical illusion. The story runs to 1838, since for the family the place remained Saint-Domingue.

Subsistence, not profit, is the axis on which Scott builds his account of peasant politics in colonial Southeast Asia. A cultivating household is a unit of consumption before it is one of production, and the fear of falling below a survival threshold explains choices that look irrational by ordinary accounting: scattered strips, several seed varieties, punishing labour for tiny gains.

Village institutions extended the same logic outward. Redistributed common land, obligations laid on the well-off, patron-client ties and reciprocity all worked as rough insurance, and because they were experienced as rights, their breach produced a sense of injustice rather than mere hardship.

Commercialised agriculture and the fiscal demands of the colonial state stripped that insurance away in Burma and Vietnam, while fixed rents and head taxes shifted risk onto those least able to carry it. The revolts Scott examines he reads as the protests of consumers, backward-looking demands that an older bargain be honoured.

Lacet asks what allowed Haitian women who lived through the 2010 earthquake to recover, starting from two obstacles: research on Haitian mental health is scarce, and a term like resilience does not travel cleanly between cultures.

The design is qualitative, built to describe rather than measure. It follows women displaced by the disaster who had to make a life in unfamiliar surroundings while carrying grief and loss, asking what actually helped them do it. What emerges is that the women's perseverance rested on values and strengths they already carried from their own culture.

Emigration, Laguerre argues, does not simply drain a nation; it redistributes it. He proposes the cosmonation, a nation whose homeland and its diasporic settlements together form a single crossborder social formation, as a way past both methodological nationalism and loose talk about the nation's disappearance.

Nations are sorted first by shape: monoterritorial ones with a single homeland and a dispersed diaspora, multiterritorial ones assembled through colonisation, annexation or merger. Either can become multisite, and the book follows how such entities are built and held together through migrant associations, expanded consular services, diasporic representation in homeland parliaments, and digital media.

The evidence comes from interviews with French, Italian and Croatian migrants in the United States, with comparative material from Turkish, Greek, Haitian and Armenian informants, alongside content analysis of association and government websites. Crossborder immigrant organisations, operating in several sites at once and sometimes partnered with states, serve as the clearest case.

Mocombe works from a framework he names phenomenological structuralism, an adaptation of structuration theory, to argue that Vodou supplied Haiti's rural majority with a working set of values: collective living, egalitarian and democratic instincts, openness to outsiders, a sense of balance and of justice among them.

Carried by oungan, manbo, gangan and the granmoun, that outlook produced what he calls the Haitian spirit of communism and sustained in the mountains and the provinces what Jean Casimir calls the counter-plantation system.

Set against it stands a rival ethic, Catholic and Protestant in inspiration and capitalist in aim, held by whites, by the mulatto and gens de couleur elite, and by the free black petite bourgeoisie. Mocombe's charge is that the affranchis who lived by that second ethic hollowed out the independence movement the Vodou practitioners had begun, and that the result was the poorest, most racist and most tyrannical state in the hemisphere.

From colonial Saint-Domingue in the seventeenth century to Haiti after independence, Vodou has been rendered in Haitian thought as something unsettling and paradoxical, in literature, law, politics, history, painting, music, and art alike. Cleophat and Joseph collect chapters arguing that the rival accounts arising from these domains have not merely touched Haitian life but supplied its cosmology and its way of seeing.

Vodou's reach, on this account, extends into Haitian intellectual, aesthetic, and literary imagination, into social ethics, and into thinking about sexuality, gender, and theology, as in Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Roumain, and others. It also shapes how memory, trauma, collective redemption, and diasporic identity are handled by Haitian women writers, Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy among them.

The contributors come from many fields, ethnomusicology and performance through anthropology, economics, philosophy, and theology, and work from queer, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic positions.

Cleophat and Joseph open from a complaint: scholarship on Vodou has largely treated it as something that sprang up in Saint-Domingue on its own, without African antecedents, and has said little about its debt to Yoruba religion. The collection is built to close that gap.

Its chapters compare Vodou with African traditions, Yoruba and Egyptian religion among them, on the argument that shared patterns of belief and ritual can be read as evidence of continuity between the continent and its diaspora, and can clarify Vodou's mythology and practice.

The editors also insist that Vodou be read across borders and cultures, and in the political and economic circumstances that produced competing versions of it. Contributors come from ethnomusicology, performance studies, anthropology and other fields, and work with feminist, queer, Marxist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic frameworks, building a composite account of how the religion has shaped Haitian self-understanding.

Haiti's first novel tells the revolution as allegory. Two enslaved half-brothers, Romulus and Remus, one fathered by an African and the other by the Colonist, are driven to revolt by the killing of their mother, Marie the African, an event dated to 1789. Stella is no ordinary character but Liberty in the flesh, the Star of Nations, who with the Spirit of the Nation convinces the brothers they can win only once they stop fighting each other.

Bergeaud wrote from exile, and the editors place him among a generation of Haitian writers who were also politicians and who composed with France watching: the imagery is classical and European, and the few local plants that appear are explained for outsiders.

Their introduction also lays out the history the allegory shadows, from Oge's revolt and the Leclerc expedition to the 1825 indemnity and the long fragmentation under Christophe, Petion and Boyer.

Sutton and Quinn introduce a volume built around David Nicholls's work, picking out the arguments of his that have drawn the most comment and the most criticism.

The best known concerns colour. Nicholls read much of nineteenth-century Haitian politics as a contest between an urban, commercial, largely mulatto elite and a rural, military, largely black one, and identified the two rival versions of the national past each side used to justify itself. But he insisted that colour was the badge of class rather than its substance, that blacks could hold the mulatto legend and mulattoes the black, that the politique de doublure muddied the picture further, and that colour usually counted only where other divisions reinforced it.

They also take up his refusal to call Duvalierism fascist or totalitarian, treating it instead as a further growth of post-colonial patterns already visible in the previous century, and his insistence that Caribbean politics be read historically and on its own terms.

Leservot takes up Auguste Lussan's La Famille créole to trace how refugees from Saint-Domingue turned into Louisiana Creoles. The backdrop is the upheaval that began with the slave uprising of 1791 and closed with Haitian independence in 1804, which left a deep mark on Louisiana.

Arrivals came in waves. A thin stream reached New Orleans soon after the uprising began, thousands followed around 1803, and then, across a few months in 1809 and 1810, roughly ten thousand more landed at once after being pushed out of Cuba, where they had settled first. The city took in enough people to double in size, reaching 25,000 residents by 1810 and standing seventh-largest in the country.

Gros works through Haiti's condition as a case in the study of failed states. The book first asks what the concept of state failure actually means, then places Haiti's version of it in historical perspective.

From there it offers a rational-choice account of Duvalierism, follows the disorder and foreign intervention that came after the Duvaliers, and weighs geological catastrophe against an enfeebled state. A closing chapter takes up what remaking a failed state would require, in theory and in policy.

Beard announces his purpose at the outset: to prove through narrative rather than argument that no fixed barrier separates light- and dark-skinned peoples, and that a despised race is capable of heroism and virtue. Toussaint's life is the vehicle.

The story opens with the island's geography and moves through the collision of planters, free men of colour and the enslaved after 1789: the deputation of men of colour to Paris, the colonial assembly's refusal to share power, Ogé's rising, and the great revolt of the northern plain. Toussaint appears first as the Bréda coachman who shields his master's household, then as the commander who outmanoeuvres his rivals, and finally as the prisoner left to starve in the Jura after Bonaparte's betrayal.

Later chapters carry the account past independence, through Dessalines, the division between Christophe and Pétion, and Boyer's reunification, down to the Haiti of the author's own century.

The years from 1789 to 1804 in Saint-Domingue roused enslaved people and alarmed planters across the Atlantic world. Ghachem resists reading the period only as a clean break with slavery, presenting emancipation in Haiti instead as something that grew out of the colony's legal history over a long span.

The study works beneath the letter of the law into how it was actually used, and stages particular episodes at length, among them the extraordinary case in which a master was prosecuted for torturing and killing the people he owned.

Old Regime law turns out to have been invoked from several directions at once during the revolutionary years. Administrators reached for it hoping to hold the colony steady; free people of color and enslaved people reached for it to claim citizenship and demand an end to brutality. What emerges is a portrait of colonial governance as a field of strategy in the land that became Haiti.

When the insurgent commander Macaya told a French commissioner in 1793 that he was subject to the kings of Congo, France and Spain, historians from Madiou onward took it as proof that the rebels were burdened with an African attachment to monarchy, something backward that Louverture had patiently to talk them out of.

Thornton takes the statement seriously instead. Perhaps two-thirds of Saint-Domingue's enslaved population had been born and raised in Africa, many of them in Kongo, and he reconstructs what kingship meant there in order to read their politics as a coherent ideology rather than nostalgia.

His evidence includes insurgents electing kings and queens quarter by quarter as they took territory, a ceremony at L'Acul conducted by a Capuchin, which points to Kongolese Christianity, the conqueror-king manner of certain commanders and the terror they used, and the Kikongo chant recorded by Moreau de Saint-Mery, whose translation scholars have fought over for decades.

Joseph surveys the recent wave of literary and historiographical writing on the Haitian Revolution and assesses what it has changed.

The starting point is what the revolution accomplished: formerly enslaved Africans founded a state without slavery, wrote a permanent ban on colonial slavery into the republic's first constitution, and asserted equality and human rights for all people. Dessalines, who took over as general in chief after Toussaint Louverture, proclaimed Haiti on the first day of 1804, following years of fighting against France, Spain, and Britain.

The central claim is that scholarship in North America has undergone an intellectual shift Joseph names the Haitian Turn. He reads the revolution as both a world event and a reference point for present arguments about equality, social justice, freedom, and universal human rights, closing with suggestions about where the field should go next. The piece offers itself as selective critical reflection rather than an exhaustive review.

Slave revolt was never more frequent in the Americas than between the 1770s and the 1840s, and Geggus places Curacao's insurrection of 1795, and its strange sequel five years later, inside that wave. He begins by admitting how slippery the counting is: no complete census of revolts and conspiracies exists, and even the threshold for calling an act a rebellion is contested.

What emerges is a picture of causes that are more tangled than the obvious one. Insurgents in the French colonies rarely spoke of the rights of man; they said instead that freedom had already been granted them, whether by the king or by the deputies in Paris, and comparable rumours of a concealed emancipation law drove more than twenty revolts through to the 1830s.

Geggus weighs the French Revolution's disruption of colonial authority, the example of Saint-Domingue becoming Haiti, and an abolitionist movement that predated both and outlasted them.

The inauguration of the first Black president of the United States in January 2009 sent many Haitians, and many friends of Haiti, thinking back to another January. In 1804 Jean-Jacques Dessalines became the first Black leader of a nation in the New World, and Jenson's chapter takes that echo as its opening.

Dessalines came to power just as the new country marked its independence with a formal declaration. Jenson sets that document beside the American one, which Jefferson described as an instrument carrying within it the fate of the world, and turns from there to what David Armitage has observed about Haiti's place in the history of such declarations.

Jenson begins from a claim Susan Buck-Morss advanced in "Hegel and Haiti": that Hegel's dialectic of master and slave took shape while he was at Jena reading press reports about the turmoil in Saint-Domingue. The newspaper in question, Minerva, mattered to how Hegel saw the world.

Buck-Morss went through its coverage, which was unusually heavy. Across 1804 and 1805 the paper ran a continuing series on the colony that came to more than a hundred pages, mixing source documents, digests of the news, and accounts from witnesses. With that research in hand, Jenson suggests, the appearance of Hegel's enormously influential paradigm looks less like coincidence than like a response to something he was reading.

Kaiama L. Glover takes up three Haitian writers — Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète — whose Spiralist project has long been credited within francophone Caribbean letters without ever receiving book-length treatment. Hers is the first study in any language to read them singly and as a group, and she treats the gap as symptomatic: Haiti's reputation for exceptionality has kept even major figures at the edge of how the New World is mapped.

Close reading carries the argument. Glover works through the prose fiction to draw out the philosophical commitments and formal habits that make Spiralism an ethic as much as an aesthetic, and sets that beside wider reflection on what postcolonial studies has chosen to canonize and on Atlantic histories of empire and resistance. The book presses for these three names to be added to a roster of writer-intellectuals it describes as unusually fixed, and doubles as a practical guide for reading and teaching their fiction.

Slavery has been an accepted institution since antiquity, but the editors are interested in a less obvious consequence: bondage threw people from different cultures into shared space, in households, on plantations, in mines and quarries, and on shared ground in art and public memory.

Recent commemorations of Britain's 1807 and the United States' 1808 abolition of the transatlantic trade, together with the growth of Black Atlantic studies, renewed attention to the subject. Even so, Hormann and Mackenthun argue, what slavery implies for the study of cultural encounter remains largely unexamined, and the volume sets out to address that gap.

The essays come from several disciplines and take varied conceptual approaches, treating labor camps in ancient Palestine, early Christian slavery and its moral standing, Enlightenment writing about black revolution, and other subjects. Most are concerned with the human and cultural dimensions of bondage and with the sharp differences between its forms from antiquity to the twentieth century.

Geggus weighs how much the age of revolution actually changed the Caribbean, and finds the answer uneven. Only one colony, Saint-Domingue, became independent before the 1840s; elsewhere imperial rule held, and the number of enslaved people in the region in 1840 was barely below what it had been in 1760, with Cuba and Puerto Rico still importing Africans illegally and expanding fast.

Emancipation, he notes, owed at least as much to metropolitan abolitionism as to revolt: the British act of 1833 freed more people than the Haitian Revolution had, and the ending of legal racial discrimination across most colonies between 1828 and 1832 came through reform rather than rising. The region's economic eclipse had more to do with Brazil, Mauritius and European beet sugar than with political violence.

Recent scholarship's stress on Caribbean agency, including claims that slave resistance drove European antislavery, receives a sympathetic but sceptical hearing.

Toussaint Louverture's constitution of 1801 usually appears as a footnote, overshadowed by his arrest, his deportation and the rise of Dessalines. Drexler and White make a larger claim for it. Once American newspapers circulated the text in the autumn of 1801, no text by a Black author was more widely read in the United States, they contend, and probably none was until Douglass published his Narrative in 1845.

They meet the objections head-on. The document was not written in the United States, not published there first, not about the country, and not authored by Toussaint in any conventional sense, having been drafted by a committee made up largely of white planters.

Their reply is that early African American writing is full of texts with tangled origins, Wheatley's London-printed poems among them, and that reading the constitution as literature shifts where the tradition can be said to begin.

Spears and Berotte Joseph assemble the first wide-ranging treatment of a language long kept in the shade by French. Specialists in Creole studies contribute chapters on where the language came from, how it is built, and how it works in schooling, in literature, and in ordinary exchange.

Nearly every Haitian speaks Creole, yet it gained standing as a co-official language of Haiti only some two decades before this volume appeared. The editors address teachers, service providers and Creole speakers who want the language used more widely in Haiti and among Haitians abroad.

Their argument is practical: stronger competence in the language would improve the education of its speakers and their ability to take part in the political and social life of the countries where they live.

Poor households do not chiefly need small sums, Rutherford argues; they need occasional large ones. Life-cycle obligations, emergencies from illness and bereavement to fire, flood or the bulldozing of a slum, and opportunities ranging from a business to a better roof or a bribe for a secure job all demand more cash than a home can hold.

Since the poor own little to sell or pawn, the dependable route to a lump sum is to build it out of savings. Rutherford calls this basic personal financial intermediation and reduces it to three moves: saving up, borrowing against savings not yet made, and combinations of the two. The rest of the book follows from that.

He then surveys what people have devised without banks, from rotating and accumulating savings clubs to deposit collectors paid handsomely to take money away and keep it safe, and describes SafeSave, designed around tiny, irregular, daily transactions.

Written in 1542 by a Dominican friar who had watched much of what he describes, this is a reckoning laid before the Spanish crown. Las Casas moves island by island and province by province, beginning with Hispaniola and going on to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and the mainland kingdoms, recording massacre, forced labour, deportation and the emptying of whole regions now silent across thousands of leagues.

The indictment rests on law as much as on pity. The peoples of the Indies were subjects and vassals of Castile, not goods; the papal grant had charged the monarchs with bringing them the faith without inflicting harm; so the settlers' conduct offended divine law, natural law and Castilian law together. He was prepared to argue that they had just cause to make war on the Spaniards.

The pamphlet was one instrument in a campaign he pressed on his king, on the Council of the Indies, and finally on Europe.

Hometown associations sit at the centre of Pierre-Louis's account of Haitian New York. Organised around places of origin in Haiti, they ship goods, raise money for local projects and help officials at home set up nonprofits of their own, while doubling as advocacy bodies for their members in the city.

They also do identity work. Haitians arrived from a society where class outranked colour and found themselves assigned to a racially marginalised minority; the associations offer a setting where the history of the first black republic stays in view, immigrant enterprise is admired, and the differences of language and culture that separate Haitians from African Americans and other black immigrants are treated as assets.

Exile politics complicated all of this. Service organisations meant to help newcomers settle were led by people whose horizon was the fall of Duvalier and a return home, and several of them did return, into government.

Laguerre argues that migrant politics has been misfiled. Examined from inside the receiving country it looks like ethnic politics or voting behaviour; examined from the homeland it looks marginal, a shadow of real government. Neither framing captures what is happening.

He proposes diasporic politics as an arena in its own right, transnational rather than domestic or international, and without the legal foundation that gives states their legitimacy. It works by grafting itself onto institutions at both ends, party organizations where migrants live and electoral machinery where they came from, while building nonprofit structures of its own, so that a foothold in one place becomes leverage in the other.

Because it crosses borders by definition, he insists it be theorized through globalization rather than international relations, and he traces how homeland governments come to count on remittances while host states seek integration. Haitian settlements in the United States, Canada and France supply the recurring examples.

Michel writes against a long habit of describing Haitian religion as sorcery, fetishism or blood magic, and sets out to restate what Vodou actually holds. Her emphasis falls on its humanism, its sense of community, and the way its ethical content passes between generations without a book, a clergy or a creed.

Vodou, on this account, is less a set of doctrines than a way of organising the whole of life. It offers few absolutes, yet those who serve the spirits prize balance, justice, patience, forgiveness and respect for elders much as members of the scriptural religions do, and they see no contradiction between that service and being good Catholics.

Drawing on Bellegarde-Smith, Courlander, Karen McCarthy Brown and others, Michel presents the religion as African in origin and Creole in formation, pushing up from below rather than imposed from above, and functioning as a practical resource for people living with scarcity and repression.

Rey combines archival history with fieldwork at two northern shrines, Saint James the Greater as Ogou Feray at Plaine-du-Nord and Saint Philomena as Lasyrenn at Bord-de-Mer-de-Limonade, to ask where Haiti's pilgrimage tradition comes from.

Pilgrimage, he notes, is the communal rite with the widest following in the paired cults of Catholic saints and Vodou lwa, and the major feasts cluster in a single summer season. Tracing ritual forms, processions and devotional idioms back through the colonial period, he argues that they draw heavily on Kongolese religious culture, both its older strand and the Catholicism Kongo had already absorbed before the Atlantic crossing.

That claim cuts against a scholarly habit of reading Vodou primarily through West African sources. On Rey's evidence, Central Africa shaped the pilgrimage complex more decisively than the literature on the religion has allowed, and syncretism in Haiti has a longer prehistory than the plantation.

Girard centers his account on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's political career, the calculations he made, the concessions he accepted, and the long negotiation he conducted with the Clinton administration. Rather than place one leader in the right, Girard weighs what each man needed and the moral claims each pressed against the other.

The method gives both sides substance. Aristide and Clinton appear with their constituencies behind them, and the bargaining between them reads as consequential rather than procedural. At the book's core sit the confrontation itself and the foreign-policy machinery running between Haiti and the United States.

Around that core Girard also sketches Haiti as it stood at the time of writing, setting out with unusual clarity the tensions that built toward the violence of recent years and Aristide's removal from office.

Anthropology, for Trouillot, has always worked inside a wider Western story about difference, and he sets out to excavate the thematic field that handed the discipline its subject in the first place. The postmodernist turn of the 1980s, which asked how ethnographies are written and who speaks in them, gets credit for opening the question and criticism for stopping too soon: it examined the discourse within anthropology rather than the order within which anthropology makes sense, and treated feminism and a historicised Third World as marginal.

Behind that order lies what he calls a geography of imagination, the Elsewhere that Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers needed in order to place themselves as modern. Rousseau's state of nature, Hegel's Africa and Marx's Asiatic mode all mark spaces against which the modern was measured.

The Caribbean, colonised earliest and remade most completely, therefore belongs to modernity from the start, which unsettles North Atlantic claims to having got there first.

Vollmann reports from two places where violence had settled into routine. The first is Mogadishu during the American intervention, riding out at night with a Marine squad ordered to confiscate weapons from every faction impartially, led by a corporal who says the frightening thing is never knowing where the enemy is. A man from another platoon is shot on a street they had patrolled that afternoon; a newspaper clipping notes the United Nations withdrawing convoy protection a year later.

The second is the Muslim south of Thailand, where he tries to determine whether the separatist bands are fighting for Pattani and Islam or running extortion rackets, and finds the distinction will not stay put.

The method is deliberately unresolved. First-person narrative is broken up by flat transcripts, a provincial governor, a defector, schoolgirls, low-ranking policemen, an ageing separatist leader, set against each other rather than reconciled.

Reporting, not theory, carries this volume. Vollmann travels through Cambodia and the Thai border zone in the years after the Vietnamese withdrawal, and his method is to let people account for their own violence and then set the accounts against each other.

In Phnom Penh he visits Tuol Sleng and the killing field at Choeung Ek, an amputee rehabilitation centre, and the mined road north to Battambang, where a provincial commander briefs him for an hour before he can ask a question and a commune committee meets beside a dugout roofed with logs to soak up shellfire. Across the frontier he tries to buy his way toward the Khmer Rouge and the logging money that sustains them, and hears from a brothel owner and a smuggler's sister why the movement was not, in their telling, so bad.

Japan's yakuza appear on the same terms: extortionists entirely convinced that they protect the weak.

This volume distils the argument of the larger work into a numbered code. The principles, Vollmann explains in a prefatory apology, were extracted wherever possible word for word from the four theoretical volumes that precede it, and are offered as working rules rather than as an exact science of ethics.

The structure is that of a legal instrument. It begins with how to form a moral code, variations on the Golden Rule, and maxims addressed to murderers and tyrants, then runs through a long sequence on when violence is warranted, when it is not, and when it is inexcusable yet forgivable. Categories of self-defence extend from honour and race through homeland, ground, earth, animals and gender to defence against traitors and defence of revolution; a second section treats violence as policy, covering deterrence, retribution, revenge, punishment, obedience and sadism.

Each rule carries caveats, cross-references and worked examples, from Bernhard Goetz to the Talmud.

Dash's survey opens with the land, a mountainous terrain that struck European colonizers as forbidding, then lays down a historical spine running from French rule through independence, the American occupation of the early twentieth century, the Duvalier years, and the present day. That chronology frames all that follows.

A chapter on people and society dwells on the pride Haitians take in a black state born of the only slave revolution that succeeded, and moves across the social range from the elite to peasants and slum dwellers, with attention to Haitians abroad. Religion gets its own treatment, centered on the fusion of Roman Catholicism with vaudou, brought from West Africa. Another remarks on the joy people find despite hard economic conditions.

Media, literature, and language are handled against the political record, with a section on writing in Creole. Later chapters cover vaudou jazz and dance, rara rock, and the folkloric debts of Haitian painting. A chronology and glossary close the book.