Lasirenn belongs to a wide family of Afro-Atlantic water spirits, kin to Mami Wata and to mermaid figures from both African and European sources, and her attributes have shifted with the circumstances of those who serve her. Szeles takes that fluidity as the point, and pursues it through the stories told about her, her rituals, and above all her drawn signs.

Much of the essay is close reading of the vèvè. Spirals become eggs, or the southern point of the Kongo cosmogram where things begin again; a vertical line marks the axis toward the ancestors; a diamond refracts one self into many facets, and the whole figure resolves into a womb. What these images offer, in her account, is a means of repairing the natal alienation Orlando Patterson identified as slavery's core injury — reconnecting the living to Ginen and letting a person gather her disparate versions into a whole.

Tinsley starts from a question put to her at a conference: does queering the tropes of the region risk hypersexualizing the Caribbean all over again? Her answer runs through Ezili, the Vodou lwa whose pantheon, from Gran Ezili and Ezili Freda to Ezili Danto and Lasyrenn, matters most to practitioners who embody or desire femininity.

Rather than claim that religion gives room for self-expression, she treats songs, stories, possessions and dream interpretations as black feminist theorizing in its own right, the kind Barbara Christian described as arriving in narrative, riddle and wordplay. She asks what it would sound like to cite Ezili with the explanatory authority scholars grant Judith Butler, and locates the discussion in a lineage of women-of-color feminism rather than in queer or transgender studies.

The close reading centres on Lescot and Magloire's 2002 documentary Of Men and Gods, about Vodou practitioners whose genders and sexualities are complex, in a religion outlawed repeatedly where same-sex practice never was.

For Mignolo the Global South names a condition rather than a hemisphere. He reads the phrase, which came into use as talk of a Third World faded after the Soviet collapse, as shorthand for the parts of the planet that absorbed the costs of European expansion — pockets of which sit north of the equator, while Singapore and the Gulf states straddle both categories.

Western civilization, he insists, is a latecomer: only after 1500 did one of several coexisting civilizations begin imposing its economy, its law, its cartography and its criteria for knowledge on all the others, assembling what he calls the colonial matrix of power. Carl Schmitt's account of a Eurocentric world order is put to use and then turned against itself for failing to notice where its author was standing.

The essay closes by sorting today's contenders — rewesternization, dewesternization, a scattered left, and the decolonial and spiritual options — by which part of that matrix each disputes.

Salt examines how American politicians and diplomats late in the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass among them, worked to talk Haiti into the Atlantic world as a full member. A country the century had opened by disavowing, fearing and refusing to recognize was, in the form of its pavilion at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, to be presented as an example of political, social and economic advancement — modern rather than a problem for modernity.

What Salt calls the Haitian Question is not a single query but a cluster of suppositions about the country, only some of which imply deficiency. Colin Dayan's account of Haiti's stigmatization holds, Salt argues, but does not cover the whole.

Rhetorics of trade reciprocity, political equality and racial inclusion share space with the stories of degeneracy. Geography underlies them: Haiti sits between the Windward and Mona Passages, and American designs on those lanes produced conflicting impulses to denounce, isolate, protect, possess and control it.

Whatley and Gillezeau connect two strands of recent economic history: the claim that Africa experienced a reversal of fortune, and the claim that ethnic fragmentation helps explain the continent's underdevelopment. Their contribution is to trace present-day fragmentation back to the Atlantic slave trade.

The empirical case rests on both correlation and an instrumental-variables strategy meant to identify a causal effect. Measured against slave exports, ethnic heterogeneity in Africa today comes out higher where the trade drew more people away, and the estimated relationship is large enough to matter economically as well as being statistically firm.

The authors test the finding against the obvious objections, varying how ethnic boundaries are drawn and changing the unit of observation; the result holds up under both.

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.

Carson and colleagues compare how Haitian, African American and non-Latino White young people used outpatient mental health care, drawing on five community clinics in a northeastern U.S. city. The method was a retrospective review of 252 charts, counting sessions and treatment types over the first six months of care and testing whether treatment met published guidelines for ADHD and depression once clinical need was accounted for.

Retention was low among both Haitian and African American patients. Most had stopped by six months, most attended fewer than eight sessions, and a third came only once. Among Haitian patients, milder symptoms and less dysfunction predicted a single visit. Guideline-adherent treatment was less likely for Haitians, and adequate depression care was more common among the older patients in the sample.

Haitian youth were also relatively underinsured, had more documented family separations, and were given adjustment disorder diagnoses at higher rates. Coverage, the authors suggest, is a likely driver.

Hardly anyone among the colony's free people of color was richer than Oge, which makes his conduct in 1790 hard to explain. Men of his standing were cautious, backing Julien Raimond's slow campaign in Paris for rights grounded in property rather than color, a program built to leave slavery intact. Oge instead returned home, took the head of armed militiamen demanding the vote, and four months later was broken on the wheel.

Reading the record of his interrogation, Garrigus finds a man undone by his own earlier success. A broker who had grown rich drafting contracts with white colonists and then lost the fortune, he was used to being dealt with as an equal and underestimated how far planters' fear of Parisian abolitionists had hardened.

The testimony also unsettles the military story: no battle crushed the movement, its members dispersed. What counted was the execution, which drew poorer men of mixed ancestry into arms and toward civil war.

Arthur Fournier, a physician, recounts his time in Haiti and above all the period after the earthquake, which the book describes as the largest natural disaster the world has known. He works alongside Haitians dealing with what the quake left behind, and draws from that experience lessons about living and dying, about courage and about endurance.

Much of the book concerns his patients with AIDS and the particular kind of care their illness required. A private family tragedy, disclosed later, returns the narrative to where it began.

The publisher places the result in the company of Camus's The Plague as an account of the human condition.

Scott opens with three complaints from frustrated officials: Qing surveyors defeated by the mountains of Guizhou, British soldiers unable to pursue rebels into the Burmese hill jungle, and a missionary despairing of the creek-cut valleys of Appalachia. Each speaks for a project of rule that styled itself as order and enlightenment, and each was baffled by terrain and by people who would not hold still.

From that irritation he builds an argument about the long quarrel between lowland states and the peoples above them. Living without a state, he points out, has been the ordinary human condition; the grain-growing kingdoms of Southeast Asia were late, small and thinly populated, and a land-rich frontier meant that subjects who were pressed too hard could simply go. Flight set a practical limit on rulers, and the hills filled accordingly.

Only the modern state has had the means to close that frontier, a final enclosure carried out under the name of development.

Franketyèn's 1978 play Pèlin-tèt puts two Haitian men in a New York basement: Piram, penniless and speaking only Kreyòl, and Polidò, a francophone trading on his learning. Past reads their cramped quarrel as a compressed account of what displacement does to Haitians, with the United States serving both as a literal room and as a figure for the political and economic pressures that drove them out in the first place.

Writing in Kreyòl rather than French, and for the stage rather than the page, Franketyèn made his work reachable by audiences excluded from literary culture, and did so while remaining in the country under Duvalier. Past notes how little criticism the play has drawn beside his novels, and argues that it refuses the stock images of Haitian helplessness that resurfaced in coverage of the 2010 earthquake, pressing instead for solidarity across the diaspora.

Landers follows a connected set of African and African-descended lives across the southern mainland of North America and in the Caribbean, roughly 1760 to 1850. Her opening figure is Francisco Menéndez, a Mandinga who passed from British captivity into Spanish service, commanded the Black militia of St. Augustine, led the free town of Mose, petitioned the Spanish king for a captaincy, sailed as a corsair when no answer came, and took his people into Cuban exile when Florida changed hands.

Lives like his, she argues, show enslaved and free people reading the politics around them and acting on what they read. Several empires and many Native nations competed in this arena, and its conflicts kept opening chances to change the course of a life.

Drawing on Spanish-language records not used before, she adds names to a story long carried by a handful of famous voices, and puts flight, marronage and shifting allegiance near the centre of the age of revolutions.

Historians of science have had little to say about France's richest Caribbean possession, and almost nothing has been written in English. McClellan treats that silence as the problem to be solved, and builds his study in three movements.

He begins with the colony itself: how the French settled and organised it, what made its plantations so profitable, and which of its difficulties European expertise was expected to remedy. Without that groundwork, he argues, the scientific story cannot be read properly.

A second part follows the many ways seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and medicine served colonial development, or appeared to. The third traces the Cercle des Philadelphes as an institution: the learned society at Cap Français that Louis XVI raised to royal standing in 1789. A provincial academy in the tropics, on McClellan's account, has more to say about science and empire than its obscurity would suggest.

White asks what the Haitian Revolution did to political thinking in the young United States, and in the process recasts how republicanism and slavery sat together at a founding moment. For Americans after their own revolution, events in Saint-Domingue exposed the gap between professed democratic principle and the practice of slaveholding.

For thirteen years, from 1791 to 1804, enslaved people and free people of color fought for equal rights on French revolutionary terms. Refugees, white and mixed-race, reached American cities, and their arrival made the contradiction concrete: slaveholders in the United States could read their own possible fate in the predicament of Haitian planters.

White gathers reactions across the divisions of the day — Black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, proslavery and antislavery. Setting the new republic in a wider Atlantic frame, she shows the refugees' presence provoking some of the earliest arguments about what the nation was.

Anti-Haitian feeling in the Caribbean is usually studied one territory at a time, and Zacair and Reinhardt argue that this is why it remains poorly understood. The Dominican Republic has drawn sustained attention; Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Jamaica and the Bahamas far less, and for French Guiana there is almost nothing in English. Their volume assembles historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and sociologists so that the comparison can finally be made.

The essays examine how host societies imagine Haitian migrants and how migrants absorb those images: a televised campaign of slander in Guadeloupe and the trial that followed, the stereotype of clandestine invasion in French Guiana, Jamaica's retreat from an initially generous response to refugees after Aristide's ouster in 2004, and the competing languages of human rights and humanitarianism in Dominican border clinics.

A second section turns to interviews and first-person accounts, in which Haitians abroad describe that same marginality from the inside.

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.

Girard runs from Columbus's landfall through the sugar colony, independence, the emperors and presidents of the nineteenth century, the American occupation, the Duvaliers and the Aristide years, closing on the earthquake of January 2010 and the relief effort that followed.

The thread through the narrative is deliberately unwelcome. Foreign imperialism, Girard maintains, is not the principal cause of Haitian poverty; bad government and racial antagonism inside the country are, and the habit of blaming outsiders corrodes both enterprise and reform, since nothing one does can matter if everything was decided elsewhere. The earthquake serves as his illustration: unenforced building standards multiplied the dead, and the political class responded by bickering over its own tenure.

He is no gentler about Washington. Two occupations and decades of aid have failed, and the flow of assistance has persuaded too many Haitians that recovery is somebody else's job.

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.