Kalaf and Díaz examine how social policy is designed in the Americas and what it does to race, national identity, and belonging. Their focus is the Dominican Republic, where international actors promoted universal legal identity while access to citizenship documents was being restricted, arbitrarily, from people of Haitian descent above all. This book is the first to draw the connection between those two developments.

That pairing exposes a gap in global policy, which has not reckoned with how measures meant to include people can instead push them out, particularly where states already discriminate against populations descended from migrants. As identification systems grow more capable, the authors note, fresh insecurities and uncertainties appear alongside them.

The argument works as a warning about how fast identification practices are spreading, and offers a pointed critique of the international push to give everyone a legal identity ahead of the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

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.

The ordinance Charles X signed in 1825 is remembered for its second article, the 150-million-franc indemnity. Kwass turns to the first: the demi droit, a halving of duties on French goods intended to restore the commerce France had enjoyed when the colony was the richest in the Atlantic world.

Where the indemnity succeeded in extracting money, this commercial privilege failed. Haitian customs officers obstructed it from the outset through a series of deliberate tactics, and the government eventually abolished it; a French consul, casting Haiti as a duplicitous woman, compared the resistance to Penelope weaving by day and unpicking her work by night. Kwass reads this as statecraft rather than mere evasion, driven by fiscal need, revolutionary principle, and a rural population unwilling to purchase an independence already won by arms.

Set against French mercantilism and recent work on sovereignty, the affair shows a young Black republic acting effectively against an informal empire that nonetheless did it lasting harm.

The ransom France imposed on Haiti in 1825 as the price of recognition is usually treated as a story that starts in the 1820s. Ghachem pushes it back a century, to John Law's debt-financing experiment of 1719–20 and the collapse that followed.

That, he argues, was when France first bent its Caribbean colony to the borrowing needs of the metropolitan economy. The indemnity is a decisive episode in a much longer subordination rather than its origin, and the repeated devaluation of Haitian currency at the urging of North Atlantic financial interests belongs to the same lineage.

The practical conclusion follows from the historical one. If the dependence is structural, restoring Haiti's monetary sovereignty will take more than settling one debt: it requires confronting an international financial order that has narrowed the country's chances of building durable democratic institutions. The bicentenary of 1825, he suggests, is the moment to attempt it.

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.

Desgranges turns the conch shell into a method. The Lambi model, with Haiti at the helm, offers a way of reading resistance and renewal and of tracing the temporal paths and ancestral practices that run through African Diaspora life.

Time and space work as crossing axes, marking out where questions of race, space, power, and freedom begin. The framework is assembled from the writing and activism of Jemima Pierre, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Edwidge Danticat, and it proceeds from an Antillean feminist standpoint.

The result is an account of Diaspora identity that moves fluidly rather than in fixed categories, with consequences for how being is described, how knowledge is understood, and how either might be taught.

The essays collected here take up a question posed sharply in the opening chapter by Souleymane Bachir Diagne: whether African thought should keep asking who and what Africans are, or turn instead to what they are becoming. Diagne traces the identitarian answer through the founding of Presence africaine, through Cheikh Anta Diop's account of African origins and Nkrumah's consciencism, and through the parallel language of rebirth in North Africa, before arguing that the pressing work now lies in religious and cultural pluralism rather than in return to a foundation.

Later contributions push in other directions. One reads marronage as the ground of a feminism built on flight rather than on recognition. Another treats writing and thinking in Africa as a kind of weaving. A further section examines how African personal status law is handled in Western jurisdictions.

The recurring claim is that meaning should be drawn from what is coming rather than from what has been.

Catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, approached from several directions at once. The editors gather work by anthropologists, historians and literary scholars, among others, and set these accounts of disaster beside one another.

The volume is assembled less to settle the question than to open it. The arguments differ from chapter to chapter, and the point of housing them together is to get researchers who study disaster from separate disciplinary bases into conversation.

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.

This collection gathers papers from the Workshops of Thought held at Dakar and Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, where the invited scholars first argued among themselves and then met a wider public in open sessions. The stated aim was to start from Africa as a place rather than treat it as a case, and to build frameworks of analysis equal to what is actually in motion across the continent.

The contributions take up decoloniality, the construction of social utopias, the standing of the African question in a global frame, how the universal and the singular are joined, the rebuilding of collective self-regard, and what it takes to think together. Their authors come from a wide spread of disciplines. Mamadou Diouf opens by putting European universalism to the test of indigenous histories, setting the tone for a volume more interested in producing new terms of intelligibility than in arriving at a single position.

Why Christians and Vodouists in Haiti have so often stood in opposition is the question the editors begin with, tracing the hostility to both historical circumstance and competing ideas. From there the collection turns practical, proposing ways the two communities might live together with less friction.

Contributors approach the problem from several directions, among them memoir, anthropology and fieldwork, the study of religious experience, and gender analysis, and the volume also supplies concrete material for those who want to run interreligious dialogue or teach it in Haitian settings.

Three convictions hold the project together: that religion is a good worth defending, capable of serving dignity and justice; that a country cannot be built democratically without cooperation across differences, which the editors take to be a central task of religious traditions; and that religion's public standing can be turned toward reconciliation and friendship rather than division.

Nwokocha's subject is the tight weave of sacred and secular life in Haitian Vodou, where spirits bear on what Black practitioners do from one day to the next.

That connection, she argues, shows itself in the interplay among four things: ceremonies held in public, the material aesthetics that surround them, the adornment of the body, and possession by the spirits. The book treats these as one dynamic set of relations rather than separate topics.

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.

Grace Sanders Johnson follows a group of Haitian women whose lives ran well beyond Haiti's borders — through the Caribbean and on to the United States, Canada, and the Belgian Congo — during and after the years of US occupation.

The book is framed as transnational history, taking gender and radical politics as its subject. By staying with this particular cohort of elite and middle-class women, Sanders Johnson examines how ideas of womanhood, nation, and race were worked out together in their lives rather than treated as separate attachments.

Haiti buys roughly four-fifths of the rice it consumes from abroad and pays a premium for it. Import rules cap broken kernels at four percent, which pushes the country toward some of the costliest non-fragrant long grain rice anywhere — a strange position for a poor nation that depends on rice as a staple.

Richardson and colleagues test whether that standard matches what buyers actually want. A non-hypothetical field experiment in open-air markets, with three hundred observations, measured how shoppers priced rice containing more broken grains. Across locations and income groups, only the highest earners paid extra for a cleaner sample.

The authors read this as a signal to policymakers that consumers will accept rice above the four percent threshold. Since broken rice carries the same nutritional value and can be sourced more cheaply on world markets, they argue that relaxing the rule could ease food insecurity by offering an alternative to expensive domestic and imported grain.

Mary D. Lewis writes in the wake of a New York Times series from May 20, 2022 on what the "ransom" Haiti paid to former French planters, compensation for property they lost in the revolution, did to the country.

Her own subject is the pressure that French merchant interests brought to bear on their government over the question of recognizing Haitian independence. Only the opening lines of the piece are available in this record, so the argument itself cannot be reported here.

Thornton addresses a puzzle in Vodou and in a number of other African American religious traditions: how Catholic saints came to stand alongside deities drawn from Yoruba and Fon practice.

Two claims carry the argument. The first is that the saints came primarily out of the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo. The second explains why it was the Yoruba-Fon gods in particular who joined them: most religions of Atlantic Africa attach their spirits to a specific place or people, but this tradition has deities that travel and whose authority can extend anywhere, which made them fit company for saints in a way other African deities were not.

Girard reads the papers of a single estate, the Bréda plantation at Haut-du-Cap, and finds that flight from it was roughly ten times more common than the runaway notices in the colonial press would indicate.

The gap is widest for collective departures, the temporary walkouts long dismissed as something less than real marronage. These show up neither in the newspapers nor in the plantation's accounting records, yet on this estate they were both the most frequent form of flight and the one most likely to succeed.

If other plantation studies turn up the same pattern, Girard suggests, the long-running Debien-Fouchard argument about the links between marronage and the revolt of 1791 would need rethinking. His proposal is to set aside the division between small and large marronage and look instead at group flight, whose revolutionary potential has been undervalued.

Campbell builds an essay around one odd episode — crabs swarming ashore — in Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo of 1808. The reading follows the crustacean backward into eighteenth-century natural history, where writers on the natural world had already loaded the animal with meaning about slavery, and specifically about the threat that enslaved people were thought to pose to European colonization.

Taken as an emblem rather than a stray detail, the swarm lets Sansay do two things at once: register American alarm at the Haitian Revolution and take the edge off that alarm by rendering it in the cool, classifying idiom of science.

Campbell treats the episode as evidence for a wider claim about the period's fiction — that political commentary often sits inside borrowed scientific description, and that early American literary study has something to gain from reading natural history alongside the novels.

Jean-Charles builds a framework she calls a Black feminist ethic and tests it on contemporary Haitian fiction, principally novels by Kettly Mars, Évelyne Trouillot and Yanick Lahens. Her title is deliberate: seeing the world through women's eyes, a phrase she takes from Myriam Merlet, is where the work starts rather than where it ends, since the point is to imagine other worlds and eventually to build them.

Thinking ethically, in her account, has four moving parts: the internal logic of a novel, the thinking its characters do, what happens in readers as a result, and what all of this discloses about the worlds the authors make. She draws on Spivak's definition of ethics as inquiry pressed from below and on recent Black feminist writing about care, reading closely and always intersectionally.

Alongside the novels she analyses visual, popular and sonic work by Haitian women, keeping the study anchored in the present and in ordinary life.

Escape from slavery, marronnage, ran across centuries in Haiti, and Eddins treats it as an answer to the plantation, a system built, in Sylvia Wynter's terms, to deny people their humanity, cut their social and cultural bonds, and turn them and their labour into goods.

Alongside arguments by Cedric Robinson, Wynter, and Jean Casimir, the article makes marronnage a form of anti-capitalist resistance, political criticism, and organizing from below. In fleeing, enslaved people repossessed themselves and what enslavers had taken: their hours, relationships, knowledge, and skills. Reclaiming those things undercut colonial structures and helped bring down first Spanish and then French slaveries on the island.

Africa-born rebels and maroons stood at the center of the mobilizing that abolished slavery and ended colonial rule between 1791 and 1804. Afterward, as the new government copied parts of colonial administration, the formerly enslaved built communal arrangements around subsistence and kin and kept using marronnage to protest, exposing the limits of Haiti's own states.

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.

Niño and González use process tracing to ask what motivated the hiring of mercenaries to remove Haiti's increasingly authoritarian president. Tracing that question back through the country's history, they map the points at which crime and political institutions grew into one another.

What they describe is a phantom state: a political structure that exists in name but has been supplanted in practice, its authority contested by rival groups until state presence became limited, fragmented, delegated, and authoritarian. Force is no longer the state's alone; it is parceled out among competing oligopolies of violence, with state institutions serving as machinery for criminal organizations to hold territory and take profit.

On this account Jovenel Moïse had allied his government with the strongest gangs while weakening political groups and criminal rivals, and the mercenaries became the instrument for breaking that grip. The killing, the authors conclude, followed a plan by political leaders acting with judicial complicity to check the concentration of executive power.

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.