Glissant begins in the hold of the slave ship: a place that swallows and dissolves, then expels, and that binds strangers into a shared unknown. It is the first of three abysses, the second being the sea floor marked by bodies thrown overboard in irons, the third the loss of everything left behind. From that unmaking he derives not a lost origin waiting to be recovered but another way of belonging.

Against the single root, which takes everything into itself and kills what grows nearby, he sets rhizomatic identity, extended through relation to others; against exile and errantry understood as deprivation, a rootedness that needs no totalising stock. He takes the rhizome from Deleuze and Guattari while declining their faith in nomadism as liberation.

The book's most quoted demand is for opacity — a right not to be made transparent, not to be reduced to somebody else's measure. Relation guards what can touch without being fused.

Eighteen case studies make up this collection, each concerned with women who held power in Africa. Kaplan's subjects are royal and elite women, brought into their positions by inheritance, by their own choosing, or by circumstance, and the volume examines the ritual and political offices through which they came to wield authority and sway, at home as well as in public life.

Around twelve ethnic groups from sub-Saharan Africa appear, most of them southern or West African.

Contributors are drawn from across the disciplines: religion, women's studies, art history, comparative literature, political science, history, and African as well as African American studies.

Clark assembled this volume as the first reasonably complete account of African prehistory, running from the earliest hominids of the Plio-Pleistocene to the point after about 500 BC when iron technology spread. Chapters are built to stand on their own, so material occasionally recurs; the editor treats that as intended rather than careless, and is scrupulous about how radiocarbon results are reported and where they have been calibrated against tree-ring sequences.

An opening chapter lays the physical groundwork: a continent of extremes, equatorial forest and the world's greatest hot desert, rift trenches and snow-capped volcanoes, basins lying well below sea level, and the climatic swings recorded in cave fills, lake margins, spring tufas and coastal gravels that decided where Acheulian populations could live.

Later chapters carry the story into the Saharan and Mediterranean Neolithic, the domestication of sorghum, millet and rice, Egypt and Nubia, and the first Iron Age.

How did a state whose people were overwhelmingly African and Afro-Caribbean end up carrying an Amerindian word? Geggus notes that nobody recorded how the decision was reached, and works backward from what it ruled out.

An African name was never plausible. The enslaved spoke dozens of languages and no single homeland could have satisfied them all, while the officers who signed the declaration of 1804 were mostly colony-born and largely of mixed descent. Taino symbolism gave the new state an anchor outside both Europe and Africa, and suited a literate ex-free-colored group that now filled the administration.

Geggus is skeptical of the companion claim that Arawak language or ritual survived to be picked up in 1804. The island's native population had all but vanished by the 1550s, Boya was not a Taino remnant, and the chant long cited as Arawak turns out to be African. What he grants the name is staying power: it outlasted partition, monarchy and republic alike.

Michel's account of Charlemagne Peralte is frankly commemorative: its sections are cantos, and the guerrilla leader's road to execution is told as a Calvary with his mother as the grieving witness. It begins at Hinche on the Central Plateau, where he grew up as the youngest son of General Massena Peralte, served at mass under the priest who would later hear his confession in prison, and formed the attachment to his mother that carried him through the war.

The narrative turns on late July 1915: the killing of prisoners in Port-au-Prince, the lynching of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam after crowds took him from the French legation, the execution of the hated post commander at Leogane where Peralte held authority, and the landing of the Marines at Bizoton that same afternoon.

The translator's introduction places him in a line from Louverture and Dessalines, and reads the occupation's methods as techniques the United States went on to use elsewhere. Documents are appended.

Shannon sets Price-Mars's formation against the conditions that brought American marines ashore in 1915. Haiti entered the century cut off from the world economy, its elite French in language, religion and schooling, its debt held in Paris, its commerce passing into German and Levantine hands, with foreign businessmen financing the coups that kept turning the presidency over.

The turn in Price-Mars's own thinking came from reading Gustave Le Bon, who sorted human races by psychological traits held to be fixed by heredity and beyond the reach of education. That a people could be written off in advance struck him as an insolence refuted by fourteen years of revolutionary war, and he resolved to answer it.

The occupation supplied the occasion. Shannon follows Caperton's landing and his assumption of governing authority over a country with no institution able to refuse him, then turns to Price-Mars's early efforts to organize Haitians in response.

Edited by Gaspar and Hine, this collection puts gender at the center of how slave societies worked. Its premise is that enslavement was never a single experience: men and women lived it differently, and women were exploited for their reproductive capacity as well as for their labor.

That difference extends to resistance. The volume holds that women appear rarely in accounts of revolt because their opposition took less confrontational forms, closer to the inventive daily work of surviving abuse and the denial of their humanity.

Sixteen contributors take up the subject, among them Hilary Beckles, Barbara Bush, David Barry Gaspar, David P. Geggus, Wilma King, Bernard Moitt, Claire Robertson, Susan M. Socolow, and Brenda E. Stevenson. Drew Faust, quoted in the publisher's notice, describes the book as filling a gap for scholars of women, slavery, and African American history.

Michel approaches Vodou as an educational system rather than an exotic survival, asking how its view of the world is handed from one generation to the next in a country where nearly everyone believes in the spirits while most profess Catholicism in public.

Vodou offers no scripture and no fixed code, she argues; adepts work out moral principles from the wisdom of elders, the lessons of a life, and their dealings with the lwa. The spirits teach by mirroring the whole range of human conduct, contradictions included, rather than by precept, which is why outsiders have wrongly concluded the religion has no morality. Children learn by imitation, young people through graded participation and responsibility, initiates through long apprenticeship. Competence is judged by style and by konesans, a knowledge that is both the means and the end of the training.

No settlement in Haiti, Michel concludes, will hold while the elite and foreign actors refuse this culture their respect.

Kadish takes up four French women — Germaine de Staël, Olympe de Gouges, Claire de Duras, and Sophie Doin — who wrote between 1790 and 1825 about the uprisings of 1791 in Haiti. Rather than treating rebel violence as inexplicable, each set it against the violence of slavery itself.

The pairing of terror with blackness in the article's title echoes C. L. R. James, whose The Black Jacobins appeared in 1938, and that echo frames how these writers handled their subject.

Reading their responses closely yields three things at once, Kadish argues: a clearer picture of antislavery sentiment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, evidence of women's part in the political and cultural thought of the period, and a link between the abolitionist cause and women's emergence as writers with a voice of their own.

Rural Haiti is usually taken as the least likely place on earth for voluntary cooperation to work, which is precisely why White and Runge choose it. They recast the upkeep of a small watershed as a problem of public goods, where a landholder's contribution of labor amounts to a conditional promise to cooperate rather than defect, then test statistically which farmers actually turned out.

The results unsettle a familiar assumption. Insecure land tenure made no difference to participation, and neither wealth nor poverty predicted much; check dams went up on defectors' land as readily as on cooperators', and roughly a third of the labor came from people holding no land in the watershed at all. What did predict cooperation was prior membership in a groupman and the habit of exchanging labor, reciprocity-based institutions already in place. Jointly held ravines, effectively open access, were the one arrangement local assurance could not overcome.

Trouillot argues that Haiti's color question can neither be detached from a worldwide hierarchy of races and cultures nor reduced to one. Nothing there resembles the apparatus familiar from segregated America - no color riots, no lynchings, no slurs on school walls - and yet color remains decisive, working through family alliance and serving as a favored idiom of politics.

His demonstration is demographic. Given how few light-skinned people survived the war of independence, genetics cannot explain the persistence of a category called clairs; only the social management of marriage can, and the boundary keeps sliding darker to keep it populated. He describes the resulting bargain: the ascending darker partner brings education and prospects, the lighter one what he calls epidermic capital, and the return arrives a generation or two later, in the children.

Because the color line and the income line move separately, prejudice cannot be read off class - the point Marxist accounts of noirisme and mulatrisme refuse.

Social science has spent its energy on formal institutions, Laguerre observes, inheriting from the Enlightenment the conviction that societies improve by being rationally ordered. He proposes reversing the procedure: study the American city from the standpoint of informality and let the formal system be understood from there.

Informal practices in his account are neither marginal nor residual but permanent and structuring, at once peripheral and central to how a city works. Some predate Western formality and survived its imposition through colonization; others exist simply because no formal apparatus can regulate everything.

His material comes largely from the San Francisco Bay Area and Oakland. He shows space being informalized from the supply side, by traders spilling out of premises, and from the demand side, by the customer who turns a street into a mechanic's shop, and he follows firms adopting flexible workplace arrangements until home and office, formal and informal work, blur into each other.

Farmer's subject is not Haitian poverty but its manufacture. Following Gutiérrez, who asked that exploitation be studied concretely rather than deplored in general, he runs two investigations at once: a historical account of the economic and political forces that produced the crisis, and close attention to what those forces did to particular Haitians he has known.

The historical half is written deliberately from the losing side, in something close to the register Haitians use about their own past. American journalists have read that register as paranoia — the reflex of finding Washington's hand in everything — and Farmer's reply is that the specific charges, once checked, hold up. So did the peasant claim he first took for metaphor, that the United States trafficked in Haitian blood: under Duvalier, Hemo-Caribbean shipped tons of plasma a month to North American laboratories.

The 1991 coup and the HIV-positive refugees held at Guantánamo frame the whole argument.

Rival pictures of kreyòl, and what was at stake in fixing its spelling. Schieffelin and Doucet treat the standardization of an orthography as a symbolic decision rather than a technical one.

Educated Haitians describe the language as something they hold in common with everyone else in the country, and it has long served as a durable marker of Haitian identity. Its image, though, is fought over in several arenas at once, and the terms speakers use to label varieties of spoken kreyòl carry ideological weight of their own.

Tying those metalinguistic labels to the spelling disputes, the authors read the whole argument as nationalist discourse about Haitianness — about what counts as authentic and legitimate, and therefore about the part language plays in forming a national identity.

Ani names her study after a figure from Dogon myth, a being born out of a refusal of cosmic order and bent thereafter on disturbing it. The book is an avowed polemic — an attempt to put Europe inside an African-centred frame and study it as European scholarship has long studied others.

Its premise is that European dominance rested less on arms than on culture, because a culture carries rules for thinking, and imposing one on the conquered narrows what they can imagine or intend. Decolonising the mind therefore has to come first, and teaching Pan-African studies well, she says, means teaching Europe alongside them.

The analysis runs on a vocabulary she builds herself. Asili is the seed or ideological core from which a culture's creations cohere; utamawazo is thought as that core patterns it; utamaroho is its driving energy. To these she adds the cultural other, and the rhetorical ethic — high talk about conduct meant only for effect.

Scholars have long tied the rise of Saint-Domingue's wealthy free people of color to the coffee boom that began in the late 1760s. Garrigus tests that chronology in the southern parish of Aquin, working from notarial records, estate inventories and colonial censuses, and finds that the fortunes of families such as the Raimonds, Ploys and Depas-Medinas rested instead on indigo, on three generations of accumulated technical skill, and on a brisk contraband trade that their distance from official ports made possible.

Prosperity of this kind, he argues, began early in the eighteenth century and was merely accelerated after 1760. What changed abruptly was race. Men addressed as Sieur in official papers, their ancestry unremarked, were by the 1780s labelled by colour in the same documents, and apparent surges in the free colored population may register a hardening of that line rather than actual growth. Planters losing civic standing as they gained wealth pressed their claim to citizenship after 1789.

Janken opens with his subject's lifelong refusal of the word "black" — a refusal so absolute that Logan would break off a conversation or resign from an organisation over it. He preferred "Negro," took the newer term for the property of racial chauvinists who denied that African Americans had European forebears, and reckoned his own ancestry in exact fractions.

The early chapters put that temperament in its setting: birth in 1897, at what Logan later called the nadir of African-American life, into a Washington with an established Black community and good segregated schools; a mother and grandfather from a county of free Negroes in northern Virginia, whose family stories of white kin and unclaimed inheritances he grew up hearing.

From there the narrative moves to the First World War, to the argument among African Americans over whose war it was, and to the Pan-African organising around Du Bois and Blaise Diagne that Logan would soon join.

Laguerre treats the Haitian army as an institution that cannot be understood apart from the government it makes and unmakes or the society it polices. Much of the research was done inside the institution, at army headquarters and the military academy in Port-au-Prince, among officers who would shortly find themselves on opposite sides of the 1991 coup against Aristide.

The historical chapters follow the force from the fragmented, regionally based body of the nineteenth century, when the centre kept generals on a short leash precisely to stop them building local followings, through its consolidation into a professional bureaucracy under the American occupation, to the Duvalier years, when infiltration by the militia neutralised the army rather than restructuring it.

A recurring theme is the failure to create a separate civilian police. The army has resisted because policing supplies its income, its contacts with politicians, its cover for corruption, and its capacity to remove a president at will.

In conversation, Fouchard lays out the version of Haitian history he spent a career defending. He starts before Columbus, with Ciboney and Arawak settlement, and refuses the word discovery: an island of a million people was already inhabited, and what followed was extermination in the search for gold.

Marronnage is his organizing idea. Flight began with the first African arrivals in 1503 and never stopped, carrying with it poisoning, sabotage, arson and abortion, and keeping a habit of resistance alive two centuries before the Encyclopedists wrote a line. When the indigenous army was close to collapse before Leclerc, he argues, it was maroon commanders who kept fighting and showed the regular officers how the war could be won.

He also claims Toussaint for American history, on the grounds that his refusal to serve Napoleon's designs forced the sale of Louisiana, and ends on colonial theater and the singer Minette.

Two claims recur in writing about the rising of August 1791 in Saint-Domingue's northern plain: that it grew out of marronage, and that vodou furnished its organization and inspiration. Geggus tests both against the documentary record and finds neither well supported.

Colonists went on distinguishing runaways from insurgents, and no maroon band is known to have joined the revolt. Boukman and Jean-François had each been fugitives, but neither led a maroon community, and the leaders appear to have been living on their plantations when it began, which suggests the rising was organized from inside the system rather than outside it. Marronage, he proposes, worked more as a safety valve.

On religion he is equally cautious, noting that the chant tied to Bois Caïman has been mistranslated as an oath to kill whites when it in fact calls on a Kongo divinity for protection. That such cults gave rebellions leaders and cohesion he grants; that they caused this one is unproven.

The volume opens by taking stock of its own sources and of the scholarship that reads them. Documentary survival is thin and haphazard until the Ottoman records, after which a rich and systematically kept government archive becomes available; archaeology, epigraphy, palaeography, diplomatic and numismatics fill part of the earlier gap.

An account of European study follows. For a thousand years Christendom and Islam largely ignored or misread one another, the Christian side elaborating what has been called a deformed image of the religion and its founder. That gave way in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as trade and diplomacy multiplied, Arabic entered the universities, and critical textual and archival method took shape. Erpenius, Golius and above all Pococke published the texts; d'Herbelot, Ockley and Sale carried the new understanding beyond the academy.

The history proper starts in pre-Islamic Arabia, treated at once as the last phase of Semitic antiquity in the Near East and as the prelude to medieval Islam.

Perched three thousand feet above the northern plain, the La Ferrière Citadel is presented here as the crowning work — and the great cost — of Henry Christophe's kingdom. Wilson recounts how Christophe refused the presidency in 1806, secured full powers in the north, and crowned himself in 1811, then built a state around a civil code and a rural one, compulsory labor, courts, schools, a printing house, and a currency backed by gold.

The fortress itself is described from the inside: galleries, magazines, cisterns, and barracks meant to hold a garrison through a three-year siege, with cannon captured from the French still trained on the valley. How thousands of conscripted men hauled guns and half a million tons of stone up those paths no surviving record explains; twenty thousand are said to have died doing it. Paralyzed by a stroke and abandoned, Christophe shot himself in 1820 and was buried in the courtyard.

Rouse sets out to restore a name and a history to the people Columbus met. They had no collective name for themselves, calling themselves after the islands they lived on; ethnohistorians settled on Taino. He sorts them into Classic groups in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Western groups in Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas, and Eastern groups in the small islands, arguing that populations at the edges stay conservative and shade into their neighbours.

Against the older view that these were recent migrants from the far headwaters of the Amazon, he brings four bodies of evidence — the Spanish chronicles, archaeology, historical linguistics and biology — to a single conclusion. The ancestors did come from South America, traceable to the Orinoco valley, but the Taino themselves took shape within the archipelago over millennia that radiocarbon dating has made visible.

He also separates them sharply from the Island-Caribs, whose alleged cannibalism colonists inflated to license enslaving them.

Thornton argues that the 1739 rising in South Carolina becomes legible once the participants' African past is taken seriously. Historians had already invoked African backgrounds to explain rice growing, folk medicine, language and religion in the low country, but had left the colony's largest slave revolt out of that reckoning.

Most captives shipped through Kabinda in the decades before 1739 probably came from Kongo, and Kongo was no blank to Europeans. A Kongolese wrote in Portuguese as early as 1491, schools stood in every provincial capital, and a creole Portuguese served as the language of trade across west-central Africa -- which helps explain how Spanish offers of freedom in Florida could reach these rebels and be understood.

Forty-four years of civil war after 1665 also meant that some of those sold had been soldiers. Carolina had closed militia service to slaves by that decade, while African armies were taking up the flintlock in exactly these years.

Bulfinch Lambe worked for the Royal African Company at its factory in Jakin, the port of Allada, until the king of Allada seized him in 1722 as security against an unpaid debt. When Agaja of Dahomey conquered Allada in 1724, Lambe passed into his hands and was carried inland to Abomey.

Agaja soon formed the idea, perhaps at Lambe's prompting, of negotiating a commercial agreement with the Company. Writing that November to Jeremiah Tinker, who governed the Company's factory in neighboring Whydah, Lambe reported the king's interest in establishing a correspondence and in having Europeans come to him, and offered himself as intermediary, which doubled as a route out of captivity. His release in 1726 came with the expectation that he would come back: Agaja told the trader William Snelgrave the following year that Lambe had sworn to return with a ship.

Law builds on Marion Johnson's earlier account of the episode in this journal.

Trouillot takes apart a story Haitian intellectuals and foreign observers have told in chorus for well over a century: that the country has simply been unlucky in its rulers. Treat the state as a free-standing thing acting on society, he argues, and nothing is left but to trust whichever clique looks most promising. States are conditioned instead by where they came from, where they sit in the world order, and what productive base they tax.

Reading colonial Saint-Domingue for those conditions, he finds the pattern that outlasted it: slavery, dependence, export crops, the plantation - and against them a peasant way of working that the enslaved built inside the estate system and afterward defended. The elites who took power inherited the colonists' divided sense of belonging, proud of a black nation and oriented elsewhere at once.

Hence the title: state and nation were pointed away from each other from the outset, and Duvalierism follows from that divergence rather than interrupting it.

Fick sets out to show how the outlook and the collective action of ordinary people shaped the revolution in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue and what followed it. The book moves from slavery and the forms of resistance that preceded 1791, through the risings in the north and the separate struggles of free people of colour, into a long treatment of the south, tracing the path from local revolt to civil war and independence.

Writing in the late 1980s, Fick connects that history to the mass mobilisations then spreading from Gonaives, Saint Marc and other provincial towns to the capital, and argues that leaderless popular organisation, not politicians or foreign patrons, brought down the dictatorship. Reconstruction, on this view, will come from rural knowledge and local forms of association or it will not come at all.

Names that colonizers attach to colonized people are never simply descriptive. Trouillot treats such labels as the product of several forces working at once: the everyday social relations of a given colony, the assumptions colonists carried with them, rivalries between empires, and pressures arriving from the metropole.

The case examined here is Dominica, where British colonists took roughly a century, from 1838 to 1928, to settle on calling the island's cultivators peasants. Trouillot follows that slow shift in vocabulary and shows that the term carried the same weight for both sides of the quarrel over it. Those who welcomed the label and those who resisted it agreed on what it signified: an admission that production on the island had changed, and that cultivators had won firmer command over how their own work was organized.