Lee covers Singapore's first three decades after the separation from Malaysia in 1965, a small country left without a hinterland, working against long odds. He dates the anxiety precisely: relief in 1971, when enough jobs existed to absorb the British military withdrawal, and confidence only after the island came through the oil shock of 1973.

Numbers frame the story. Income per head stood at four hundred dollars when he took office in 1959, more than twelve thousand when he stepped down in 1990, and twenty-two thousand by the end of the 1990s. Alignment with the West during the Cold War, he notes, brought both regional solidarity and backing from the Americans, Western Europeans and Japanese.

He is careful about what the book is not. It offers no formula for building an economy or a nation, only the problems he and his colleagues faced and how they solved them, arranged by theme rather than by year.

A technical manual explaining how USAID builds its annual Country Roadmaps, the scorecards it publishes for every low- and middle-income country it works with.

Two dimensions organise the exercise. Commitment covers what a country's laws, policies and informal norms actually do — open and accountable governance, inclusive development across gender and social groups, and economic policy. Capacity covers what it can deliver: government effectiveness, tax collection, safety and security, the strength of civil society and free media, the condition of citizens, and the productivity of the economy. Eighteen primary metrics carry the weight, eight on commitment and ten on capacity, with further secondary measures behind them.

For each metric the guide names the definition, the outside data source, and the place it occupies in the framework. Closing sections document the arithmetic: normalisation, aggregation, the time periods covered, what is done about missing data, and which countries are included.

Written jointly by an anthropologist and a Haitian-born scholar who met when he walked into her office to tell her that her dissertation had it wrong -- Haitians, he said, never stop thinking about Haiti -- this book grows out of a 1996 trip and 109 interviews, most of them with people who had little money and no power.

Its subject is what the authors call long-distance nationalism: an ideology that keeps a territorial homeland and its state at the centre while refusing to let borders settle who belongs to the nation. Emigrants, their children and those who stayed behind are bound into a single transborder citizenry, justified by talk of shared descent and blood, and it produces actions rather than only sentiment.

Haiti supplies the case. Remittances prop up the economy; Aristide named the diaspora a tenth department and created a ministry for Haitians abroad, while American opinion still expects immigrants to pick one country.

Library organizations around the world moved quickly after the January 2010 earthquake. The American Library Association raised funds at its Midwinter Meeting in Boston, created a relief fund for rebuilding the country's libraries and archives, and began coordinating with the Blue Shield committee, IFLA and UNESCO. Its Black Caucus opened a separate fund channelled to relief agencies.

Much of the account concerns the Digital Library of the Caribbean, run out of Florida International University, which launched an initiative aimed at the National Archives and the country's three biggest heritage libraries. The buildings were standing but damaged, one of them likely to be demolished, and staff asked first for gloves, masks, archival boxes and temporary help, with shelving, equipment and conservation work to follow. The National Library came through with its shelving and holdings shifted.

Speaking with Rowell after the flooding of New Orleans, Hall explains why she once described the city as the most African in America. Africans reached Louisiana in a compact mass before 1731, two-thirds of them from Senegambia, and their languages, religion, cooking and music shaped the colony during its formative years; Louisiana Creole was made by that first generation and their children.

She resists the habit of crediting Caribbean or Haitian influence for what Louisiana made itself, noting that the Creole spoken there is a separate language from Haiti's, that voodoo in Louisiana was led by women rather than men, and that Marie Laveau's ancestry turns out to be entirely local.

Asked why televised images of the Superdome struck other Americans as foreign, she answers twice over: culturally, in the French names and the musicality of speech; politically, in a pattern of governing a hard-to-control population through repression, corruption, mass incarceration and the deliberate encouragement of division by color.

Logan treats the two states sharing Hispaniola as a single problem. He opens with the physical island - the gap between temperatures at Furcy and at sea level in Port-au-Prince, the short and irregular rivers, the Artibonite that floods and then dwindles, the porous limestone that stores no water and the deforestation that has made run-off worse.

He turns then to the people, setting out how conquest and slavery produced the island's population and the vocabulary of mixture attached to it, and why the near-total disappearance of the Taino, together with the small number of Spanish settlers, left Santo Domingo less Hispanicized and less severe about color than the mainland colonies.

The history that follows is one of entanglement and outside pressure: Toussaint's constitution claiming the whole island, later cited by Haitian rulers as warrant for repeated invasions; the French withdrawal of 1809; and the American customs receivership, which by 1912 had marines ashore and Washington choosing Dominican presidents.

Danticat edited this volume for Akashic's Noir series, which assigns each contributor a specific neighborhood or locale and had reached its thirty-sixth city with Haiti. The stories are new work, from Haitian writers including Gary Victor, Kettly Mars and Yanick Lahens along with others based in the diaspora and two foreign writers on Haiti.

In her introduction Danticat records that the project began roughly a year before the earthquake of 12 January 2010, which caused over two hundred thousand deaths and left more than a million people homeless in the capital and in Léogâne, Petit-Goâve and Jacmel; she was writing while survivors were still in makeshift camps. Hardship, she notes, predated the disaster, and so did the humor and invention Haitians have long put into painting, music and fiction, including its darker registers.

Dayan begins from a reversal. Rather than reading Haiti through the French revolution, she reads the revolution from Haitian ground, where the promise of liberty and equality met the hard facts of property, labour and race. The stories of Toussaint, Christophe and Dessalines have been told and retold in Haiti itself, and they conflict according to who is telling them and to what end; Dayan turns away from mainstream historical accounts toward what Haitians wrote about themselves.

Much of the book dwells on figures who were either idealized or brutalized, and on scenes where illicit identities surface: Rochambeau inheriting Toussaint's household of women, the woman known as Defilee gathering up the pieces of Dessalines's body, Ezili as a spirit of love who forbids it, among others.

Underlying the reconstruction is vodou, taken not as exotica but, following a remark of Sidney Mintz that stayed with her, as a set of postulates about reality.

Commissioned for the United Nations Secretary-General, Collier's report contends that Haiti's economic prospects are far better than its standing among so-called fragile states suggests. He points to a calm and prosperous neighbourhood, the absence of ethnic division or an armed opposition, a large and politically effective diaspora in North America, wage costs competitive with China's, proximity to the American market, and nine years of guaranteed duty-free access under HOPE II.

What is missing, on this account, is not potential but a strategy. Donors have treated strategy as the government's business alone, yet capacity is thin and the decisive levers sit with donors, the Security Council, parliament and investors, so commitments have to be made together rather than in sequence.

Collier proposes a deliberately narrow programme organised around employment, basic services, food supply and the environment, with quick results credited to Haitians. Urgency comes from the shocks of 2008 and from the fixed horizons of MINUSTAH and HOPE II.

Rhodes reads the Georgia Gazette straight through from 1763 to 1799, along with papers in Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, New York, London and Paris, and pulls out 123 items concerning Haitians. From them she reconstructs both an episode and the way it was reported.

The episode is the siege of Savannah in 1779, where men of colour from Saint-Domingue fought under d'Estaing beside American troops, and where several future leaders of Haitian independence got their first experience of war. White historians, she notes, have mostly passed over their part while Black historians have magnified it, and she treats the silence and the celebration as two forms of the same distortion.

She also traces what a partisan, Tory-controlled press chose to print and to withhold about Black soldiers and, later, about the revolution in the colony — an anxiety that resurfaces in the Charleston conspiracy trials of 1822.

Mocombe sets out to name and codify a philosophical system he finds already embedded in Vodou practice, calling it Haitian or Vilokan idealism. On his reading the cosmos is a single material universe made by Bondye out of itself, doubled into a profane world and a mirrored sacred one where the lwa exist as real concepts, ideals and skills reached through dreams, divination, trance, reason or ordinary experience.

He treats this as a form of transcendental idealism close to Kant's but departing from it at two points: the noumenal realm is knowable rather than sealed off, and the categories of understanding are supplemented by dream and trance states. Out of it he derives a hermeneutic phenomenology, a materialism, an antidialectics in which each person contends against everyone else's interpretation, and an ethic of reciprocal justice.

Later chapters follow these commitments through the revolution, the lakou and Haitian aesthetics, and argue that Haiti's metaphysics has outrun its sciences.

Anglophone scholarship on Haiti has expanded sharply, driven by Atlantic and world history and by interest in race, colonialism and migration, while inside Haiti historical work revived once the Duvalier regime and its persecution of intellectuals ended. Sepinwall's premise is that the growth is itself an obstacle: the work is scattered across so many disciplines and journals that even specialists lose track, and newcomers have had no obvious entry point.

The volume reprints fifteen recent articles in three sections, running from colonial Saint-Domingue through the nineteenth century to the occupation, the second independence of 1934 and the earthquake of 2010. Each section opens with an essay giving background, previewing the readings, surveying the surrounding historiography and marking out where research is still needed, and closes with a reading list. Sepinwall is pointed about the gulf between Anglophone and Haitian scholarship, noting how much work by Haitian historians remains untranslated and correspondingly little cited abroad.

Geggus's studies of the Haitian Revolution begin by reconstructing the society that produced it. On the eve of 1789 Saint Domingue held some eight thousand estates and accounted for something near two-fifths of all French trade abroad, with a population of about 500,000 slaves, 40,000 whites and 30,000 free people of colour.

Each of those groups, he shows, was split from within. Planters quarrelled with merchants and with the turbulent petits blancs; the gens de couleur ranged from newly freed Africans to educated landowners, bound together only by legal disability; the enslaved majority was divided by birthplace, language and rank, with Kongolese the largest African contingent. By comparative standards, he notes, the colony's slaves rebelled remarkably little.

A further study surveys where the evidence lies: French and colonial archives, published inquiries such as the Débats of 1792–94, and the personal records generated when insurgents went into exile.

Drawing on fieldwork in the Marbial valley above Jacmel, Bastien describes how Haitian peasant families were actually organized, and how the arrangement was coming apart. His starting unit is the lakou, a cluster of huts on undivided family land, each household farming its own plot, presided over by a met whose authority is real over sons and largely ceremonial over cousins.

Land holds the arrangement together and also destroys it. A father parcels his holdings informally among his children, daughters included; at his death, vague boundaries, unrecognized heirs and defective titles produce lawsuits that break families, and the costs push peasants off the very land they fought to keep. Each lakou has its own graveyard and its inherited spirits, so the ground is ancestral as much as economic.

Bastien reads the resulting fragmentation, alongside erosion and population growth, as the setting for Haiti's agricultural crisis.

Geggus asks why vodou, alone among the neo-African religions of the Americas, became the faith of a national majority, and finds the answer in an unusual combination of circumstances.

Africans made up well over half the non-white population of Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, and nothing much stood against them: after the Jesuits were expelled in the 1760s, and through the long rupture with Rome that lasted until 1860, efforts to christianise the rural population were slight. Yet baptism and priests kept their prestige, and many Central African captives arrived already carrying some Christianity from Portuguese and Italian missions, which made the fusing of Catholic ritual with African rites easier than a simple model of acculturation allows.

Turning to the colonial record, he works chiefly from Moreau de Saint-Méry's account of a snake cult in the west province, associated with Aja-Fon captives the colonists called Arada, and follows its vocabulary and its serpent deity back toward Whydah.

Taking up Trouillot's claim that the Haitian Revolution could not be thought at the moment it occurred, the editors move the argument from historiography into language. If the concepts adequate to the event were still being invented alongside it, its silencing was structural rather than merely retrospective — and literature, poised at the edge of the believable, becomes a privileged place to watch that pressure register.

They read Article Fourteen of the 1805 constitution, declaring all Haitians Black regardless of origin, as exactly such an invention: a performative act that collapses the classification it borrows from and turns an as-if into a promise still outstanding. Following Trouillot, they warn against letting uniqueness harden into exceptionalism.

The second thread is disciplinary. Romanticism has absorbed the French Revolution at length while treating Haiti as an afterthought. The volume asks what changes when Haiti enters not as subject matter but as an event in the history of Romanticism itself.

Bouchereau's 1957 study reads the position of women in Haiti as a sequence of cultural inheritances. It opens before the conquest, drawing on Las Casas, Oviedo and Charlevoix to describe a Taino order in which chieftaincies could pass through sisters and women held villages and whole cacicats — Anacaona, poet, queen and stateswoman, being the figure Haitian historiography has kept.

The second layer is African. Since the captives shipped from Senegal to Mozambique became the island's majority, she sketches women's roles in West and Central Africa before turning to the French colony, where the first women sent from France were drawn from prisons and the streets of Paris, and where women helped lead the 1722 revolt at Le Cap against the Compagnie des Indes.

The Haitian period begins in ruins. Slavery, she argues, had shattered clan and family organisation and made women objects of passing pleasure; Dessalines then had to legislate a social order largely out of metropolitan remnants.

Zephaniah Kingsley — merchant, slaveowner, slave trader — spent the revolutionary decades in motion around the Atlantic. Fleszar uses that itinerary to track a worldview taking shape and then breaking apart.

Enlightenment thinkers had worried about what happened when boundaries were crossed, real or imagined, picturing the ocean as a brutal space full of shape-shifters who answered to nothing but profit. Kingsley's life supplies the case. The process began, Fleszar argues, with what he paid for staying loyal to the British Crown as an idea, and was then worked on by the violence, mobility, anxiety and constant adaptation of booming Caribbean markets during the Haitian Revolution.

Following how he manipulated identity and race does more than catalogue the masks of his self-invention; it brings into view how deeply power was structured across the Atlantic.

A reference volume for English-speaking readers approaching Haiti, built to be consulted rather than read through. Entries are deliberately brief: enough to make sense of a name or term met elsewhere, with a bibliography and bibliographical essay at the back for anyone who wants to pursue it.

Coverage reaches from geography and population to political and governmental history, and on to culture and social welfare. Perusse describes a country whose survival under punishing conditions he finds remarkable, and a culture mixing African and French elements through speech, worship, custom and art, supplying colour and invention in the middle of poverty.

The editorial choices are stated plainly. Because the audience is anglophone, the English headword normally leads, with the French, Spanish or Creole term cross-referenced to it; words that translate awkwardly, or that English has already absorbed, keep their original form, usually with the definite article dropped.

Hebblethwaite approaches the history of Haitian Creole through the language of Vodou. The rites and the sacred songs performed during services are in Haitian Creole, but their vocabulary reaches well beyond it, carrying items traceable to West African languages such as Fon, Yoruba, Ewe and Igbo, as well as to West Central African sources.

The available description breaks off at that point, before the study's findings, so its conclusions about those borrowings are not represented here.

A statistical portrait of Boston's Haitian-born population, issued by the city as part of a series on its immigrant communities. It dates the community's origins to Haitians fleeing the Duvalier regime from the late 1950s, and locates present-day settlement in Mattapan, Roxbury, Dorchester and Hyde Park, with movement outward to the South Shore and to Lawrence, Lowell and Worcester.

Census figures give roughly 18,900 Haitian-born residents in the city, the largest single immigrant group at a tenth of the foreign-born total. The profile covers age, marriage, naturalisation, schooling, occupation, labour-force participation and self-employment, measuring Haitians throughout against all foreign-born and all native-born residents.

Two results stand out. Attainment at the high-school level matches or exceeds both comparison groups while degree-holding lags far behind them. And a fifth of Haitian workers hold health-care support jobs, most of them registered nurses, four times the share among other immigrants and ten times that of the native-born.

Frost sets out to teach statistical reasoning to readers who mostly encounter numbers and charts produced by someone else and want to judge whether they can be trusted, and he does it with explanation rather than formal derivation.

An opening section pits statistical evidence against anecdote, using a weight-loss supplement to show why testimonials mislead: the people whose results were unremarkable never come forward, and a self-selected sample tells you nothing about anyone else. Observational studies, which measure many relevant variables and model the contribution of each, are distinguished from randomized controlled trials, which alone support causal conclusions.

The book then splits in two. The first half covers working tools — kinds of data, quantitative and categorical, continuous and discrete; histograms, boxplots and contingency tables, with cautions about how each can mislead; central tendency, variability, percentiles and correlation; and probability distributions, dwelling on the normal curve and standard scores. The second turns to inference from sample to population.

Luhmann opens his lecture course by telling a sociology audience that their discipline is in theoretical crisis. It keeps circling back to Weber, Marx, Simmel and Durkheim, has some middle-range theories drawn from empirical work, and has almost nothing to say about ecological problems or the therapeutic demands of modern life. The interesting developments, he suggests, are happening outside the field.

The lectures therefore begin with the structural and maintenance functionalism of American sociology in the 1940s and 1950s, and with Parsons, showing where each ran up against its limits and why the ideological criticism of the late 1960s was enough to shut the programme down. He then turns to mathematics, biology, cybernetics and epistemology for concepts sociology might borrow.

Chief among them is autopoiesis, detached from its biological origins so it can describe self-reproducing social systems, whose closure and openness condition one another and which keep human beings in their environment rather than inside them.

Bongie takes Glissant's proposition that the world is creolizing as his point of departure, opening with a passage from Carpentier in which the Americas appear as a place of mixture and identity rests on migratory routes rather than roots.

He then argues against himself. Exclusionary, essentialist thinking cannot simply be got past; assertions of fixed identity are unavoidable, and even the affirmation of a creole identity betrays the endless transformation it claims to name. Demystifying identity is a necessary tactic but not a sufficient one, and the most fervent demystifiers tend to repeat the very gesture they attack.

The readings alternate between colonial and postcolonial writing: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's island pastoral, Hugo's reactionary retelling of the Haitian Revolution and its hostility to people of mixed race, a little-known Martiniquan novel read beside the journalism of Cyrille Bissette, and two novels of 1987 by Glissant and Daniel Maximin.

Fouchard, questioned as a historian of Haiti and of the Americas generally, moves from the island's first inhabitants to its cultural life under slavery. He begins with the Ciboney and the Arawak, the Taino settlement of the Greater Antilles and Caonabo's resistance, and refuses flatly to take part in any commemoration of Columbus, whom he holds responsible for a swiftly executed genocide and for ordering the mutilation of captives who ran.

Marronnage, he says, arrives with the first Africans in 1503 and carries its idea of freedom to the Indians. He argues at length that Toussaint Louverture's refusal to serve Napoleon's designs on the mainland cost France Louisiana and so made the American federation possible, a claim he thinks ought to be taught in United States schools.

The later part of the conversation turns to Saint-Domingue's theaters, the singer Minette, and comedies performed in Creole, from which Fouchard dates an indigenous current in Haitian art long preceding Price-Mars.

Mocombe reads Dessalines through phenomenological structuralism, a structurationist framework, and argues that he differs from Haiti's traditional leaderships in a specific way.

Having avenged the island's Taino and African populations against France, Spain, and Britain, Dessalines attempted to mediate between two incompatible modes of social and system integration. On one side stood the Catholic and Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism carried by mulatto elites and creole petit-bourgeois blacks who had taken on their former masters' worldview. On the other stood the African majority's Vodou ethic and its spirit of communism, an ethos they had merged with that of the Taino.

Where the first two classes wanted Haiti absorbed into the capitalist world-system of nineteenth-century Europe, Dessalines tried to constitute the nation within both frameworks at once. Working from a structural Marxist account of practical consciousness, the book examines the roots of his policies and concludes that his death drained the revolution of its momentum.

Matthewson reconstructs Jefferson's dealings with Saint-Domingue and then with independent Haiti, and argues that neither his professed dislike of slavery nor his racism accounts for what he did. What governed him throughout was his identification with Virginia's planters and his determination to secure Louisiana and the Southwest.

Jefferson helped bring French power in the Caribbean down, which brought the Haitians their independence and at the same time opened enormous tracts of land to slaveholders. The reaction that followed, fed by the massacres of 1804 and by the Virginia conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, hardened southern opinion. He gave up his hope of early emancipation, rebuffed Dessalines, and settled on embargo and refusal of recognition, a policy that survived until 1862 at the cost of northern merchants.

Racial fear is granted a real but secondary place, and the shift of antislavery leadership from the United States to Britain is dated to these years.

Matthewson traces how a president who privately urged gradual emancipation came to embargo trade with the hemisphere's second independent republic and withhold recognition from it. Jefferson encouraged Saint-Domingue's separation from France and inherited a pragmatic line from Adams, but Gabriel's conspiracy in 1800 and the Easter Plot of 1802 hardened Virginian opinion, and he faced a Congress unwilling to countenance a black state.

Earlier accounts explained the embargo chiefly by Jefferson's appetite for the Floridas and his wish to oblige Napoleon. Matthewson reads it instead as a victory for southern conservatives, arguing that defending slavery at home required disparaging Haiti abroad. He places the decision beside Britain's, which in the same years moved to end its own slave trade and cultivate influence on the island while the United States turned to planting the southwest with slave labour.

Jefferson's stated aversion to slavery, on this account, never survived contact with racial fear and loyalty to Virginia's planter class.

Between the September 1991 coup and the intervention that restored Aristide three years later, Haiti's military rulers made sexual assault an instrument of political terror. Rey argues this set the Cedras regime apart from the Duvalier dictatorships it otherwise imitated: women and girls in pro-Aristide neighbourhoods were attacked, frequently as reprisal when a male relative sought by soldiers could not be found.

The evidence comes from a survey of ninety-eight women who suffered abuse under the regime and from repeated interviews with two dozen of them over five years. The pattern points to a sharp escalation from mid-1993, and Rey holds that senior officers ordered it. Official inquiries, he shows, recorded only a small share of the cases.

The essay then asks what religion does for survivors. Belief supplies the terms in which the violence is understood, sometimes easing recovery and sometimes obstructing it, and Rey argues that it has also helped underwrite a culture permissive of sexual violence.

In August 1704 a young Kongolese woman named Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita rose from a sickbed convinced that Saint Anthony had taken up residence in her head and charged her with putting the Kingdom of Kongo back together. Thornton follows her from that vision into the movement she built, and sets both against a country split among rival claimants to a vacant throne.

The reconstruction rests on the reports of Italian Capuchins stationed in Kongo, Bernardo da Gallo and Marcellino d'Atri above all. Thornton is open about his own hand in the material: he restores reported speech to the first person so that participants speak directly, and he standardises Kikongo names on twentieth-century usage rather than seventeenth-century Portuguese spelling.

He rejects readings of the Antonian movement as early nationalism in a semi-colonial setting, placing it instead within Kongolese Christianity and dynastic conflict, and he writes the whole as narrative rather than argument, for readers outside the university.

Bellegarde combines a compressed national history with a firsthand account of what the American occupation did to Haiti's institutions. The opening chapters run from the destruction of colonial Saint-Domingue through independence in 1804 and the long succession of nineteenth-century rulers -- Dessalines, Christophe, Petion, Boyer -- taking in the indemnity owed to France and the brief union with the Spanish east.

The heart of the book is 1915 and after. Bellegarde reconstructs the ratification of the Haitian-American convention, reproducing the speech of the deputy from Gonaives who tore off his rosette and resigned rather than sign, and sets out what the treaty actually conceded: a receiver general and a financial adviser named on Washington's designation, customs revenue pledged in a fixed order, a gendarmerie left as the republic's only armed force.

As minister of public instruction from 1918 to 1921 he testifies personally, listing the teacher-training schools Haitian law authorised and American financial officers refused to fund.

Mignolo presents decoloniality as an option rather than a creed: one of several trajectories he expects to shape the coming decades, alongside rewesternization, a reoriented Left, dewesternization, and a spiritual turn. He declines to pick a victor, arguing that the era in which any single course could claim to be the truth of history has ended.

The argument builds on Anibal Quijano's coloniality, which names what the rhetoric of modernity conceals and looks at it from the receiving end rather than, as world-system analysis does, from the vantage of the wealthy North. Fanon supplies the second thread: thinking starts from a body located in a particular history, which unsettles critical theory's placeless knower.

Later chapters read Renaissance periodization, Greenwich meridian time and Kant's geography as colonizations of time and space, then take Zapatista practice as a case where thought and action are one, closing on a cosmopolitanism that is plural and local rather than designed from Europe.

Fifty linked adventures of Bouqui, the gullible one, and Malice, who outwits him, taken down word for word from Haitian country storytellers and presented as a single cycle rather than scattered tales.

Comhaire-Sylvain then asks where they came from. Roughly twenty-five have African relatives, mostly in the hare cycle of West Africa and the Bantu world; five are widespread in Europe; two look Amerindian; seventeen she could place nowhere. Names carry their own evidence: Bouqui is the Wolof word for hyena, kept in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Louisiana and the Bahamas, while the hare became Lapin in the north and Malice in the south and west.

Foreign origins, she argues, do not make the corpus foreign. Nothing travels whole; a people takes only what answers to its own taste, and then reshapes it. Motives change, characters vanish, a bawdy Eastern farce turns into a mild moral story. What results belongs to Haiti.

A field study of the Haitian folktale, built from recordings taken from named tellers in Nippes, Plaisance and elsewhere, and concerned less with the stories than with how they work.

Comhaire-Sylvain separates the sung part from the spoken part. Songs are the conservative element: they hold onto Creole forms that everyday speech has dropped, and onto words nobody can translate any more, some of which she traces to African languages. Their meaning is often deliberately veiled, so that a tortoise's complaint about thorns and fruit turns out to be a warning about a dangerous man. The spoken portion varies with the teller, though set phrases, proverbs and metaphors recur at fixed points.

She catalogues the openings and closings — the exchange of cric and crac, the mock quarrel with the hero at the end — and sorts the tales by kind: origin stories, anecdotes, animal tales where cunning is the only virtue, realistic episodes, and marvels both Christian and pagan.

Herskovits went to Mirebalais in central Haiti in 1934 and set out to describe an entire rural community rather than one exotic practice. The result answers, by demonstration, the foreign habit of reducing Haiti to drums and sorcery.

The valley lies some thirty-five miles from Port-au-Prince, with converted trucks running to the coast a few times a week: near the capital, and by every other measure far from it. Its economy rests not on employer and hired hand but on cooperative labour, the coumbite; its social organisation follows a logic of its own, which he traces back through Moreau de Saint-Méry to the parish's colonial beginnings.

A long section goes to vodun — pantheon, services, dances — and a later chapter to its dealings with Catholicism. That encounter is the theoretical payoff: vodun gave Herskovits his clearest instance of syncretism, and the valley gave him somewhere to watch it happen. Notes on method and a Creole glossary close the book.

Writing after the 2010 earthquake, Glick Schiller notes how readily reporters now speak of the Haitian diaspora as a settled fact, and how recent and contested that assumption is. Disaster, epidemic and collective stigma pull people into a shared identity that many would otherwise decline.

Her foreword takes up the puzzle running through the volume it opens: contributors insist on the plurality of Haitian settlement, from Boston and Michigan to the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Guadeloupe and Paris, while still invoking a single diaspora. She resists the choice between a model in which diasporic consciousness circulates uniformly and one in which local experience is primary, arguing that localities and nation-states are neither bounded nor separable from the circuits running through them.

Racialization in a Paris suburb or a Dominican batey is shaped at once by local politics and by global narratives about blackness, and Haiti's revolutionary history remains part of the contest over those narratives.

A grant from the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme funded the digitization of part of the holdings at the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Frères de l'Instruction Chrétienne in Port-au-Prince, and this account follows that work through. Along the way the authors sketch how the library came to hold what it does — generations of collectors, students, alumni, and staff who kept the material intact — pick out some of what the nineteenth-century newspapers contain, and give space to the current Executive Director.

Collaboration is presented as central to the result: dLOC supplied further support while BHFIC staff carried out a substantial share of the scanning themselves. The closing pages turn on an uncomfortable point about the field. Projects meant to open up Haitian historical sources operate inside the same inequalities they set out to contest, paywalled access being one instance, and the authors ask how such initiatives might serve cultural and historical institutions better than they now do.

Roumain's novel follows Manuel, a young peasant who comes back to Fonds Rouge after years cutting cane in Cuba. He finds the village burnt dry by drought and split by a family quarrel, its people slack with resignation and leaning on ritual for relief. Against that he sets what he learned abroad: water can be found, and finding it is worth nothing unless the villagers agree to dig for it and share it.

Dash's introduction places the book in a line of Haitian peasant fiction reaching back to the turn of the century, and separates Roumain from contemporaries who made rural life into exotic spectacle. The title comes from a Creole phrase for the peasant who waters the fields, and carries the book's insistence that people can impose their will on their circumstances. The fable stays credible because Manuel's parents, and his courtship of Annaise, have lives of their own.

Redmond's subject is what he calls the second supercycle, the decades in which Britain went from an empire bleeding territory and money in America to the hegemon of the nineteenth century. He treats that outcome as improbable and worth explaining: France had three times the population, the strongest army in Europe, an alliance with Spain and vast Caribbean wealth as late as 1790.

Several puzzles organise the account. Why the Austrian, Ottoman and Qing empires proved so durable. Why victorious Britain left the Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish empires standing in reduced form. Why the East India Company could absorb fifty million South Asians but not two million colonists. Why the United States and Prussia emerged as new powers.

The American Revolution, read beside the Dutch Patriot rising, France, Brabant and Haiti, looks institutionally conservative — continuity of authority, no challenge to slavery, western land as the real motive. Culture enters too: Mozart's new public, Smith, Gibbon, Pitt's fiscal reordering.

The seventeenth century has long been described as an age of general crisis, and this volume argues that the label misleads. Between roughly 1600 and 1750 the European world-economy contracted, but its outer boundaries scarcely moved and no qualitative break occurred. What took place was a downturn inside a capitalist system already functioning, not the collapse of one order into another, and it was mild precisely because the crisis of feudalism had already been resolved.

Prices, cereal yields, land use, bullion stocks, wages and population all point to a plateau rather than a catastrophe. Contraction redistributed rather than destroyed. Core zones kept the higher-value industries while cheap textiles moved to rural peripheries, landlords in those peripheries met falling profits by pressing labor harder, and a semiperipheral zone consolidated in between.

Hegemony is the other thread: Dutch primacy is traced through production, then commerce, then finance, and its decline through the same sequence in the same order.

Sheller proposes mobility justice as a single frame for problems usually kept apart: transport equity, policing and incarceration, border walls and deportation, sexual violence, eviction, and climate change. Each, on her account, turns on who is permitted to move, who is held still, and who decides.

The book works across scales, from the body through the street, city and nation to the planet, on the premise that these are not separate arenas but one entangled system, and that movement is what makes and remakes them. Against theories of justice she calls sedentary, which take their object to be stable before it is set in motion, she offers an ontology in which justice is itself unstable and emergent.

History carries weight here: the regulation of movement under slavery and colonial rule helped constitute the free, white, mobile subject of liberal politics. She credits the organizers who coined the term, and ends each chapter with specific principles rather than a general prescription.

Hoffman argues that international child protection work in Haiti, and the family reunification drive that expanded after the 2010 earthquake, rest on assumptions about childhood and household that do not describe the country. Registries built to return separated children to their birth parents ran into a result that should have been expected: a large share of the children on them had left home long before the quake.

Movement between households is ordinary in Haiti. She assembles survey evidence that only about a third of children live with both biological parents, that most young people have left the household they were born into and many have done so repeatedly, and that these moves track work, schooling, the breakup of unions and death. Restavèk children sit inside this pattern rather than outside it. Drawing on the anthropology of childhood, Hoffman resists both the sensational image of slavery and blanket verdicts on children's labour, noting how unstable the status itself is.

Wynter starts from the pairing Coulthard drew between negritude and indigenismo, twentieth-century movements that answered colonial assumptions of racial and cultural superiority by asserting a distinct perspective of their own. Both arose, she argues, where running down a people's culture served to cheapen its labour.

That devaluation she traces to the conquest and to arguments like Sepúlveda's that peoples without writing had no culture and so barely counted as human — a myth of the cultural void by which European culture became a synonym for humanity, and the press finished what the gun began. Cultural racism, on this reading, is organic to Western capitalism, and the plantation turned the African captive from a person of defined status into labour power priced for a world market.

Her central case is Haiti, where Price-Mars found African belief surviving under the worst conditions. Wynter calls that process indigenization: the making of a people native to the ground they fought over.

A field geography of Haiti's Departement du Nord, built on survey work carried out in 1954 and on aerial photographs that Wood turned into planimetric maps for the southeastern stretch no earlier survey had covered. Soil samples were analysed in Port-au-Prince and at McMaster, and the land-use categories were designed so that each could be identified from the photographs themselves.

The exposition runs from landforms to climate to soils before it reaches land use, on the reasoning that where so much rain falls orographically, relief has to be understood first. Seven climatic types are distinguished on monthly rainfall alone, temperature varying too little to matter, and the intricate patterns of soil and population density are traced back to a complicated history of uplift, river capture and coastal deposition.

Behind the physical analysis sits a social observation: independence left a dispersed peasantry farming land no cadastral survey has ever recorded.

An alphabetical reference for students and researchers in physical anthropology and neighboring fields. Entries define terms drawn from human anatomy and osteology, genetics and cell biology, primate behavior and taxonomy, evolutionary theory, and the archaeology of early stone tool industries.

Coverage runs from named fossil specimens and extinct primate genera to competing models of how Neandertals and anatomically modern populations overlapped in Europe, and to congenital and infectious conditions that mark bone and so concern paleopathologists. Cross-references connect related entries, flag obsolete or alternative usages, and point to an appendix for the placement of fossil species.

Garrigus reconstructs the career of Julien Raimond, an indigo planter, one-quarter African by descent, from Saint-Domingue's southern coast who became the foremost campaigner for racial reform in revolutionary Paris -- and who is remembered chiefly as a hypocrite, having told free men of colour and later rebel slaves that they owed France a debt while himself sinking under debts to French creditors.

Against that reputation four claims are advanced. Raimond's early life shows colonial racism hardening in the 1760s, when men of mixed ancestry who had been treated as social equals were barred from office and made to document their status. His success in persuading Parisian abolitionists to attack prejudice rather than bondage cleared the ground for the uprising of August 1791. His argument for keeping freedpeople at work was taken up by revolutionary governments across the Antilles. And his turn towards Toussaint Louverture in 1800 marked an early reading of what Bonaparte intended.

These essays weigh political explanations of Haitian poverty against economic ones, and generally find markets working better than their critics allow. The Duvalier state was authoritarian, but calling it totalitarian goes too far; the claim that merchants bent the nineteenth-century state at will is judged poorly evidenced; and Haitian landholding is held to bear little resemblance to Spanish America's, with sharecropping among near-equals easing access to land rather than blocking it.

On erosion, what decides the outcome is the number of hands on a plot and the intensity of their labour, not whether the crop is eaten or sold; perennial coffee, in fact, holds soil better than food crops do.

Later chapters survey the decline of sugar and sisal, cocoa and coffee, bauxite and essential oils, and reopen the quarrel over coffee marketing, re-examining Girault's case for exploitative middlemen and finding that the figures point the other way. A further chapter reviews Haitian classics from Price-Mars and Bellegarde onward.

Rouse presents this as a report on procedure rather than on findings. The material comes from the Fort Liberte region of northern Haiti, already excavated and sorted; the question is how to turn artifacts into history.

The method rests on two units. A type is the set of attributes shared by a class of objects, treated as an abstract pattern rather than as the objects themselves. A mode is a single attribute -- a design, a technique, a property such as hardness -- handled on its own as a culture trait equal in standing to a type. Types are reached by classification, modes by analysis.

Both are traced from site to site and, once a time scale is built from the shifting frequencies of eight selected modes, from period to period. Diffusion, persistence and replacement then read those distributions as events. Culture, Rouse insists, lies in the standards guiding the artisan, not in the objects.

Selden Rodman spent five decades collecting, dealing and writing about Haitian painting, and left his journals to an archive without cutting the passages that make him look worst. Gonzalez uses them to examine how one American critic came to regard Haiti's art world as his own creation.

Rodman's affection was genuine and his judgements consistent. He prized painters he took to be untutored, comparing them to Breughel and to Byzantine icons, and dismissed the urban, internationally minded artists of the Foyer des Arts Plastiques. Gonzalez observes that those he condemned were generally the ones working outside the Centre d'Art and beyond his reach as a dealer, and that his praise rested on assumptions about black innocence and white sophistication.

The chapter also tracks his accommodation with the Duvalier regime, whose character he understood clearly and criticised only in his private notebooks.

Largey examines how the Haitian bandmaster Occide Jeanty became, in the telling of his admirers, a figure of national defiance during the American occupation of 1915 to 1934, and what that transformation reveals about the making of historical meaning.

Jeanty's compositions commemorating the war of independence carried criticism of the occupying forces that Haitian audiences could hear even when foreigners could not. Largey calls the process recombinant mythology: speakers borrow the language of myth to praise a hero's qualities, and so link him to earlier heroes. Jean-Jacques Dessalines had already undergone such a fusion, absorbed into Vodou as a form of Ogou, at once the general who defended the republic and the body torn apart by the elite in 1806. President Florvil Hyppolite, whose death echoed that of Dessalines, was drawn into the same chain of stories.

Myth and history, on this account, are not separate domains but linked ways of holding on to the past.

Law takes up a gap in the study of Christian missions in West Africa: the seventeenth-century Catholic efforts in Allada and Whydah, kingdoms on the Bight of Benin that Dahomey absorbed in the 1720s. Despite abundant printed documentation, no detailed study had been attempted, and general surveys handle the episode briefly and not always accurately.

Two things are done here. The first is narrative -- a fuller reconstruction of missionary enterprise from early Portuguese contact through the Dahomian conquests. The second is explanatory, asking why Africans responded to evangelisation as they did.

Kings, Law finds, were consistently more open to baptism than their chiefs, and he reads this politically. Royal authority was checked in practice by provincial governors and by the priesthoods of the local vodun; raising up a supreme god mirrored, and could serve, an expansion of the king's power. Whydah's rulers were meanwhile quarrelling openly with the python cult over offerings and attendance.

How the army came to own Haiti's economy is the question here. Gerlus answers it from the revolution itself: the estates the French left behind were nationalized, and the state that absorbed them was in practice the officer corps, which converted public property into the basis of a class of its own.

The framing draws on debates about the state's role in accumulation, from Marx and Engels through later theorists of development, and is then grounded in the conditions of a new nation cut off diplomatically and governed almost without interruption by soldiers.

The second half explains why military governments failed to revive plantation exports. Coercion could not hold workers on estates they were able to walk away from, and former slaves who fed themselves from their own plots were never made dependent on a wage. Without that dependence, Gerlus argues, no policy of production could take hold, whatever the rulers intended.

The American, French and Haitian revolutions are usually remembered separately, with Haiti's the one most often left out. Bender's essay for this catalogue insists on treating them as one event that remade the Atlantic world. French assistance won American independence, the debt it created forced the calling of the Estates General, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man was drafted by men including a veteran of the American war who consulted Jefferson in Paris.

What binds the three, on this account, is the long imperial rivalry of Britain, France and Spain, and above all the Seven Years' War, the first conflict waged on every continent, whose costs sent governments looking to their colonies for revenue.

Haiti is the limit case. Its revolution turned on slavery and the color bar, and white reaction came fast: Jefferson foresaw a racial storm reaching Virginia, and the United States refused recognition until Lincoln granted it during the Civil War.

How Haitians have commemorated their own founding is, Zavitz argues, a subject no one had studied at length. Her dissertation supplies the first extended interdisciplinary account, running from independence to the present and drawing on national holidays, historiography, literature, oral tradition and interviews conducted in Port-au-Prince.

Following Trouillot on how silences are produced, she looks for what commemoration omits as much as what it asserts, and for the counter-memories that press against the narratives of the powerful, reshaping them over time. The first of January 1804 anchors the account: she traces a century of Independence Day observance and the making of Dessalines as its presiding figure, showing officials drawing on symbols from France, Africa and the Americas.

Later chapters follow the rival mulâtriste and noiriste legends through Haitian letters, and the successive waves of indigénisme that brought the peasantry, Kreyòl and Vodou into a contest over who made the nation.

The editors begin with the photograph on their cover, an empty and gleaming train carriage that could be almost anywhere, and use it to work through what a mobilities perspective actually asks. Where did this vehicle come from, who rides it, who maintains it, who is kept off it, what infrastructure lies beneath it, and how would anyone go about researching it?

They are explicit about what the book is not. Celebrations of speed, frictionlessness and borderless flow, written largely by people whose own movement is unimpeded, obscure more than they reveal.

What replaces them is a body of work spanning sociology, geography, anthropology, history and cultural studies, concerned with how movement reshapes economies and government, provokes fear and regulation, and produces stark inequality between undocumented migrants and business-class elites. Seven recurring themes, from the qualities of movement to questions of method, organise the volume's seven sections.

Girard looks at the French Revolutionary wars from the Caribbean end, where the doctrine that won battles in Europe ran up against the institutions the colonies were built on. Mass conscription was unthinkable where nine in ten inhabitants were enslaved and kept away from weapons, and free men of colour, who had served before, could hardly fight as citizen-soldiers for an order that refused them citizenship.

Emancipation, he argues, was worth more than tactics or naval support, since it could turn hundreds of thousands of enemies into allies at a stroke. The catch was that colonies without slaves might not be worth holding at all.

France's answer changed with its politics. Reluctant at first, it emancipated in 1794, and for the next four years the alliance with the formerly enslaved underwrote an aggressive strategy and plans for expeditions against British, Spanish and American territory. Bonaparte's restoration of slavery in 1802 lost the richest colonies despite massive white reinforcements.

Gillikin follows the people who reached Charleston from Saint-Domingue between 1791 and 1822 — ruined planters, gens de couleur and enslaved people alike — and asks how a slaveholding southern city absorbed them. Charlestonians had been reading about the island for years before the largest group landed in 1793, and sympathy for dispossessed planters was already shadowed by suspicion of their politics and dread of what the newcomers might carry.

Assimilation, she argues, was neither quick nor smooth, and it turned on regional particulars: South Carolina's commercial and educational ties to Europe and the Caribbean made distant events feel immediate, and its leaders were caught between kinship with the French and their obligations under a new federal constitution. Refugees were repeatedly drawn into local arguments about republicanism, their standing rising and falling with France's reputation through the Terror, Napoleon and the Restoration.

Fiehrer sets out to give substance to a phrase often invoked and seldom examined: Louisiana's connection to the Caribbean. He follows French settlement of northwestern Hispaniola from the buccaneering decades through the Treaty of Ryswick to a colony whose enslaved population grew steadily until 1803, and traces the move from indigo to the sugar and coffee that made planters rich enough to resent the Crown's monopolists and the Nantes slavers.

Much of the essay is corrective. Refugee families of the lower Mississippi cherish a story of narrow escape from butchery, and the antebellum press supplied the imagery: a docile bondswoman on one side, a cannibal insurgent on the other. Measured against correspondence, census returns and the numbers who reached Cuba, France and the eastern seaboard over fourteen years of movement, the tale of mass killing has thin support.

Through the eighteenth century the two colonies depended on one another, and many south Louisianians descend from those who left.

Gathering Stuart Hall's writing on art, photography and film, this collection is framed by Tawadros as the record of a deliberate detour: Hall's move away from the apparent solidity of politics and economics into culture and the visual, from which he returned with sharper accounts of power. Culture, in his phrase, was the domain of indirection.

The introduction traces how race gave Hall his angle. The 1970s Birmingham research that became Policing the Crisis let him see that Thatcherism was less an electoral victory than a change of historical conjuncture. By the late 1980s he was arguing that blackness is a constructed political and cultural category with no guarantee in nature, and that regimes of representation had to be interrogated rather than simply inverted.

The book follows Hall into institution-building, at Autograph and iniva and eventually Rivington Place, and into long friendships with artists, Isaac Julien above all.

Geggus weighs how much slave resistance actually accomplished in ending Atlantic slavery, and finds it rarely decisive on its own. Across the Americas he identifies only two cases where it was: the 1848 rising in the Danish West Indies, itself touched off by news from the French colonies, and the French Caribbean of the 1790s.

Saint-Domingue is the strong case, and he defends it against both understatement and overstatement. The 1791 insurrection was a necessary cause of the 1793 proclamations and the general decree of February 1794, but not a sufficient one. What shifted the balance was war with Spain and Britain in 1793, which stranded French troops across the Atlantic, let Spain recruit the insurgent leaders, and drove Sonthonax from a narrow proclamation covering men who would fight to general abolition.

Historians who say the commissioners merely ratified a freedom already seized are mistaken: much of the plantation system was still standing that August.