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

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

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

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

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

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

When Dessalines was assassinated in 1806 and his body left in the street, a woman gathered the remains and saw them decently buried. Haitian history has kept the story while stripping it of meaning, filing Marie Sainte Dedee Bazile under madness rather than politics.

Lamour reads the act as a deliberate intervention and the erasure as typical. Women enter Haitian historiography in footnotes, defined by the men they were attached to, remembered through nicknames and anecdotes; the founding generation is all fathers, with no corresponding mothers of the nation. She places her work alongside recent efforts to recover what has been pushed aside, from an early thesis on Haitian women to studies of women in the Caco movement and to novelists and artists reworking the national epic.

The present is part of the argument. In 2020, mourners for the dead of La Saline gathered under a call to repeat Defilee's gesture, which is Lamour's evidence that the inheritance remains usable.

Since the earthquake of 2010, evangelical Christians and the international LGBTQI rights movement have competed for influence in Haiti, each accusing the other of doing outsiders' work. Durban points to what both share: a willingness to call for still more foreign involvement in a country marked by European colonial rule and American imperialism.

Two frames, she shows, govern how such intervention gets justified. The first casts Haiti as a place so hobbled by its own culture that outside supervision is needed to push it forward against Haitian resistance. The second grants Haiti modernity but calls it a failed state, one whose only functioning capacity is violence, homophobia included.

Between those claims the book turns to Haitians themselves. Durban follows people who desire others of their own sex and people whose gender is lived creatively, and the resourceful ways they meet both the violence directed at them and the outside intervention that has never stopped.

Haiti receives an enormous volume of foreign-funded health projects, some sponsored by religious institutions, many run inside the secular apparatus of global health. Minn looks at the Haitian professionals who make those projects run and shows that the parties involved judge whether an intervention worked by different and often incompatible standards.

Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrators are hired to carry out programs, to hand out resources or refuse them, and to produce the accounts of outcomes funders read. Working as intermediaries, they are expected to represent the humanitarian aims of distant donors and to care for patients with almost nothing, while also serving as a source of support for their own relatives and managing their own prospects under conditions of scarcity and insecurity.

Taking these clinicians seriously, Minn argues, is what makes it possible to stop casting them and their patients as heroes, villains, or victims, and to think past the donor-recipient pair framing theories of humanitarianism and the gift.

Late colonial Saint-Domingue was among the most heavily masonic societies anywhere, and it produced the only successful slave revolution, so the temptation to connect the two has been hard to resist. One biographer builds a conspiracy on it, imagining lodge ties between the future Toussaint Louverture and the royalist planters said to have put him up to the rising of 1791.

The evidence usually cited is a signature. Toussaint and roughly three hundred other men, white and of color, marked their names with a distinctive arrangement of dots. Garrigus went looking for those men in the records of actual lodges and found almost nothing, a result that also obliges him to revise his own earlier conclusion about a supposed hidden lodge at Aquin.

His suggestion is that the mark was aspirational: men used it to imply membership in brotherhoods that did not exist, which says more about the prestige of secrecy than about how the revolution was organized.

Hebblethwaite builds a history of Haitian Vodou running from West Africa to Saint-Domingue to the recording studios of contemporary Haiti, drawing on four centuries of political, social and religious history alongside fieldwork and language documentation.

The book comes in two halves. The African chapters look at Dahomey, Allada and Hueda, taking in economics and culture as well as politics, and attend closely to how Europeans stoked local tensions. The Haitian chapters follow two rites to their sources: the Rada Rite, traced to Allada, and the Gede Rite, traced to Abomey. Both are approached through song, specifically the tracks on two rasin compact discs, Rasin Figuier's Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman's Guede, issued by Jean Altidor on the Miami label Mass Konpa Records.

Every song on the two discs is read through a procedure Hebblethwaite names Vodou hermeneutics, which pulls together history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism and ethnomusicology to put the study of Vodou songs on scholarly footing.

Lamour reads the Haitian poto-mitan woman, the one who serves as a central pillar, as a figure with a colonial history rather than a timeless cultural type. Intersectionality and coloniality supply the analytic tools.

Colonial rule and the relations that outlived slavery, in this account, formed and reproduced one another, setting up arrangements of power that still run through Haiti and that tie personal life to national and global forces. One effect is that the labour of poto-mitan women is routinely cast as something deviant.

By putting the figure back into time, Lamour shows how familiar ways of describing it lay claim to the bodies and the hours of women who are handed the work of supporting and protecting everyone else.

Maginn follows the Toussaint, Christophe, and Louverture families across the nineteenth-century Atlantic, tracing how relatives and associates in the United States, Great Britain, and France built what amounted to satellite Haitian communities between 1791 and 1880. Shared language, faith, culture, and political principle held these circles together, and they helped members survive, settle, and at times move up.

The dissertation's most original contribution concerns the networks themselves, which Maginn argues scholars of the Francophone Black Atlantic have left unexplored: they gave these families leverage in local, national, and international affairs.

A further aim is to unsettle standing paradigms of race. The families met racial inequality directly, including through contact with Atlantic slavery, yet their name and property afforded a mobility and independence that other people of color in the same three countries did not have.

Bellegarde-Smith writes the history of his country through one family member: Dantès Bellegarde, his grandfather, a diplomat and thinker who spent his career representing Haiti abroad. The book first appeared in 1985 and answered a long silence, since scholarship had rarely taken Haitian intellectual and political life seriously as a subject.

The setting is a nation made by enslaved people who overthrew their masters, and then punished for it. Governments on both shores of the Atlantic saw a threat and set about draining Haiti's wealth: trade barriers, fines heavy enough to cripple it, and finally occupation by the United States. Haitians endured this, and some of them became figures of consequence in world affairs.

Byrd's foreword to the reissue describes Bellegarde as pushing a racially inclusive idea of progress and arguing that Haiti, black people, and colonized nations generally should be able to exist outside the reach of the great powers.

News of an unfamiliar respiratory illness reached rural northern Haiti first through relatives abroad, then spread across radio broadcasts, messaging apps, and talk in markets and neighborhoods. Bulamah notes that when advice about keeping apart arrived, few doubted it would work; what they doubted was that any of this was new. He sets COVID-19 against a longer local record of epidemics, asking how that experience shaped what people expected.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and on conversations with Haitian friends during the outbreak, the article treats the stillness the pandemic imposed as a sharpening of something already there, a blocked political and existential condition named lòk. Against that stagnation, Bulamah traces a popular epidemiology built around the lakou, the household, through which people made sense of the virus and lived with it.

The closing move is conceptual. Movement itself, he suggests, works as a form of vitality, generating and ordering life even under conditions of severe uncertainty.

The manifestos Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau wrote between 2000 and 2009, collected in English for the first time, together with two op-eds they signed jointly.

Some were composed in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election in 2008, and they land now in the middle of arguments about divided identity and the case against multiculturalism. Each piece answers to a particular political moment in France, the Caribbean or North America rather than to a general condition.

Across the collection the two writers take up the climate catastrophe, extractive industry, toxicity and the survival of colonial power, working through the poetic vocabulary they had developed elsewhere: Relation, globalization, globality or mondialité.

Mbembe, a critic of colonial rule and its aftermath and a leading voice in a recent wave of French critical theory, gathers essays on what decolonization has meant for African ways of being in the world. The collection dwells on the contradictions of the postcolonial present and looks for models of community and shared humanity that might come out of them.

Working across European and African intellectual traditions, Mbembe intervenes in arguments over citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity, and takes the measure of conventional habits of writing and thinking about the continent. He faults European thinkers, French ones especially, for ignoring postcolonial critiques that expose how appeals to universal principle keep certain people out.

The book also advances a reading of African modernity built around Afropolitanism, a way of inhabiting the world that emerged from decolonized Africa amid both ruin and the founding of new societies, with South Africa treated as its testing ground.

Morgan builds an account of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Black Atlantic out of the lives of enslaved African women. What they lived through, she argues, brings into view how early modern people understood trade, race, and the turning of human beings into property.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accounts of why elites overthrow democracies usually turn on interest: how much a given elite loses under democratic rule and gains under a dictatorship. Naidu, Robinson and Young add a second variable. Even among people with identical interests, they argue, some are better placed than others to make a coup succeed, and position here means position in a social network.

Their model treats coups as generating rents and predicts that the more central a family sits in the elite network, the likelier it is to join. To test this they built a dataset of Haitian elite social ties and matched it against firm-level records for import businesses.

Central families, they find, were disproportionately involved in the 1991 overthrow of the democratic Aristide government. Afterward, retail prices rose faster for the staple goods those families imported, and children born in the cities during the years without democracy show worse health outcomes.

De Luna makes a case for treating single words as historical evidence, arguing that the intellectual life of enslaved Africans can be reached through the sounds and etymologies of the terms they used. Since the colonial archive preserves so little of what captive people thought, she borrows the comparative linguistics that Africanist historians developed for oral societies.

Four episodes from eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue carry the argument: the contested name of the healer and poisoner Makandal; the Kongo vocabulary the planter Baudry des Lozières compiled from newly arrived captives, read for what they chose to teach him about hearing and being heard; the term mundélé, built from a word for cloth, by which West-Central Africans classified Europeans; and the overlap in sound of loi, lwa and roi.

Long histories of multilingualism and convergence among related African languages, she argues, gave enslaved people terms pliant enough to debate in across language boundaries.

Trouillot's first book, published in 1977 as Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti, appears here in English for the first time, the earliest work by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

The subject is the generation of formerly enslaved people who fought in the revolution and the war of independence between 1791 and 1804. Trouillot places them at the center of the story, as the people who founded the modern Haitian state and seeded the culture that thrives in the country today. Against standard readings, he argues that two centuries of Haitian history look different once that generation is put first.

The first volume to treat the teaching of Haitian history and culture across disciplines, this collection gives instructors practical guidance: approaches to course design, theories for a wide range of texts, sample syllabi, and accounts of actual classrooms. Contributors link Haiti to the wider Caribbean throughout.

The editors push against the reflex that ties Haiti to disaster, poverty, and a debased picture of Vodou, and against the neocolonial, imperialist, and racist framings common in literary and historical writing. Teachers working in women's and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture describe how they reshape those older narratives, and they make the case for putting Haiti into American and Latin American studies courses.

Rather than the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti appears here as a country with a many-sided culture and a part to play in the world, raising questions about migration, locality, and globality that bear on isolationist politics and neoliberal practice.

Fatton sets Haitian and American exceptionalism side by side, asking where each came from and following how a story of uniqueness has governed dealings between them from their first years of independence to the present.

Every nation's founding narrative rests on something like this, in his account. Exceptionalism scrubs the injurious parts out of history and replaces them with innocence and distinction. It also binds people together as a chosen fellowship, which means it necessarily shuts out those judged unfit to belong on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, or class.

The narrative is not fixed. Being a social invention, it shifts over time, though never outside the boundaries laid down by its original premises. How far it can be remade depends on the hegemony the ruling class has achieved and on whether that class commands the infrastructural power to absorb, by degrees, the groups it once kept out.

The American and French revolutions generated a flood of celebratory objects: printed ceramics and textiles, cockades, medallions, engravings of heroes. Almost nothing comparable was made for the Haitian Revolution, and White takes that absence as her starting point.

Part of the explanation is structural. A colony organized around plantation labour had neither market nor workshops for such goods, and most images circulating in the Atlantic world were produced by white observers rather than by the people who made the revolution. What those observers fixed on was violence, and violence read in racial terms, which gave the Saint-Domingue war a charge that prints of the guillotine never carried.

White examines how that violence was rendered in objects, alongside a few works imagining something else, including a painting Rush proposed and a wax tableau by Davenport and Bishop. Both proved too much for white audiences. Material culture, she argues, narrowed the revolution more sharply than texts did.

The Constitution Haiti adopted in 1987, a year after Jean-Claude Duvalier fled and twenty-nine years of dictatorship ended, called for decentralizing the state. Deane finds the country no nearer that goal now than it was then.

Only parts of the decentralizing framework were ever put in place, and the resulting administrative holes have hardened into a political impasse. Instead of shared power across levels of government and wider inclusion, which the drafters intended, those gaps have propped up autocratic rule that outlived the dictator's departure.

Drawing on in-depth semistructured interviews with experts and on content analysis, and offered as the first thorough study of post-Duvalier decentralization efforts, the paper identifies the institutional obstacles blocking better public services and genuine citizen participation. It also traces how and why officials at the center keep limiting what decentralization might do for local development and subnational governance.

A reader gathering writings by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot: the essays that made his reputation alongside pieces that are less familiar or hard to track down. Taken together the selection shows the range of his influence, on Caribbean studies, anthropology, history and postcolonial thought, and on scholarship that takes political commitment seriously.

Past reads Michel-Rolph Trouillot's first book, written in Haitian Kreyòl in 1977 while its young author was writing from New York City during the Duvalier years, as a work built on oral material rather than official record. The essay works through passages where Trouillot folds Vodou songs, prayers, and vocabulary into historical narration, showing how that choice turns memory into evidence and puts ordinary Haitians at the center of the revolutionary decades between 1791 and 1804.

Both Vodou and the Kreyòl language, on this reading, took shape under colonial repression and became the binding forces of Haitian resistance. Past also follows Trouillot's account of nineteenth-century oppression under new masters and his unsentimental reassessment of Toussaint Louverture, whose government used Vodou to keep the population subordinate — a class-based pattern that hardened into Haiti's predatory state.

Past treats the book as an under-read masterpiece whose defense of Haitian spiritual practice and language deserves more attention now that both are under pressure.

The international effort to rebuild Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake failed, and Joos sets out both why it failed and what Haitians built instead. Alongside the shortcomings of foreign aid, the book documents Haitian-led reconstruction and Haitian economic practice.

Its frame treats urban planning as a form of violence, and from there examines how residents actually use the cityscape and how the countryside has been urbanized. Read together, these show that the development promoted by international agencies makes impermanence and instability into standing conditions. Ordinary Haitians, meanwhile, put the city to their own uses and remake it, producing spaces of belonging and forms of citizenship that draw on a long record of resistance to extractive economies.

Joos moves between the leftovers of failed industrial ventures in the provinces and the streets, rubble, and houses of the capital, thinking about what dwelling can mean in a landscape after disaster.

The essays here work toward a more sophisticated social history of colonialism, concentrating on the eighteenth century and running from roughly 1700 to the close of the Age of Revolutions in the 1830s.

Their method is to read legal practice and litigation across the French colonial world, in its Atlantic as well as its Oceanic reaches, in order to question an assumption that has come to seem natural: that law and empire amount to the same thing, with doctrine and codified procedure formed in the metropolis and then transmitted outward to the colonies. Against that, the contributors treat state authority as unsteady and open to challenge, and offer new approaches to writing the history of the French empire.

The volume also addresses a gap. France's first colonial empire has drawn far less scholarly and theoretical attention than its imperial forms after 1830, and the book positions itself as a corrective.

When disaster strikes, the humanitarian operation tends to eclipse what survivors themselves do and want, particularly where the national state and international agencies are seen as carrying colonial power structures forward.

Melis and Jean spent four months in Haiti, interviewing people affected by Hurricane Matthew alongside state officials and humanitarian actors and running focus group discussions in Port-au-Prince, Jeremie, Les Cayes, and Dame Marie. Their question was what societal actors can actually do where state and society are sharply disconnected.

The response, they find, made existing tensions worse: aid became politicized and affected communities were largely shut out of decisions about it. Society-based actors negotiated the terms of assistance anyway, through public protest and quieter everyday resistance, and through social networks and aid structures of their own. A more locally led response, the article argues, requires closing the gap between society and state.

In 1683 buccaneers sacked Veracruz, the leading port of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Historians of piracy know the raid well; Sierra Silva argues that what it meant for women's history and for the study of the African diaspora has never been properly situated, falling as it did in a period when Atlantic slavery was expanding.

The article follows women of African descent seized in the raid, some of them taken a second time, and carried to Saint-Domingue. Contraband proceedings, parish registers, slave law and eyewitness accounts are read closely and against one another.

Attention to displacement, and to how these women withstood it, produces a different sort of story. Some married French colonists; some became free mothers of children who belonged to Saint-Domingue's gens de couleur. Their lives, on this account, reached beyond the captivity that brought them there.