Fox studies a mid-twentieth-century turn among Caribbean writers toward Tragedy as a way of thinking about revolution and independence, following Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier and Aimé Césaire as they enlist Henry Christophe (1767-1820) into a usable past. Where the inherited habit was to narrate the Haitian Revolution as Romance, these writers experimented with tragic form to imagine new philosophies of resistance.

The argument extends David Scott's reading of C.L.R. James's 1963 revision of The Black Jacobins, where James trades his epic register for meditation on Tragedy. Fox holds that the revolution's emplotment is tragic regardless, but that Tragedy works as analysis rather than surrender: it can lay bare the colonial subject's dilemma and prompt theories of radical action.

Archival work unsettles the received Christophe, whose reputation as a black tyrant became a racialist palimpsest serving neocolonial ends, though a tragic version surfaces as early as 1823. Walcott and Césaire, Fox argues, saw in him a visionary asserting black humanity.

Travel by members of a diaspora back to their country of origin is the subject here, with Haiti as the case. Seraphin, Korstanje and Gowreesunkar treat the topic as underdeveloped both in theory and in practice, and work mainly from existing data, supplemented by two culinary events staged by a Haitian chef based abroad.

Their findings favour diasporic travel over conventional international tourism for destinations that are struggling. It does not rise and fall with the season; visitors go past the standard attractions to smaller regional sites; and they buy local goods and services, putting money directly into local hands. They also act as informal promoters of the culture they come from.

For destinations shaped by colonial rule, conflict or disaster, the authors propose ambidextrous management as a way to sustain tourism, offering it as a template for other underperforming economies.

Stieber begins where many accounts stop. After 1804, Haitian sovereignty faced a challenge from inside, a civil conflict between monarchy and republic that was carried on with weapons but equally with printed matter, in newspapers and periodicals, in books, broadsheets, and fliers.

Out of that record she assembles a literary history of the young nation. Reading what Haitians wrote once independence was secured, she finds freedom itself under dispute in public argument, and that dispute supplied the ground for the guerre de plume, a contest over opinion and over what Haiti was to mean. The rival claims made for liberté, for writing, and for civilization expose how loaded those categories are and how closely literature and politics were bound together.

The effect is to break up a uniform picture of Haiti, drawing out competing conceptions of the nation that persisted deep into the twentieth century and bearing on how Haiti figures in black radical, black Atlantic, anticolonial, and decolonial thought.

People past a hundred have gone largely unstudied, especially in poorer countries where even basic statistics are missing. Dasilma works to close that gap for Haiti, drawing on archival transcripts to give centenarians and supercentenarians on the island a hearing.

Three findings organize the account: these very old people have outlived family, friends and loved ones; their bodies have changed markedly with age; and all mention memory loss, though they speak lucidly about their youth, older customs and what a century has taught them. Six themes emerge from the analysis — loss of financial independence, mixed feelings about living so long, longevity understood as God's will and the fruit of a good heart, criticism of the young, resilience, and wisdom passed on. Faith and prayer sustain them against scarcity, loneliness and neglect.

Dasilma argues the material has uses beyond the academy, for physicians weighing prevention over after-the-fact care and for teachers, students and leaders alike.

Four lectures and six interviews, arranged so that Glissant's central preoccupations arrive in the middle of conversation rather than in formal exposition. Creolization, langage, and the distinction between atavistic and composite cultures are among the topics covered, along with culture and identity.

Because Glissant is working against other people's positions throughout, the material is unusually approachable without the range of his concerns narrowing.

Isaac Sasportas was born in French Saint-Domingue around 1779, into the Sephardic Diaspora. Girard follows him to Charleston, where between 1793 and 1795 he lived with his uncle Abraham, a man caught up both in the American Revolution and in the political battles of the French one.

The nephew adopted the uncle's radicalism and carried it home. Back in Saint-Domingue he became a leading planner of an invasion of Jamaica, then British, meant to free the enslaved Africans there. Toussaint Louverture disclosed the plan, and Sasportas was executed in Jamaica in December 1799.

Sheller takes up the ecological emergencies and the work of rebuilding that confront the Caribbean as a whole under climate catastrophe. Her fieldwork covers reconstruction in Haiti after the earthquake, flooding along the Haitian-Dominican border, and the aftermath of recent hurricanes.

What she finds is that vulnerability and the pursuit of a just recovery cannot be separated from particular transnational arrangements, political, economic, and cultural. Foreigners generally know little about Haiti's political, cultural, and economic situation, and least of all about the part the United States has played in it, so their attempts to help frequently deepen the inequities already there.

Survival in the region, Sheller argues, will require alternatives to the neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and United States military dominance that produce what she calls the coloniality of climate. Any serious project for rebuilding, for justice, and for resilience against the climate has to be rooted in radical Caribbean intellectual traditions and their demand for deeper transformation.

Dessalines led Haiti as the first head of the independent state, and the editors' headnote sketches how he got there. Embittered as a young man by the extreme brutality visited on enslaved people in what was then a French colony, he rose to command after the French betrayed and seized Toussaint L'Ouverture.

Having declared the country independent in 1804, he ordered the mass killing of French settlers, in which between three and five thousand people of every age and sex died. That September, generals of the revolution proclaimed him Emperor Jacques I. He was assassinated. The text introduced by this headnote is his proclamation of 28 April 1804.

Runaway advertisements placed by owners in colonial newspapers are among the few records in which enslaved people surface as individuals, with injuries, accents, clothing and friendships attached to them. Geggus assesses the online archive that has gathered such notices from Les Affiches Americaines, the Saint-Domingue paper that ran from 1766 to 1791, presenting each item as a photograph beside a searchable transcription.

He tempers the praise. The organizers overstate both the inaccessibility of the newspaper, microfilmed and digitized years earlier, and the neglect of the fugitive material; their bibliography missed much recent scholarship, and a published total of individuals identified looks to him like an error.

The verdict is still favourable. Jail registers of recaptured fugitives, unique to the French colonies and rarely studied, are now being added, which should permit comparison between those who got away and those brought back, and the project is expanding to newspapers from Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Louisiana and elsewhere.

White elites across Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico spent two centuries invoking Haiti as a warning, proof of barbarism and a reason to refuse black populations any larger share of civic life. Valdés gathers essays tracing how writers and artists in those three countries answered back, turning Haiti into a figure for liberation instead.

The premise is that language never kept these populations apart: exchange has been continuous since 1804, whatever the region's school curricula and the fields of Latin American and Caribbean studies have implied by silence or caricature. Contributors follow that exchange through Cuban film and poetry, Ana Lydia Vega's story of three men adrift in a raft, Edwidge Danticat on the killings of 1937, and Dominican fiction that keeps the old hostility alive.

A closing essay supplies a syllabus for teaching Hispaniola's two nations together, written after the 2013 ruling that stripped Dominicans of Haitian descent of citizenship.

Seven women stand at the center of Joseph-Gabriel's account of mid-twentieth-century decolonization, figures whose contributions later analysis has tended to shrink or miss altogether. Some were wounded by German torpedoes, some held in concentration camps, some declared enemies of the Vichy state.

Working from archives in France, Haiti, Martinique, and the United States, Joseph-Gabriel places these women at the heart of anticolonial movements and argues that they formulated a decolonial citizenship — more capacious than what was on offer precisely because it answered the intersecting oppressions they met in the French empire.

Citizenship in their hands became a way of claiming attachment to several political and cultural worlds at once: France, Africa, the Caribbean, the diaspora, the global South. Joseph-Gabriel reads this as pushing the idea past the boundaries of both nation-state and empire, toward Pan-African, Pan-Caribbean, and global South identities grounded in a feminist practice of anticolonial resistance.

Laws passed by the Haitian government in 1824 secularized the Catholic Church's lands in Santo Domingo and placed the institution under state control. Working from correspondence, pamphlets and petitions, Keane-Dawes argues that these reforms produced a new distribution of power, one that drew local communities into the workings of both secular and religious institutions.

The article also joins two bodies of scholarship that seldom meet: work on what Haitian unification did to the Church in Santo Domingo, and work on Haiti's diplomatic efforts to secure its sovereignty in the Atlantic world.

It begins with the differing church-state relationships on either side of the island and the conflict these generated after the annexation of 1822, turns to how the clergy responded to Haitian rule and to the 1824 secularization law, and closes on what the reforms meant for ordinary communities and their priests.

Scott starts from a puzzle about states and people who move — pastoralists, foragers, vagrants, runaways — and arrives at something larger: the state's need to make its subjects legible. Permanent surnames, standardized measures, cadastral surveys, freehold tenure, uniform legal language, planned cities and scientific forestry all appear as devices for converting local complexity into a grid that can be read, taxed and conscripted from a center. Such abridgments do not merely describe; joined to power, they remake what they claim to record.

He then asks why so many well-meant schemes to improve human life ended in catastrophe. Four things together, he argues, are required: administrative simplification; a high-modernist faith that borrows the prestige of science and mistakes geometric regularity for rational order; an authoritarian state prepared to impose it; and a civil society too battered to object. Collectivization, the Great Leap Forward and compulsory villagization supply his cases.

Scott reconstructs the webs of communication that linked enslaved and free people across the eighteenth-century New World. Working through obscure official records in three imperial languages, Spanish, English and French, he writes history from the vantage point of those at the bottom.

The book follows talk of coming freedom as it moved, and the people who carried it: sailors and military deserters, buccaneers, runaways living in maroon settlements, from Venezuela up to Virginia. Out of these traced routes Scott builds a detailed account of how mutiny and revolt spread, and in effect a history of thought among the enslaved.

Its own history is unusual. The manuscript went unpublished for thirty-two years, gathering a reputation among historians of slavery for having opened the study of the Black Atlantic to serious work, before Verso finally issued it with a foreword by Marcus Rediker.

Haiti was the second nation in the hemisphere to become independent, and the first black one to break free of European colonizers, yet its history stays largely unknown to Anglophone readers. This anthology sets out to change that by presenting the country through the words of Haitians from every social position.

Dozens of selections, most of them appearing in English for the first time, range across scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political culture: poems, novels, political tracts, essays, legislation, songs, folk tales. The span runs from indigenous Haiti before contact to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.

Familiar episodes appear, among them the United States military occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship, but so do stretches that usually get skipped, such as the decades following the second independence of 1934. Political upheaval, the environment, and modernization all come into view through the documents themselves.

Grüner reads the Haitian Revolution as the moment when the contradiction inside modernity becomes impossible to miss. Working from Marxist theory and from Adorno and Horkheimer, he treats the period not as one forward movement but as an age at war with itself: the decades that produced the French Revolution's language of universal liberty also required inventing new forms of racial slavery to underwrite an emerging capitalism.

The book declines the choice between writing about Haiti and writing about the modern, arguing that the choice is itself a Eurocentric one. When enslaved people took the promises of liberty and equality literally, they exposed how narrowly those promises had been drawn — reserved in practice for men who were white, European and free. What Grüner names counter-modernity is not a position outside or before the modern but the place where its violence and its emancipatory claims are stretched furthest apart, and he writes it deliberately from the South.

Casimir writes a history not of Haiti but of Haitians — of the political imagination of the population rather than the machinery that governed it. His organising distinction is between a state that expresses a people's sovereignty and a public administration that governs from outside on behalf of outsiders. Saint-Domingue had only the second, and independence, he argues, did not dissolve it.

The generals who defeated France took over the conqueror's claim instead of refusing it, treating the land as spoils and trying to keep plantation agriculture running. What they ran into was the counter-plantation system built by people who had been captives and never conceded the legitimacy of their captivity: their own arrangements for land, markets, family, language, worship and movement.

Moving back and forth between the arrival of Columbus and the American occupation, Casimir reads the country through Kreyòl, rural insurgencies and the sovereignty the majority built without a state.

Orcel's novel unfolds on the Grand-Rue in Port-au-Prince, in a neighborhood known for its trade in flesh, sex, and desire, where women young and old make their living. In fragments and glimpses, readers learn about lives shaped by attachment to television images, to the romance found in novels, and to the prospect of getting out. Then an earthquake levels the capital and its brothels.

The narrator, unnamed, discovers that one of her clients is a writer and strikes a bargain with him: sex in return for setting down the stories of the friends left under the rubble. She recounts the lives of women who were lovers, friends, mothers, and daughters, in a trade that used pseudonyms and artifice to erase any sign of intimacy or inner life. What emerges is their insistence on being named in life and remembered in death.

Translated by Dize, the book mixes poetry with prose and won France's 2012 Prix Thyde Monnier.

Trouillot begins by quoting, without attribution, a lush paragraph about Haiti's beauty, cruelty and apartness — then identifies it as the opening of a sensationalist history by a Marine colonel who had advised Duvalier. The passage performs exactly what he wants to expose: it asks how Haiti is to be explained, then answers with a list of particulars that adds up to nothing but singularity.

Every society is unique, he observes, and nobody keeps repeating the point about Paraguay or Madagascar. The insistence on Haitian exceptionalism therefore serves other ends, and its pedigree runs back to nineteenth-century racist writing. Against it he sets the Haitian scholars of that same period, who defended the country in a hostile world by asking specific questions informed by international debate. Haitian studies cannot move until it drops the fiction that the country lies beyond comparison. The oddity belongs to the doctrine, not its object.

Ulrickson examines how religion was actually practiced in Haiti during the presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer, which ran from 1818 to 1843, and asks how citizens pictured their own relationship to God at a moment when the state wanted a national Haitian Catholic church.

The entry point is a lay confraternity in Cap-Haïtien devoted to the Sacred Heart. From it Ulrickson argues that Catholic institutions in the early independence years were built by ordinary believers as much as by officials, and that much of this construction was under way before the government had regularized its standing with the Holy See.

The devotions themselves came from many directions across the Atlantic world. That variety, on this account, fed back into the making of the nation, and particularly into the presidency's ambition for a Catholicism that was nationalized and distinctly Haitian.

Britton's introduction presents a book that shifts without warning between registers - memoir, poetry, polemic, literary criticism - and coheres through a small number of insistent ideas: Relation, diversity, and the refusal of any single universal measure.

Glissant reads widely and unevenly on purpose, moving between major French writers, obscure ones, and founding texts of Asian and Arabic traditions, and takes an equal interest in computing and audiovisual technique for having reset the old division between speech and writing. He prefers islands and archipelagos to continents, holds that culture is inescapably political, and is scathing about multinational companies both for exploiting the poor and for dissolving the very idea of place.

Other passages are concrete proposals: an ecological plan to reclaim Martinique, a scheme of refuge towns for persecuted writers. Alongside them run adolescent memories of Martinique under wartime privation and of the dissidents who slipped away to fight, and an account of how medieval multiplicity hardened into classical universality.

Johnson locates the beginnings of freedom in intimate acts saturated with power, and in the particular oppressions borne by African women and women of African descent. Slavery in the Americas grew as an institution but also through the body and through reproduction; fantasies of domination fed by that bondage seeped into every relation, between husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and worker. Intimacy bound the enslaved to owners, and it bound black women and the children they bore to men, European and African alike.

Working from documents held across three continents, written in several languages and mostly by colonial officials and slaveholding men, Johnson reassembles the lives of black women from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue, Spanish Cuba, and the Gulf Coast, with New Orleans as the central case.

Free status, she argues, took on meaning through what these women did with kinship and intimacy, aggressively and sometimes without success, and their attempts shaped the emancipation struggles that followed.

American readers first met Toussaint Louverture through their newspapers, which cast him as a commander in the field and as a figure who shielded white residents during the fighting in Saint-Domingue. Johnson shows that this was no accident of coverage.

Louverture worked deliberately to place those images before audiences around the Atlantic, aiming to calm white American anxiety about Black insurrection, an anxiety fed by racial prejudice and by the slanted way US papers reported the revolution. Johnson treats the effort as strategic public diplomacy: Louverture shaped the news that traveled north for white American consumption.

The essay tracks what he did between 1795 and 1802, as his position in Hispaniola shifted and his self-presentation shifted with it, always with the aim of making white Americans willing to imagine formal relations with an independent nation governed by Black people in the Caribbean. Even after his arrest, deportation and death, the fascination he had cultivated persisted.

Dirksen's ethnography follows carnival in contemporary Haiti as a place where music and political power meet, and where ordinary citizens argue with celebrities about what the country should be.

A central thread is Michel Martelly, the konpa performer known as Sweet Micky, who declared himself president of the genre before winning the presidency of the republic, building a political persona that was inseparable from the musical one. Dirksen supplies the longer background to this: the traditions of carnivalesque wordplay and the particular performing repertoire, vulgarity and provocation included, that let Sweet Micky dominate carnival for over a decade.

That style of politics met sustained opposition from other prominent musicians. Matyas and Joj, Brothers Posse, Boukman Eksperyans and RAM all released carnival songs that fed public argument about civic participation and citizenship. Drawing on more than fifteen years of fieldwork, Dirksen gives extensive space to interviews with musicians and everyday Haitians, and reads performances against events well outside music.

Vastey, who lived from 1781 to 1820, served as the most important secretary to Haiti's King Henry Christophe and wrote prolifically. Daut reads that body of work as the founding instance of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a mode of argument aimed squarely at the Enlightenment premises underwriting colonial rule.

The claim is one of priority. Taking apart colonial racism and the justifications for slavery is a project usually credited to the twentieth century, to W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, and Daut places Vastey at the head of that line rather than outside it. She reads him alongside those later figures and also among black Atlantic writers nearer his own time, including Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs.

The conclusion follows from the connections she draws: no account of how Afro-diasporic thought began holds together without him.

Immigration, movement to the suburbs, and gentrification run through this collection on the shifting terrain of Black politics in the United States. Candis Watts Smith opens it under the heading of Black flight; Christina M. Greer closes by asking where things go from here.

One group of chapters stays in the city, taking up relations among African American, Black ethnic, and Dominican constituencies in New York, the different shapes ethnic respectability assumes in New York and in Los Angeles, what sanctuary policy has meant for the Black public sphere, and how political incorporation works where no single group holds a majority.

The rest follow Black residents outward — into majority-white suburbs, into multiracial neighbourhoods, and across regions — weighing how time, place, and class shift political attitudes, what sets neighbourhood change in motion, and how its effects settle on African Americans. Contributors include Sharon D. Wright Austin, Niambi M. Carter, and Reuel R. Rogers, among others.

Davis takes up a question decolonial thought usually approaches with suspicion: whether the language of human rights is any use to people trying to change how wealthy societies live. He grants the objections at length. The 'human' of human rights was invented by Christian Europe; responsibility has been repackaged as development and as justification for military intervention; corporations recast structural harm as an individual carbon footprint.

Borrowing Stuart Hall's account of ideological terrain, he answers that rights remain the moral vocabulary in which enormous numbers of people actually reason, and so can be rearticulated rather than abandoned. His anchor is Glissant's claim to a right to opacity, from which he draws duties: joining coalitional protest of the kind gathered at Standing Rock in 2016, then reconsidering food, work, clothing, travel and kinship.

A final chapter on Du Bois's own retreat from rights language marks where the strategy stops working.

Decentralization has circulated in Haitian political talk as a development tool for more than thirty years, since the twenty-nine-year Duvalier dictatorship ended in 1986. Recent fiscal gains have been credited largely to a USAID program, LOKAL+, but whether the extra local revenue actually changed what municipalities spent was never clear.

Léon tests this with a mixed-methods case study of two of the program's nine target communes, supported by descriptive statistics for all nine and a dataset of annual budgets covering each of Haiti's 140 communes from 2012 to 2015. Saint Marc, where the intervention began, and Delmas, reckoned the country's most successful local government, both show modest improvement in public service delivery.

Two cautions follow. Without parallel accountability measures such as citizen engagement, local capture and personalism can distort who gets served. And Haiti's authoritarian legacy, showing up as an absence of political will among central government actors, keeps limiting what decentralization can accomplish.

Small Caribbean Community economies keep turning in weak performance — low productivity, low competitiveness, too little diversification. Persaud-Ready examines that problem through Jamaica and Haiti, asking what migrant remittances, foreign direct investment and national competitiveness scores have to do with growth across the thirty years from 1987 to 2017.

The conceptual frame draws on several propositions: that remittances lift GDP growth in less financially developed countries, that the gain shrinks when the money goes to consumption, that foreign direct investment raises growth, and that competitiveness and growth are linked. Secondary data are analysed with inferential statistics. Tests show a strong relationship between growth and all three variables in both countries, with trade openness, financial development, productivity and economic freedom emerging as important determinants too.

Recommendations follow for both countries: engage the diaspora to draw more remittances and channel them into productive investment, strengthen democratic institutions to build investor confidence, and act to attract and keep skilled people.

Dubois and Turits begin where most Caribbean histories hurry past. The indigenous peoples of the islands have been told they were vanishing for five hundred years and have not vanished, surviving in descendants who claim the identity and in lifeways, crops and practices that outlasted invasion. The authors take up Melanie Newton's point that aboriginal disappearance was a founding imperial myth, one that persisted even in twentieth-century anticolonial writing, and they follow the Garifuna from St Vincent into Central America and beyond.

The plantation follows, treated as an anomaly rather than a norm. Nowhere else had the enslaved formed eighty-five or ninety per cent of a population, and nowhere had slavery been so thoroughly racialised, with indentured European labour abandoned in favour of Africans and their children.

They trace the system from early Spanish sugar in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico through the British and French colonies to the Cuban boom that followed Haitian independence.

Dupuy sets out to explain why Haiti has remained underdeveloped from the late seventeenth century onward.

The framing draws on the models that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s to explain why underdevelopment took hold across Latin America and the Caribbean and why it lasted. The available abstract stops short as it turns to that body of theory, so the book's own argument cannot be described further from it.

Haiti's tradition of European-style art music runs from the opera houses of colonial Cap-Français through Christophe's court, Geffrard's national music school, a long salon culture, and the conservatory founded under Magloire. Very little of the resulting paper survives in institutions. Dirksen's subject is the private collections — scores, manuscripts, correspondence — kept in individual homes, and the people who happen to be keeping them.

Drawing on years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, she works through cases in which the only surviving music of composers such as Occide Jeanty, Werner Jaegerhuber and Justin Élie was lost, nearly lost, or salvaged by accident. The obstacles she catalogues are both practical and structural: climate, disaster, money, and contested claims of ownership. Behind them sits a harder question about whether this repertoire is understood locally as national heritage at all, and therefore whether anyone will judge it worth preserving.

Juste Chanlatte mattered to the political and literary life of the newly independent Haiti, yet his standing has never matched that role: his writing has long been disparaged, Haitian critics included. The record of the man is thin in the same way. Even the date of his birth is uncertain, and what he did during the Revolution is largely a matter of guesswork.

The gap is widest across the ten years that begin with the British landing of 1793 and close with the rout of Leclerc's expedition in 1803, a stretch his biographers have filled in by conjecture. Pierrot shows where the conjecture came from: accounts composed after Chanlatte's death, seldom supported by references, and frequently written by people with no sympathy for him.

Against that inherited picture Pierrot sets French colonial paperwork and other archival material, building the fullest life of Chanlatte yet written.