Descriptions of Haiti as failed, cursed, or fragile are the target here. Lamour sets them aside and works instead from interviews and life stories with Haitian women, from project documents drawn up for women after the earthquake, and from the talk that circulated about those women in the rooms where decisions were made.

What emerges is a tight relationship between political decision makers of both sexes, NGOs, and the ordering of gender in Haitian society. Reading from inside Haiti rather than from outside it, Lamour reworks governmentality and proposes irresponsibility as a skill that those in dominant positions hold.

Decision makers occupy a traditional place in an unequal society, and that position keeps them from shouldering the population's difficulties; instead those difficulties are pushed into families and onto women, with NGOs assisting. Irresponsibility, on this argument, is a form of politics in its own right, the equal of responsibility, in a state that has long refused to become one.

Rachel Douglas treats The Black Jacobins not as a fixed text but as one C. L. R. James kept reopening. Following it from the 1930s forward, she compares the 1938 and 1963 editions, the stage version of 1967, and the earlier Toussaint Louverture play of 1936, drawing as well on manuscripts, notes, and interviews.

What the revisions register, in her account, is James's own movement — his shifting politics and his changing engagement with Marxism, each rewriting of the Haitian Revolution's history marked by where he stood at the time. Douglas also argues that theatre was no sideline for him: it shaped how he understood history itself.

The figure she settles on is the palimpsest. Layer written over layer, the book keeps renewing itself, and keeps issuing its call to readers who were not there for the earlier versions. It remains, she holds, both a major work of the last century and the foundation of Haitian revolutionary studies.

Haiti's standing as the one state produced by a successful revolt of the enslaved is widely known; its first decades are not. Gonzalez fills that gap with a study built on rarely used primary sources and centred on what people grew, who held land, and the unsanctioned rural settlements that former slaves of the plantation system built for themselves.

The transformation he traces runs from the eighteenth century's most profitable and most exploitative slave colony to a comparatively free society of small farmers. Out of that shift came lasting institutions: marketplaces operating in the open air and outside formal regulation, and the lakou, the clustered agrarian compounds of the countryside.

His central claim gives communities of runaways and conflict over land a formative weight equal to the Revolution itself, arguing that Haiti's farming, its commerce and its religious life all carry their imprint.

Dupuy follows the long aftermath of the only slave revolt that ended in an independent state. Reading the Haitian Revolution through race, class, and slavery, he accounts for where the revolution fell short and for the pattern of underdevelopment that has marked the country since.

Leonora Sansay went to Saint-Domingue in 1802 with her husband, a planter attempting to recover the estate he had abandoned, and published her letters to Aaron Burr six years later as an epistolary novel. Accilien reads that book as a record of how a Western outsider tried to make sense of a revolution for which, as Trouillot put it, European thought had no frame of reference.

The reading attends closely to the machinery of the form. Sansay divides herself between a narrator, Mary, who writes the letters, and a protagonist, Clara, whose story they tell — a distance that lets the account pass as mere observation. What emerges is a picture of how whites, free people of color and the enslaved stood toward one another in the colony's last months, and of French complacency as the war closed in. Accilien ends on Sansay's nostalgia and her unresolved position on slavery.

A shoal slows a ship. Sailors could not see the sandbars beneath them and had to feel their way, and the formation itself drifts and reassembles, belonging neither to land nor to sea. King takes this as a method for reading between Black and Native studies.

She begins at 1441, when Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador and returned with captives and gold, rather than at 1492, in order to check the momentum that carries colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial studies toward familiar starting points. Her claim is that land and labour alone cannot account for conquest in this hemisphere, and that Blackness has mediated its relations throughout.

Working with Wynter, McKittrick, Brathwaite, Glissant and Pacific scholarship on seafaring and Indigenous mobility, she treats Black thought, movement and aesthetics as friction against the normal flow of Western theory, and looks for the shifting places where Black and Indigenous life have met.

Mocombe's phenomenological structuralism treats consciousness as a fifth force of nature: a quantum field whose particles, which he names psychions, are recycled across a multiverse and embodied through the microtubules of evolved brains. Vodou metaphysics supplies the frame, with the lwa understood as eternal forms and the lwa met tèt as an alternative to the psychoanalytic unconscious.

The application here is to language. Philosophy of language has split between truth-conditional accounts descended from the Tractatus and use-based accounts descended from the Investigations, with postmodernism extending the latter; rather than choose, this account insists the two are one philosophy. Reality has a logical-grammatical structure that innate grammar tracks, and that structure is then obscured by the ordinary speech, ideology and institutions of whoever controls a society's resources. The result is not one speech community but many, leaving those marginalized within them to accept or defer the meanings they are assigned.

Beckett is not writing about crisis in Haiti as an event to be explained. He is writing about what living with it feels like, and sometimes dying with it, when the crisis has no visible end and keeps producing further disasters, further emergencies, and further interventions.

Drawing on more than a decade of research in Port-au-Prince, he traces how people make their way through ecological destruction, economic collapse, political turmoil, violence, and humanitarian catastrophe.

Running alongside that account is an interest in stories themselves, in what narrative can do to help make sense of a world and to convey what someone else's experience is like.

Dominican national identity has long been built on a negative: Dominicans are what Haitians are not. Wigginton and Middleton trace how that construction, sharpened under Trujillo, whose regime encouraged European immigration, ordered the 1937 border massacre and coined the term dominicanization, has been carried into the classroom.

Their method is to read primary-school social science textbooks through critical race theory, a framework developed for the United States that they argue travels, pointing to Freire's own Latin American grounding. Curricula on this view are never neutral. They transmit a pigmentocracy in which lighter skin confers standing, and the profusion of available colour terms lets people of visible African descent avoid ever calling themselves black.

What the textbooks actually show, though, is not flat anti-Haitianism. The script is under pressure, and the materials register a slow and uneven movement toward a Dominican identity willing to acknowledge its African inheritance.

Girard opens on an 1802 Guadeloupe census of hundreds of people described as belonging to the State: legally free under the abolition of 1794, yet catalogued with a price beside each name, called negre while planters were addressed as citizens, and reenslaved within months. The document poses his question. When France had outlawed slavery and the trade in captives, what should one call the traffic that plainly continued?

The traffic persisted in substance while the word was avoided. Ships under French captains supplied Saint Domingue out of Kingston; exiles took the people they owned overseas instead of freeing them; cultivators were kidnapped and sold in Santo Domingo; privateers landed recaptured Africans in Guadeloupe; officials shipped prisoners of war to Central America and the United States.

To sort cases Girard proposes three tests, asking whether a movement was voluntary, whether unpaid forced labour followed, and whether profit was the motive, and reads the era's shifting vocabulary as both cover and evidence.

A small revolt by free men of color in the Grande Anse in 1791 gives Geggus the material for a microhistory, built on archival sources barely used before and set within a wider argument about class relations during the revolution.

The rising itself is obscure, though an atrocity story attached to it has echoed through discussion of the revolution ever since. Working outward from it, Geggus reaches the questions it touches: how rumor moved, how slaves came to be armed, how the races dealt with one another, and where the free colored population's wealth and origins lay. That group, long the least understood part of Caribbean society, is on his account central, since its position in Saint-Domingue was anomalous and its activism began the colony's unraveling.

The Grande Anse held to slavery and white supremacy longer than anywhere else in the colony. Geggus takes the case as evidence that a regional approach is the most promising way forward.

A collected volume returns to Jean Price-Mars to weigh his thinking and his legacy again, and to ask what his ideas mean now, amid a culture of political correctness, the unfinished problem of race and racism, and continuing imperial dominance.

Contributors take up the several roles Price-Mars occupied at once: historian, anthropologist, cultural critic, public intellectual, scholar of religion, pan-Africanist, humanist. Four lines of inquiry organize the book. It examines what he contributed to Haitian history and culture; it follows his quarrel with Western historical writing and the racist narrative embedded in it; it reads his ties to Black Internationalism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Negritude; and it sets out his bearing on postcolonial thought, religious studies, Africana Studies, and Pan-Africanism.

The editors connect this reassessment to renewed academic attention to Haiti and Haitian Studies in North America, and to questions about the place of contemporary Africa in the world.

Reviewing three recent works on Haiti and the early United States — Dun's Dangerous Neighbors, Dillon and Drexler's essay collection, and Daut's Tropics of Haiti — Stieber notes that all three answer Trouillot's call to unsilence Saint-Domingue, and all three complicate it. Far from unthinkable, the revolution was narrated constantly, and in racialized terms, in Philadelphia newspapers and across the Atlantic print world.

Her sharper point concerns method. Silencing the Past deserves reading whole, she argues, rather than being mined for its chapter on Atlantic silences: the book widens outward from disputes internal to Haitian historiography to the framing of Columbus's landfall. The trouble is that the Haitian detail becomes imperceptible as the frame widens, and comparative scholarship risks reproducing that flattening. Her proposed remedy is to bring the work done in Haiti — journals, monographs, the Haitian press — properly into view.

Jung reads Haitian writing produced under and after the Duvaliers as a sustained inquiry into what dictatorship does to men. The study works through Marie Vieux Chauvet, René Depestre, Frankétienne, Georges Castera, Kettly Mars, and Dany Laferrière, asking whether extreme repression can generate new ways of being a man rather than merely deforming the old ones.

At the center are the thirty years from 1957 to 1986, when François and then Jean-Claude Duvalier governed through fear and organized violence. Out of those tactics, Jung contends, came a ruling model of manhood built on domination, one that fed itself by pushing rival masculinities to the margins — a self-devouring pattern that mirrors the machinery of the regime.

Against that background the literature does double work: it disputes the dominant script for manhood, and it opens a room in which the injuries of the dictatorship can be worked through.

Two books, Daut argues, mark a shift in how nineteenth-century Hispaniola is studied: away from what Europeans and North Americans said about Haiti and toward what Haitians and Dominicans said and did themselves. She notes how rarely scholars in the United States consult Haitian-produced historiography, the Revue de la Société haïtienne d'histoire above all.

Gaffield asks whether other Atlantic governments actually treated Haiti as sovereign after 1804, and shows that France's attempt to cut the new state out of trade failed, commerce continuing with Curaçao, St. Thomas and the Batavian Republic. Eller crosses to the eastern side of the island, tracing how unification loyalties outlasted the separation of the 1840s, how Dominican elites manufactured anti-Haitian feeling and a raceless national identity, and how popular resistance to Spain's 1861 annexation strained Geffrard's official neutrality.

Together, Daut concludes, they dismantle the story of Haitian isolation.

In the late 1970s a small Haitian sailboat put into Guantanamo Bay and was met with food and assistance before continuing toward Miami; those who reached Florida were locked up in detention centres. Kahn opens with that contrast and then tells how the water between Haiti and the United States was made into a border.

Interdiction, begun in 1981, was designed as jurisdictional arbitrage: processing asylum claims aboard Coast Guard cutters in international waters kept the procedure clear of judicial review. Within a decade it had grown into a standing fleet of cutters, long-range aircraft, helicopters and a tethered surveillance balloon, while Guantanamo itself became a camp of razor wire and guard towers with a quarantine for detainees who tested positive for HIV.

Kahn reads this as an expression of a tension inside liberal constitutionalism, between binding the state by law and wanting to slip those bonds, and as a template since exported across the global North.

Written in two voices that stay deliberately separate, this book sets out what its authors mean by decoloniality and how it differs from the decolonization struggles of the mid-twentieth century. The horizon is not sovereign statehood, nor solely a fight with capitalism, but the habits that the modern/colonial matrix of power has planted in everyone, and the knowledges and world senses it continues to deny.

Quijano's concept of coloniality is the shared anchor: decoloniality, they contend, was born at the moment coloniality was named, as the Cold War ended and neoliberal global designs opened. It is offered not as a new paradigm but as an option, a standpoint, an analytic and a praxis, plural and bound to context.

Reading the present through it, Walsh and Mignolo find right-wing nationalism, neoliberal globalism and progressive governments funded by extractivism all continuing coloniality by different means.

Fanning weighs a compact study of how American media have pictured Caribbean migrants, and finds it well suited to teaching. Celeste sets New York Times coverage from 1994 to 2004 beside photographs, captions and celebrity biography to show Haitians rendered as a flood and Cubans as refugees from communism, with the Elián González affair and the charge that Haitians carried AIDS as her two test cases. Racial hostility, Celeste concludes, explains the gap better than Cold War politics do.

The review admires her step-by-step account of method, which it suggests could be turned on European coverage of Syrian refugees, and singles out the chapter on Mia Love, whose Haitian background is deployed while her family's migration story is played down. Its main reservation concerns the interviews with fans, summarized rather than transcribed, which leaves later scholars little to work with.