This is a study edition of the New Revised Standard Version, the translation descended from the King James Bible by way of the Revised and Revised Standard Versions and authorised for use by Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches alike.

The prefatory material explains the choices behind it: the Hebrew and Greek critical editions used, the handling of the divine name, the footnote conventions that mark variant readings and conjectural corrections, and the instruction to remove masculine-oriented language wherever that could be done without falsifying an ancient patriarchal setting. The committee's working rule was to stay as literal as possible and as free as necessary.

Around the text sit book introductions, running annotations and a set of general essays. The essay on the Torah, for instance, weighs documentary against supplementary accounts of how the Pentateuch was assembled, and argues that its redactors deliberately preserved contradictory voices rather than smoothing them into one.

Mignolo gathers and rewrites earlier essays into a single argument about what he calls the colonial matrix of power, the structure of control laid down in the sixteenth century and still running, now through knowledge and artificial intelligence as much as through territory. His preference for investigation over research is deliberate: the latter borrows the prestige of the hard sciences and their claim on what counts as knowing.

The opening part treats race as a problem made by the classifier rather than the classified, a question of concepts rather than of bodies, and follows it from the Atlantic slave trade through the Holocaust to the disposability of migrants and refugees. Later parts ask whose humanity the language of human rights actually speaks for, chart a shift away from five centuries of Westernization, and set Andean thinkers beside European ones.

The aim throughout is to unsettle the assumptions behind Western knowing and sensing rather than to argue with their content.

Suarez reads Jean-Robert Cadet's Restavec as testimony rather than memoir - a disclosure undertaken, as such disclosures always are, at the cost of returning to what happened. Cadet, born Alfrenold Brutus to a wealthy man and a factory worker, was handed after his mother's death to his father's former mistress and raised in fear and shame as an unpaid child servant.

The book splits between Haiti and the United States, but Suarez notes that the American chapters stay governed by the Haitian injury: nightmares, a marriage lived alongside the trauma, Cadet's own likening of his long silence to that of a rape victim.

She sets the book against documentary films and campaigns on behalf of restavek children, and against a literature that has minimized or denied the arrangement altogether. Cadet's circumstances were atypical, but his survival contradicts the claim that such placements benefit the child, and his writing joins a long tradition of autobiography used as political act.

Manning takes Robin Law's study of Oyo as about as full an interpretation as the evidence then allowed, combining political narrative with cross-sectional analysis of the capital, the army and the provinces.

Cavalry does much of the explanatory work. Horses account for Oyo's power and for the empire's shape, since its reach stopped where the ground no longer suited mounted warfare, and the Alafin's dependence on cavalry he did not personally control sharpened the constitutional crisis. Manning follows the sequence from Gaha's seizure of power in 1754 to Abiodun's counterstroke in 1774, which installed provincial chiefs as a third force at the capital and left the underlying conflict unsettled until provincial revolts brought the state down.

He is warier than Law about the slave trade, suspecting smaller export volumes and reading the surge of the 1780s as an answer to rising prices. The book, he concludes, is careful synthesis rather than new argument.

A collection on the people who left Saint-Domingue during its revolution and washed up, by way of Cuba and elsewhere, in Louisiana.

The opening essay makes the largest claim. Louisiana and Saint-Domingue were one colonial world, tied by trade, shipping, kinship and a shared Creole language, and the older colony effectively made the younger one. The refugee waves of the early nineteenth century were therefore not an arrival of strangers but a return within the family — a transfusion that prolonged the life of French Creole Louisiana and left the region opaque to the rest of the country.

An editorial introduction tests this against the 1850 census and church records. The refugees who went to the countryside stayed few, mostly white and poor, farming or working trades, with the great majority holding under five hundred dollars in property. Those who stayed in New Orleans held their identity far longer, sustained by intermarriage and repeated failed attempts to reclaim island estates.

The kingdom of Allada dominated slave exports from the western Bight of Benin before Dahomey's conquests of the 1720s, yet its earliest phase has been treated thinly or misleadingly in the standard accounts. Law reworks the numbers, discarding decade-by-decade tabulation in favour of a periodisation drawn from the trade's own political history.

Two corrections follow. Portuguese activity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, judged negligible by earlier scholars, looks larger once the fiscal basis of the surviving valuations is read correctly; the mid-century Dutch and English trade, by contrast, looks smaller. Sustained growth begins only in the later 1670s.

Law also stresses how violently the traffic fluctuated year to year, disrupted by the Anglo-Dutch wars. That matters for interpretation: falling slave prices between the 1650s and 1670s accompanied stagnation rather than the expanding African supply earlier explanations assumed.

Geggus examines what the destruction of Saint-Domingue and the founding of Haiti meant for Spanish and Portuguese America. News travelled fast along maritime routes, carried by sailors, refugees and privateers, and slaveholders across the hemisphere began complaining that their slaves had grown insolent. Medallions of Dessalines turned up on militiamen in Rio; a Cuban association replaced the Spanish crown on its banner with a Haitian cocked hat.

He is more cautious about causation. Rebellions did cluster in these decades, but tax increases, colonial reforms, debates at the Cortes of Cadiz and the rhythms of the slave trade explain much of the pattern, and the claim that Haiti changed what slave resistance fundamentally was does not hold up against the Latin American evidence.

Real connections existed nonetheless, Aponte's Havana conspiracy of 1812 being the clearest, though Haitian governments avoided exporting revolt for fear of a blockade cutting off their arms.

Wesley sets the two black republics against the general practice of diplomatic recognition as it took shape after 1783 and was applied by Adams and Jefferson to Spain's rebelling American colonies, several of which Britain acknowledged in 1824. Haiti, independent since 1804, and Liberia waited far longer.

The article follows the obstruction through Congress: objections raised to sending delegates to the Panama congress, a Vermont member shouted down in 1839, resolutions ruled out of order, consular reports that misrepresented Haitian commerce even though it rivalled the combined United States trade of several South American states. The obstacle was never commercial. A slaveholding country could not receive black ministers as equals.

Recognition finally came in 1862, carried through the Senate by Charles Sumner, and treaties of friendship, commerce and navigation followed in 1864. Wesley records the thanks offered by both republics and by the A.M.E. Church, and reads the episode as a landmark in the advance toward equal standing.

Luhmann opens by asking why sociology has produced no theory of society since its founding generation. The classics escaped a circular difficulty by locating themselves historically and by taking individual and society as a settled pair — a distinction whose own unity was never posed as a problem, since society was simply assumed to consist of people.

His alternative is deliberately austere. Society is not composed of human beings and does not stop at national borders; it is a self-producing system of communication, and the concept he wants is neither humanist nor territorial nor realist about its object. Tying society to the nation-state, as he says Giddens effectively does, makes the term redundant and hands everything interesting to a separate notion of the global system.

The awkward consequence he accepts is autology. Sociology belongs to what it observes, so its theory is society describing itself, carried out in the mode of second-order observation.

Luhmann takes up the question of how a society divides itself, and declines the familiar answer that its parts are bound together by shared values.

Integration, on his account, is thin and momentary. Because everything that happens happens at the same time, a single event — a budget laid before parliament — is identified at once by politics, law, the media and the economy, and briefly limits the freedom of each. As soon as prehistory and consequences are counted in, the systems pull the event apart and each makes of it something of its own. Systems couple and uncouple continuously; the autopoiesis of subsystems is untouched.

Against that background he sets out the succession of differentiation forms — segmentary, centre and periphery, stratified, functional — and what each permits to develop inside it. A society moving from one principle of stability to another undergoes what he calls, in systems-theoretical terms, a catastrophe.

Trouillot's argument that the revolution in Haiti was, in its own moment, unthinkable — that European thought had no categories for enslaved people conceiving of freedom and founding a state — is Tomich's starting point and also his target. He accepts the account of silencing but presses on its looseness. It supplies no procedure for relating the long structures of Western ontology to a particular event, and it risks reading the revolution backwards from its outcome, treating the enslaved as fully formed revolutionary subjects from the beginning.

His test case is Victor Schoelcher, whose book on Haiti appeared in 1843 after the first visit there by a European abolitionist. Schoelcher arrived a republican heir of the Enlightenment, anxious about what he would find, and found stagnation. He blamed not race but Boyer's autocracy and a mulatto elite immobilised by fear of the black majority, and made Toussaint the figure who turned revolt into a movement for liberty.

Belony's doctoral thesis follows how Haitians in Quebec have spoken about and remembered Duvalierism, and finds no straight line running through that record.

Competing accounts of what Duvalierist power was, and where it belongs in Haiti's national story, have been argued over within the diaspora, and the arguments have shifted as political conditions changed on both sides — in Haiti and in Quebec. The thesis ends on a claim about interpretation itself: whether a given reading of Duvalierism comes out favourable or damning, it is always anchored in some wider judgment about what Haiti has become since 1986.

Written in Kreyòl and framed as a family gathering at which a long-absent traveller returns to report what he has found out, Trouillot's book asks where Haitian misery came from and answers with a class analysis of the colony and the revolution.

He reads the Code Noir not as protection for the enslaved but as legislation serving the planters who ran Saint-Domingue and the French merchants they in turn served, since law follows the interests of whoever controls the state. He explains why a slave system had to keep its workers alive in order to keep working them, and devotes a long stretch to the middle stratum — artisans, clerks, gendarmes, white and mulatto and black — whose position between the two fundamental classes made it both restless and the most prejudiced of all.

The rising of August 1791 is then set inside those contradictions, along with the diverging aims of the rebel commanders and of the enslaved mass.

A documentary collection built around Toussaint Louverture, opening with an editor's survey of the society he came out of: some four hundred fifty thousand enslaved people against a white minority a fifteenth their number, a Code Noir that restrained nothing, mortality high enough to require constant fresh imports, and a colony administered entirely from France with no representative assembly to absorb colonial grievance.

That introduction also sketches what resistance looked like before 1791, from poisoning and marronage answered by mounted patrols manned by free men of color to a long run of conspiracies, the most ambitious of them Mackandal's betrayed plot of 1758.

The documents follow. A first part gathers Toussaint's own proclamations, beginning with the calls to arms of 1793 that answered Sonthonax's emancipation offer by insisting the enslaved should take their liberty themselves. A second collects the sharply divided verdicts of contemporaries, republican Frenchmen among them.

Saint-Domingue's free population of African descent numbered some twenty-seven thousand by 1789, and a few of them owned slaves. King uses that fact to reopen the standard portrait of Toussaint Louverture as a gifted plantation coachman who rose out of bondage only in 1791.

Following Debien's discovery that Toussaint's name is absent from the Breda slave lists of 1785, King argues that he passed the years before the revolution as a free man: a small planter and slaveholder in his own right, at home in the propertied free colored world rather than in the field gangs.

The revision matters for how the revolution is read. If the leader who did most to secure its success came out of that class rather than the maroon camps and the sugar works, then the familiar story of 1791 as a rising conspired by runaways and slave foremen needs more room in it for free people of color and their ambiguous position.

Any life of Toussaint Louverture has to work around two obstacles: the archive is thin before 1791, and the gaps have been filled for two centuries with legend. Louverture supplied some of it himself, cultivating the international press and shaping his memoir with posterity in view, telling conservative planters one story and the black rank and file another.

This introduction surveys how he has been refigured since, from bloodthirsty savage at one extreme to greatest of black men at the other, and treats the mythmaking as a subject worth studying in itself. C. L. R. James is read closely on the tension between impersonal historical forces and individual leadership, including his own later turn toward a history written from below.

Much of the argument is aimed at recent conservative revisionism, particularly Philippe Girard's portrait of a pragmatic social climber, which the editors regard as reducing a revolutionary to one fragment of himself.

Issued at Cap Francais in November 1801 and labelled dictatorial by his biographer Schoelcher, this proclamation gathers most of Toussaint Louverture's domestic programme into a single document.

It opens as self-justification. War was waged with restraint, defeated enemies received as brothers, rank held as a trust rather than a reward. It then turns into a long complaint about morals. Parents in the towns are accused of raising children in idleness and in contempt for farming; unemployed women, foreigners spreading rumours, officers keeping concubines and idle domestics are all named as threats to public order. Labour becomes an obligation on everyone capable of it, marriage the institution the state must defend, religion the ground of civic virtue.

The decrees that follow put teeth in the sermon, making commanders criminally answerable for revolts they failed to foresee or suppress. Liberty here means disciplined cultivation, not release from work.

Before the man was Louverture he was Toussaint Bréda, named for the plantation where he was born to an African father who had survived the Middle Passage. The chapter sets that obscure life against the colony that made it: the destruction of the Taino, the French seizure of western Hispaniola, and a sugar and coffee boom importing some thirty thousand captives a year by the late 1780s.

Much of what circulates about his boyhood — Dahomean royal descent, the frail child nicknamed Fatras-Bâton, the precocious reader of Caesar and Raynal — comes from legend, from his son Isaac's memoir, or from C.L.R. James, and each claim is weighed against a thin archive. What holds up is a trilingual man of Fon, Kreyòl and French, taught by Jesuits and by his godfather, anchored in Catholicism and a wide network of kin, and free long before 1791 — a free man who, as he later took care to obscure, owned slaves himself.

American policy toward the revolution in Saint-Domingue was never settled, and this account explains the oscillation as a contest between economic interests rather than a matter of principle. Northern shipping and merchant houses wanted the trade. Southern planters, who had most to lose from a successful slave revolt next door, wanted the rebels isolated or crushed. Which group had the ear of the sitting administration determined where policy went.

Washington's cabinet began by helping France hold its colony. Later administrations leaned toward the rebels, at moments even toward encouraging independence, then back toward France. Only when Jefferson's embargo, coupled with the collapse of Haitian exports, drove the maritime interests out of the argument did an openly hostile policy emerge.

Racism was pervasive, but it is not offered as the whole explanation. Many Americans, north and south, recoiled from the bloodshed of the French revolution, and saw in Haiti a military autocracy rather than a fellow republic.

Pierre gives the Haitian Declaration of Independence in Haitian Creole, working from the printed copy that Julia Gaffield located in Jamaica's national archives in February 2010 - no copy having been known in Haiti, and the whereabouts of the original still unknown.

A translator's note explains the choices. Boisrond-Tonnerre, one of Dessalines's secretaries, capitalized words in mid-sentence to mark their weight, and the translation keeps that habit so the emphasis the writer felt at the time survives into Creole. Punctuation is handled more freely, with very long sentences broken so readers are not lost. The work was undertaken through Duke University's Haiti Lab, on the conviction that a text amounting to the country's birth certificate should be legible to people who speak only Creole.

What follows is the January 1804 proclamation at Gonaives, the generals' oath and signatures, and Dessalines's address to the population, set beside images of the French original.

A community study of Toco, on the northeast coast of Trinidad, offered not as a portrait complete in itself but as one specimen within the range of New World Negro cultures, to be read against both its African past and its functioning present.

The analysis rests on stated premises. Culture is learned rather than issued with the body, so a tradition devised by one people can be taken up by any other given the chance to learn it. Contact quickens borrowing, but the particular circumstances of a contact decide how much of the old survives, and what is adopted is reworked rather than swallowed whole.

Borrowing is also uneven. It gathers where a people's interest already lies — the cultural focus — which in settled conditions makes that the most receptive zone and, where change is forced, the most stubbornly defended. Toco's religious life is examined with these propositions in hand.

Daut examines what Atlantic writers made of the Haitian Revolution before 1865 and finds a fixation with little basis in events. Across European and U.S. American writing the revolt is told as a war of mixed-race sons against their white fathers rather than as an antislavery revolution led largely by enslaved people.

She names this the mulatto vengeance narrative and sets it against a rival story crediting the revolution to Enlightenment ideas. In the vengeance version the cause lies in blood: a supposedly degraded mixture is held to breed a natural appetite for revenge, and a pseudoscientific vocabulary of graded terms supplies the scaffolding. People of mixed descent do double duty, as agents blamed for the violence and as figures for the anxiety that colour, class and kinship no longer predicted allegiance.

The title names that doubling, the Caribbean as a region and the figures of speech by which colonial writing produced what it claimed only to report.

A secret dinner in Philadelphia marks the point where American officials stopped merely trading with revolutionary Saint Domingue and began dealing directly with its black leadership, seeking to protect United States commerce in a hostile Atlantic.

Johnson follows the relationship from 1798 to 1801. John Adams extended economic backing and political encouragement to Toussaint Louverture, and Timothy Pickering, as secretary of state, built what became the first diplomatic tie between the United States and a government led by black men, a relationship the study describes as confident and mutual. Adams pursued American trading interests, on this account, without abandoning the natural rights promised in the Declaration of Independence.

Both parties then occupied a similar position: emerging republics trying to get out from under a dominating power. Adams lost the election, the relationship ended, and Saint Domingue stood just short of nationhood.

Payton began with a narrow question, why Port-au-Prince's buildings failed so completely in 2010, and ended with a history of how the city was made. Taking the capital's explosive growth after 1950 as her point of departure, she reads its geographic and material forms as expressions of the same processes that underpinned the Duvalier regime between 1957 and 1986.

Some of the evidence is explicit, such as the politics behind the airport's construction and the ideological meaning invested in it. Some is oblique: elite neighborhoods raised over fragile aquifers in the 1970s reveal a deliberate environmental neglect that kept powerful interests satisfied.

Working from historical maps, archival and printed sources, oral histories collected from earthquake survivors and her own years living in the city, she treats slum clearance, transport infrastructure and the politics of cement as ways into the dictatorship's logic and its international setting, and into what she calls its infrastructures of corruption.

Laguerre studies Upper Belair, a hillside quarter of Port-au-Prince, from close range. He lived at its edge, worked for months under the eye of a Duvalierist militiaman who wanted to know what he was collecting, and had to overcome the suspicion of vodou practitioners who took him for the agent of a rival society.

The quarter is not presented as an isolated fragment. Laguerre reads it through dependency: small personal retailing squeezed by wholesalers who organise supply from outside, and survival strategies shaped by unequal dealings with a local elite of merchants, militiamen, religious leaders and patrons who share little beyond an interest in the poor remaining poor.

He carries the same logic outward to the Caribbean primate city itself, at once satellite to a metropolis abroad and metropolis to its own hinterland, and to the emigrant populations in New York and Miami whose numbers now dwarf those of provincial cities at home.

Schoelcher builds his life of Toussaint from documents, quoting dispatches, ministerial instructions, speeches to the Constituent Assembly and colonial memoirs, and arguing openly with the authorities he cites.

He starts with the free men of colour, some of them educated in Paris at the expense of white fathers, whose petition for civil and political rights in October 1789 met a courteous evasion. He follows the rising of 1791 and the bands of Jean-Francois and Biassou, who after the execution of Louis XVI took Spanish pay and royalist cockades and swelled their forces with enslaved men drawn by the promise of standing as free men.

The abolitionist purpose is never concealed. Schoelcher reproduces a colonist's tirade against people of mixed descent as evidence of how imbecilic colour prejudice could become, and records with disgust that once their own rights were won, men of colour sent the slaves they had roused back to the workshops.

The 1811 rising on Louisiana's German Coast survives, Rasmussen argues, mainly as the planters' account of itself. Governor Claiborne and the sugar planters turned a rebellion into a story about their own politics, and the historians who followed kept that framing: those who diminished the insurgents' agency and the Marxists who reversed the tone told substantially the same story.

Working from court records, plantation ledgers, reimbursement claims, newspapers and letters, several newly translated and some never used before, the study reads against the grain to recover what the enslaved were doing and why. It moves from the geography of the Mississippi and the sugar economy that made New Orleans, through the conditions of plantation labour, to the march itself and its suppression.

Considerable attention goes to the aftermath: the systematic beheadings, the heads mounted on poles along the river road, and the ritual of terror by which order was restored.

Hubert asks why Haitian governments from Soulouque to Francois Duvalier worked so hard to appear at world's fairs, and twice, in 1881 and 1949, mounted expositions of their own. The fairs were showcases of national progress and imperial reach, designed as much to confirm racial and economic hierarchy as to promise a shared future, and Haitian officials entered them to demonstrate that a black republic was capable of what the age called civilization.

The study follows the displays at New Orleans in 1884-85, Chicago in 1893, the Paris expositions of 1931 and 1937, the New York fairs of 1939 and 1964, and Expo 67 in Montreal, alongside the two Haitian expositions.

A consistent aim runs through them: to correct the country's reputation abroad and attract trade, investment and eventually tourists, often by way of the pavilions' modern architecture. The same effort, Hubert argues, registered Haiti's dependence and provoked recurring arguments at home about sovereignty.

Hurbon starts from the Fon word vodun — an invisible, unpredictable force liable to intervene in anyone's affairs — and follows it across the Middle Passage into the forms African belief took throughout the Americas, of which the Haitian one is a single branch.

Much of the book concerns slavery. In the runaway camps of the Bahoruco mountains and elsewhere, where the newly arrived outnumbered those born in the colony, ritual, song, healing and oath-taking bound together people from different nations and different plantations and gave them a shared purpose: the end of the system. Hurbon runs that thread through Makandal's poisonings and the gathering at Bois-Caïman a week before the rising of August 1791.

Later chapters set out the theology plainly — the lwa as intermediaries rather than gods, their route from a lost, mythical Guinea to the centre post of the temple, and the Catholic saints behind whom, under prohibition, they went on being served.

Foreign travellers and the international press have long cast Haiti as the land of zombies and sinister rites. Laguerre sets that literature aside and treats Vodou instead as a factor in the distribution of power, one that helps structure relations among the country's social sectors and whose political dimension, he argues, has never been examined systematically.

His account is historical. Under slavery Vodou served as a channel for a movement seeking religious, cultural and political freedom when no institutional means existed. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the state's policies shaped how the religion organised itself, while the religion in turn worked its way into politics at local and national level.

Its ideology, ritual and dealings with the state therefore changed as circumstances did, and Laguerre presents its politics as largely reactive, formed in response to constraints generated elsewhere in society.

Haitian women — peasants, market vendors, community organisers, survivors of rape under military rule — tell their own lives here. Bell recorded the narratives, edited them, then carried the text back to each speaker to be corrected, expanded, and cut where publication would be dangerous. She calls them istwa, the Creole word that means at once a tale and a history, and their tellers griyo, borrowing the standing of the village keepers of memory.

The speakers move constantly between personal incident and political analysis, and Bell's claim is that their range defeats any single figure of the Haitian woman. She is candid about the limits: a white American author, a book in English that most of its subjects can neither read nor afford, and the absence of the exiled, the wealthy, and the many who did not survive.

It opens around a cooking fire on Millet Mountain, where women trace their courage back to Anacaona.

Thornton's aim is to examine African warfare of the slave-trade centuries as one would examine any other region's — weapons, tactics, organisation, logistics — using the primary record rather than inherited generalities. Goody had proposed that ecology dictated political form, with savannah cavalry breeding oligarchy and forest archers something more democratic until imported firearms let rulers concentrate power; later close reading dismantled most of that.

The second framework is the military revolution: artillery, handheld guns, mass infantry, paid standing armies, fiscal bureaucracy, treated as a universal ladder of progress. Africa is either absent from that literature or filed under backwardness, its adoption of guns explained away through the gun-slave cycle.

Thornton counters that armies succeed when they accomplish what their commanders set out to do, not when they resemble European ones. Centralisation is a social outcome, not a measure of effectiveness — and in Angola, the one theatre of sustained conflict, Europeans fared poorly and borrowed local method.

Fieldwork inside two development organisations in Port-au-Prince supplies the material for this study of how Haitians talk about development, and of what that talk accomplishes. Joersz treats the question named in her title as one people ask constantly among themselves, diagnosing failure, assigning historical blame and imagining what should be done.

Rather than reading development as a dominant ideology imposed from outside, the analysis borrows from linguistic anthropology and treats speech as a form of action. Meetings, arguments and everyday conversation become sites where participants negotiate standing, press claims against one another and address themselves to those holding power. Development supplies both a way of ordering time and a moral demand.

Set against a combative political climate in which rival interpretations of any actor or institution are fought over openly, such talk emerges as a means of forming and reforming political commitments at once personal and national.

Michel argues that moral reasoning cannot be measured against a single abstract standard. Kant, Habermas and Piaget locate ethics in sweeping accounts of human development; Vodou, long caricatured in the West as the absence of morality altogether, shows instead how thoroughly ethics is shaped by culture, history and gender.

Her evidence comes from Karen McCarthy Brown's study of Alourdes, known as Mama Lola, a manbo serving a congregation in Brooklyn. Brown, a white anthropologist who was herself initiated, wrote from friendship and proximity rather than at a distance, letting the religion speak in its own terms. Michel uses that material to build the analytic framework Brown did not set out to supply.

What emerges is a code of ethics that is inherited rather than written down, rooted in African values, and carried in large part by women. Their standing as spiritual and social leaders, Michel suggests, is one reason Vodou has been so persistently disparaged.

A collaborative handbook on how the African past is reconstructed, addressed to historians who must work largely without written records. Opening essays treat history as a human artefact, reinterpreted by each generation as fresh evidence and new social theory arrive, before turning to the disciplines that supply the raw material.

Contributions take up archaeology and the imprecisions of stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating; historical linguistics, where a reconstructed proto-word for goat testifies to ancient herding as surely as an excavated object; human biology and the muddle created by the notion of race; botany and crop domestication; art treated as a visual document; and European-language accounts from the late fifteenth century, whose trading and missionary authors carried obvious prejudices but were present when no other observer was.

Oral evidence runs through the whole. Contributors examine how traditions were gathered, the distorting role of interpreters, the failure to deposit recordings for others to check, and the recovery of voices elite sources ignore.

Coombes takes Poetics of Relation as the hinge of Glissant's career and the starting point of this study, arguing that the 1990 book marks a genuine break with the earlier theoretical writing, and that everything Glissant produced afterwards elaborates rather than departs from the paradigm it set.

Much of the work is exposition. Coombes lays out the interlocking neologisms, Relation and errantry among them, and the rhizomatic conception of identity borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, explaining why Glissant refuses to derive identity from a single root. That refusal is grounded in the francophone Caribbean's history of forced migration, colonial rule and what Glissant saw as continued subordination. The concepts are presented as a loose system their author declined to systematize, and which he expected readers to assemble for themselves.

Coombes also reads Glissant against the market-driven globalization of the neoliberal decades, and defends him in later chapters from radical critics who find his thought politically useless.

A photographer's record of Vodou as Haitians practise it, drawn from work Galembo began in 1996 after years documenting Edo ritual dress in Nigeria and Candomble communities in northern Brazil. Her portraits favor costume, altar and ceremonial setting: cemeteries whitewashed for the November gathering of the Gede, temple interiors, priests and priestesses photographed in the regalia of the spirits they serve.

Fleurant's introduction supplies the history the images assume, running from the arrival of enslaved Africans on Hispaniola after 1502 through the French seizure of the island's western third in 1697 and the plantation expansion that followed, and treating Vodou as the memory of home those captives carried and kept.

Short texts by Vodou scholars, practitioners and artists accompany the plates, with a glossary and bibliography. The aim throughout is to set the tradition against the sensational reputation it carries abroad.

Bourhis-Mariotti traces how Haiti came to occupy the imagination of free and emancipated African Americans in the decades before the Civil War. As conditions in the United States worsened and colonization schemes aimed at Africa met resistance, black activists increasingly named the young Caribbean republic as the place where a people might govern itself.

The subject here is not the departures themselves, which earlier historians have covered, but the advocacy that produced them: a body of persuasion written and circulated largely by Blacks, and built more on hope than on reporting, since very few emigrants or travelers had sent anything back. James Theodore Holly gave the argument a providential shape. By 1860 President Geffrard's government had hired James Redpath to run an emigration bureau from American soil, and Redpath recruited black lecturers and newspapers to sell the plan.

Read this way, the campaign restores the range of black abolitionist thought and the initiative Blacks took within it.

A commune in Grand'Anse built its own road, and Dubuisson uses that case to argue that konbit and protest, both grounded in critical citizenship, can put politics back into community development.

Critical citizenship is usually framed around how civil society cooperates with or opposes the state. Dubuisson adds transnational actors to the picture. International NGOs in Haiti act as parastate bodies, taking on what the state should do, which turns civil society's attention away from an absent government and toward the organizations themselves. Unlike a state, though, those organizations present themselves as apolitical, which protects their bureaucratic dominance.

Christian Vannier has suggested konbit could serve participatory development, but such projects tend to misuse collaborative labour and treat the people involved as objects to be studied and managed rather than as citizens. The road initiative differed: residents owned it, and they applied protest and other democratic pressure to see it through.