Casimir describes the Haitian Revolution and independence as two things at once: a secessionist war against the colonial metropole, and a deep civil fracture. The revolution figures here as an accident within the modern West's sphere of influence, one whose structures are still working themselves out inside and outside the country.

Read over the long term, Haiti's history appears as a failed attempt to reach a compromise after that unexpected split. The argument is that Haiti is now undergoing a forced return to assimilation on terms set by wealthy countries, under a new metropole, the United States.

The oligarchy of Haiti's French citizens fares badly too: its position is precarious, and it loses as the state and the nation decline more rapidly. Facing these fractures squarely, the article proposes, would let Haiti pursue its freedom from a shared internal starting point.

Casimir reads two centuries of Haitian history as a struggle between two sovereignties. Africans brought to the island in the last decades of French rule were never fully controlled by the colonial administration, and out of that opening they built their own institutions, their own language and an autonomous space inside the plantation system, the pressure that finally broke the colony apart.

Independence did not settle the matter. The oligarchy that took over preserved the colonial right to use and abuse property, treated national independence as a substitute for popular freedom, and looked abroad rather than to the habitants for the knowledge to govern. The American occupation of 1915 completed the reversal, and the civilizing tasks the ruling class would not perform itself were handed first to a foreign clergy and later to foreign NGOs.

Recovering that suppressed store of experience, Casimir proposes, means joining Haitians' search for self-expression to comparable efforts elsewhere in the global South.