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.

Payton approaches the Duvalier decades through what got built. Clearing slums, laying transport infrastructure, and the business and politics of cement in Port-au-Prince supply the evidence for a fresh account of how place was made in a Caribbean capital between 1957 and 1986.

The argument runs both ways. How the city was built lodged the regime's politics, its economy, and its social order in physical form; the changes to that fabric then worked back on the dictatorship's own unstable inner life. Construction figures as part of how the regime operated, not as scenery behind it.

Payton offers the result as a new way of writing the history of place in the Caribbean, and sets its intertwined threads in a longer frame as well: power distributed unevenly across the country's protracted movement from slavery toward freedom.

The organizing premise here treats a family the way analysts treat a firm: it reads its situation, weighs options, and acts on whatever looks like the most efficient route to producing and reproducing its own survival. Fass sets that premise against ten years of material gathered in Port-au-Prince homes, markets, and streets.

What follows is a close account of how relatives earn a living, share out what they have both inside a household and beyond it, convert food and water into life and labor, obtain shelter and schooling, and borrow to pay for all of it. These strands interlock: move one and the rest move.

Aid programs in credit, housing, schooling, health, and jobs often prove beside the point, Fass argues, because the concepts steering them misread how the urban poor actually live. He avoids easy criticism, noting that ideas do shift when new knowledge arrives — only slowly, at a price the poor are the ones to pay.

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.