Georges Anglade's map of La Diaspora is the point of departure for this collection, which takes his blueprint for studying Haitian settlement abroad and asks what geography does to migration and to the positions Haitians occupy once they arrive. Jackson resists treating diaspora as a seamless web of connection; the contributors do not assume the term means anything in particular to the people they study, asking instead how it is used locally and to what end.

Three parts organise the essays. The first follows movement within the Caribbean, from exile in Jamaica and marginality in Guadeloupe to exclusion in the Dominican Republic, rural enclaves in eastern Cuba and the Bahamas as a way station, where moving is often a sideways step rather than an escape.

The second turns to Paris, Boston, Michigan and the machinery of deportation. The third treats diaspora itself as a way of mapping the world.

Anti-Haitian feeling in the Caribbean is usually studied one territory at a time, and Zacair and Reinhardt argue that this is why it remains poorly understood. The Dominican Republic has drawn sustained attention; Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Jamaica and the Bahamas far less, and for French Guiana there is almost nothing in English. Their volume assembles historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and sociologists so that the comparison can finally be made.

The essays examine how host societies imagine Haitian migrants and how migrants absorb those images: a televised campaign of slander in Guadeloupe and the trial that followed, the stereotype of clandestine invasion in French Guiana, Jamaica's retreat from an initially generous response to refugees after Aristide's ouster in 2004, and the competing languages of human rights and humanitarianism in Dominican border clinics.

A second section turns to interviews and first-person accounts, in which Haitians abroad describe that same marginality from the inside.

Hometown associations sit at the centre of Pierre-Louis's account of Haitian New York. Organised around places of origin in Haiti, they ship goods, raise money for local projects and help officials at home set up nonprofits of their own, while doubling as advocacy bodies for their members in the city.

They also do identity work. Haitians arrived from a society where class outranked colour and found themselves assigned to a racially marginalised minority; the associations offer a setting where the history of the first black republic stays in view, immigrant enterprise is admired, and the differences of language and culture that separate Haitians from African Americans and other black immigrants are treated as assets.

Exile politics complicated all of this. Service organisations meant to help newcomers settle were led by people whose horizon was the fall of Duvalier and a return home, and several of them did return, into government.

Laguerre argues that migrant politics has been misfiled. Examined from inside the receiving country it looks like ethnic politics or voting behaviour; examined from the homeland it looks marginal, a shadow of real government. Neither framing captures what is happening.

He proposes diasporic politics as an arena in its own right, transnational rather than domestic or international, and without the legal foundation that gives states their legitimacy. It works by grafting itself onto institutions at both ends, party organizations where migrants live and electoral machinery where they came from, while building nonprofit structures of its own, so that a foothold in one place becomes leverage in the other.

Because it crosses borders by definition, he insists it be theorized through globalization rather than international relations, and he traces how homeland governments come to count on remittances while host states seek integration. Haitian settlements in the United States, Canada and France supply the recurring examples.

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.