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.