Daniels begins from a saying often repeated in Haitian Vodou: the lwa come from twenty-one spirit nations. Those nanchon, the essay holds, register the African diversity present in early colonial Saint-Domingue, an inheritance devotees carried into what they established there.

The abstract available for this piece breaks off mid-sentence, so the argument that follows cannot be reported from it.

Daut places Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the celebrated alongside the obscure, inside the global history of ideas, treating their frameworks of knowledge and interpretation as central to the Age of Revolutions.

The revolution she describes struck at slavery and colonial rule together, and those who fought and wrote pushed antislavery, anticolonial, and antiracist commitments into the working vocabulary of modern politics. Haiti became the first state in the Americas to end slavery permanently, ban prejudice by color, and prohibit colonization, and it did so surrounded by slaveholding societies and by foreign powers that attacked its sovereignty again and again. Haitian writers and officeholders held the independence they had won and set down ideological foundations for egalitarian statehood.

Where modern freedom and equality are usually traced to the French or United States declarations, Daut names a closer source: the 1804 Principle, the claim that no person should ever again be enslaved or colonized.

Kalaf and Díaz examine how social policy is designed in the Americas and what it does to race, national identity, and belonging. Their focus is the Dominican Republic, where international actors promoted universal legal identity while access to citizenship documents was being restricted, arbitrarily, from people of Haitian descent above all. This book is the first to draw the connection between those two developments.

That pairing exposes a gap in global policy, which has not reckoned with how measures meant to include people can instead push them out, particularly where states already discriminate against populations descended from migrants. As identification systems grow more capable, the authors note, fresh insecurities and uncertainties appear alongside them.

The argument works as a warning about how fast identification practices are spreading, and offers a pointed critique of the international push to give everyone a legal identity ahead of the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Haiti receives an enormous volume of foreign-funded health projects, some sponsored by religious institutions, many run inside the secular apparatus of global health. Minn looks at the Haitian professionals who make those projects run and shows that the parties involved judge whether an intervention worked by different and often incompatible standards.

Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrators are hired to carry out programs, to hand out resources or refuse them, and to produce the accounts of outcomes funders read. Working as intermediaries, they are expected to represent the humanitarian aims of distant donors and to care for patients with almost nothing, while also serving as a source of support for their own relatives and managing their own prospects under conditions of scarcity and insecurity.

Taking these clinicians seriously, Minn argues, is what makes it possible to stop casting them and their patients as heroes, villains, or victims, and to think past the donor-recipient pair framing theories of humanitarianism and the gift.

Maginn follows the Toussaint, Christophe, and Louverture families across the nineteenth-century Atlantic, tracing how relatives and associates in the United States, Great Britain, and France built what amounted to satellite Haitian communities between 1791 and 1880. Shared language, faith, culture, and political principle held these circles together, and they helped members survive, settle, and at times move up.

The dissertation's most original contribution concerns the networks themselves, which Maginn argues scholars of the Francophone Black Atlantic have left unexplored: they gave these families leverage in local, national, and international affairs.

A further aim is to unsettle standing paradigms of race. The families met racial inequality directly, including through contact with Atlantic slavery, yet their name and property afforded a mobility and independence that other people of color in the same three countries did not have.

Screen portrayals of the Haitian Revolution are Sepinwall's subject, among them Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and the earlier rebel Makandal.

Part of the chapter is about money. Sepinwall asks why certain stories from Black history never reach the screen at all, and locates an answer in how film funding is distributed — a pattern she ties to the trouble former slaveholding nations, the United States and France in particular, have had in confronting slavery.

She then turns to video games, which she treats as an increasingly powerful force in shaping what the public remembers of the past. Games set during the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue already exist, and the chapter's claim is that they deserve study on the same footing as anything on film.

The first volume to treat the teaching of Haitian history and culture across disciplines, this collection gives instructors practical guidance: approaches to course design, theories for a wide range of texts, sample syllabi, and accounts of actual classrooms. Contributors link Haiti to the wider Caribbean throughout.

The editors push against the reflex that ties Haiti to disaster, poverty, and a debased picture of Vodou, and against the neocolonial, imperialist, and racist framings common in literary and historical writing. Teachers working in women's and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture describe how they reshape those older narratives, and they make the case for putting Haiti into American and Latin American studies courses.

Rather than the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti appears here as a country with a many-sided culture and a part to play in the world, raising questions about migration, locality, and globality that bear on isolationist politics and neoliberal practice.

Fatton sets Haitian and American exceptionalism side by side, asking where each came from and following how a story of uniqueness has governed dealings between them from their first years of independence to the present.

Every nation's founding narrative rests on something like this, in his account. Exceptionalism scrubs the injurious parts out of history and replaces them with innocence and distinction. It also binds people together as a chosen fellowship, which means it necessarily shuts out those judged unfit to belong on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, or class.

The narrative is not fixed. Being a social invention, it shifts over time, though never outside the boundaries laid down by its original premises. How far it can be remade depends on the hegemony the ruling class has achieved and on whether that class commands the infrastructural power to absorb, by degrees, the groups it once kept out.

The international effort to rebuild Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake failed, and Joos sets out both why it failed and what Haitians built instead. Alongside the shortcomings of foreign aid, the book documents Haitian-led reconstruction and Haitian economic practice.

Its frame treats urban planning as a form of violence, and from there examines how residents actually use the cityscape and how the countryside has been urbanized. Read together, these show that the development promoted by international agencies makes impermanence and instability into standing conditions. Ordinary Haitians, meanwhile, put the city to their own uses and remake it, producing spaces of belonging and forms of citizenship that draw on a long record of resistance to extractive economies.

Joos moves between the leftovers of failed industrial ventures in the provinces and the streets, rubble, and houses of the capital, thinking about what dwelling can mean in a landscape after disaster.

Stieber begins where many accounts stop. After 1804, Haitian sovereignty faced a challenge from inside, a civil conflict between monarchy and republic that was carried on with weapons but equally with printed matter, in newspapers and periodicals, in books, broadsheets, and fliers.

Out of that record she assembles a literary history of the young nation. Reading what Haitians wrote once independence was secured, she finds freedom itself under dispute in public argument, and that dispute supplied the ground for the guerre de plume, a contest over opinion and over what Haiti was to mean. The rival claims made for liberté, for writing, and for civilization expose how loaded those categories are and how closely literature and politics were bound together.

The effect is to break up a uniform picture of Haiti, drawing out competing conceptions of the nation that persisted deep into the twentieth century and bearing on how Haiti figures in black radical, black Atlantic, anticolonial, and decolonial thought.

Sheller takes up the ecological emergencies and the work of rebuilding that confront the Caribbean as a whole under climate catastrophe. Her fieldwork covers reconstruction in Haiti after the earthquake, flooding along the Haitian-Dominican border, and the aftermath of recent hurricanes.

What she finds is that vulnerability and the pursuit of a just recovery cannot be separated from particular transnational arrangements, political, economic, and cultural. Foreigners generally know little about Haiti's political, cultural, and economic situation, and least of all about the part the United States has played in it, so their attempts to help frequently deepen the inequities already there.

Survival in the region, Sheller argues, will require alternatives to the neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and United States military dominance that produce what she calls the coloniality of climate. Any serious project for rebuilding, for justice, and for resilience against the climate has to be rooted in radical Caribbean intellectual traditions and their demand for deeper transformation.

Johnson locates the beginnings of freedom in intimate acts saturated with power, and in the particular oppressions borne by African women and women of African descent. Slavery in the Americas grew as an institution but also through the body and through reproduction; fantasies of domination fed by that bondage seeped into every relation, between husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and worker. Intimacy bound the enslaved to owners, and it bound black women and the children they bore to men, European and African alike.

Working from documents held across three continents, written in several languages and mostly by colonial officials and slaveholding men, Johnson reassembles the lives of black women from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue, Spanish Cuba, and the Gulf Coast, with New Orleans as the central case.

Free status, she argues, took on meaning through what these women did with kinship and intimacy, aggressively and sometimes without success, and their attempts shaped the emancipation struggles that followed.

Dirksen's ethnography follows carnival in contemporary Haiti as a place where music and political power meet, and where ordinary citizens argue with celebrities about what the country should be.

A central thread is Michel Martelly, the konpa performer known as Sweet Micky, who declared himself president of the genre before winning the presidency of the republic, building a political persona that was inseparable from the musical one. Dirksen supplies the longer background to this: the traditions of carnivalesque wordplay and the particular performing repertoire, vulgarity and provocation included, that let Sweet Micky dominate carnival for over a decade.

That style of politics met sustained opposition from other prominent musicians. Matyas and Joj, Brothers Posse, Boukman Eksperyans and RAM all released carnival songs that fed public argument about civic participation and citizenship. Drawing on more than fifteen years of fieldwork, Dirksen gives extensive space to interviews with musicians and everyday Haitians, and reads performances against events well outside music.

Vastey, who lived from 1781 to 1820, served as the most important secretary to Haiti's King Henry Christophe and wrote prolifically. Daut reads that body of work as the founding instance of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a mode of argument aimed squarely at the Enlightenment premises underwriting colonial rule.

The claim is one of priority. Taking apart colonial racism and the justifications for slavery is a project usually credited to the twentieth century, to W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, and Daut places Vastey at the head of that line rather than outside it. She reads him alongside those later figures and also among black Atlantic writers nearer his own time, including Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs.

The conclusion follows from the connections she draws: no account of how Afro-diasporic thought began holds together without him.

Beckett is not writing about crisis in Haiti as an event to be explained. He is writing about what living with it feels like, and sometimes dying with it, when the crisis has no visible end and keeps producing further disasters, further emergencies, and further interventions.

Drawing on more than a decade of research in Port-au-Prince, he traces how people make their way through ecological destruction, economic collapse, political turmoil, violence, and humanitarian catastrophe.

Running alongside that account is an interest in stories themselves, in what narrative can do to help make sense of a world and to convey what someone else's experience is like.

A collected volume returns to Jean Price-Mars to weigh his thinking and his legacy again, and to ask what his ideas mean now, amid a culture of political correctness, the unfinished problem of race and racism, and continuing imperial dominance.

Contributors take up the several roles Price-Mars occupied at once: historian, anthropologist, cultural critic, public intellectual, scholar of religion, pan-Africanist, humanist. Four lines of inquiry organize the book. It examines what he contributed to Haitian history and culture; it follows his quarrel with Western historical writing and the racist narrative embedded in it; it reads his ties to Black Internationalism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Negritude; and it sets out his bearing on postcolonial thought, religious studies, Africana Studies, and Pan-Africanism.

The editors connect this reassessment to renewed academic attention to Haiti and Haitian Studies in North America, and to questions about the place of contemporary Africa in the world.

Seasonal labor migration from Haiti to Cuba sits at the center of how the early twentieth-century Caribbean is narrated, in questions of race, of national development, and of United States imperial power. Casey reconstructs what that migration was actually like for the workers who undertook it.

Following them between rural and urban Haiti and the sugar plantations, coffee farms, and cities of eastern Cuba, the study fills a substantial gap and offers a close view of how empire, labor, and political economy operated day to day in both countries.

Migrants were not simply moved around by these forces. Their attempts to improve the conditions in which they lived and worked, and to keep practicing their religions, left marks on migration policy, on economic life, on how race was understood, and on Caribbean spiritual practice, in a period when Haiti and Cuba were each living under United States domination.

A collection of poems by Georges, Boston's poet laureate, working in African American letters.

The praise the book carries comes from the poet Afaa Michael Weaver, who hears in it a fresh account of where poetry begins, and an intelligence careful enough to step across light lying on water. Weaver describes the poems as language choosing its own form, moving through history that has not been spoken, and taking up the space where music leaves off and poetry arrives to name what lasts and what belongs only to the moment.

White asks what the Haitian Revolution did to political thinking in the young United States, and in the process recasts how republicanism and slavery sat together at a founding moment. For Americans after their own revolution, events in Saint-Domingue exposed the gap between professed democratic principle and the practice of slaveholding.

For thirteen years, from 1791 to 1804, enslaved people and free people of color fought for equal rights on French revolutionary terms. Refugees, white and mixed-race, reached American cities, and their arrival made the contradiction concrete: slaveholders in the United States could read their own possible fate in the predicament of Haitian planters.

White gathers reactions across the divisions of the day — Black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, proslavery and antislavery. Setting the new republic in a wider Atlantic frame, she shows the refugees' presence provoking some of the earliest arguments about what the nation was.

In 1934 Haiti marked one hundred and thirty years as an independent republic. Smith takes that same year as the occasion of a second kind of Haitian independence, though the description available here breaks off before naming it.

Fatton's earlier book, Haiti's Predatory Republic, traced the brief ascendancy and subsequent crisis of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas movement after the Duvalier dictatorship fell in 1986. Here he digs further down, into the social origins of Haitian despotism.

The question is why the country has been ruled, almost from its inception, by a succession of dictatorial regimes lording over an exploited majority. Fatton's answer turns on habitus: an intricate repertoire of practices, attitudes, and behavior grounded in the material foundation of the society that produces it.

Dupuy traces Haiti's contested path toward democracy through the rise and collapse of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Carried into office in 1991 by the poor majority demanding a more equal and participatory society, the priest turned president lasted seven months before the military removed him. Popular resistance to the junta pushed the United States into leading a multinational force that returned him to power in 1994 for the balance of his term, ending in 1996.

By his re-election in 2000 he was a changed figure, expelled from the priesthood, no longer preaching liberation theology, and bent on consolidating power for himself and Lavalas while leaving intact the predatory state he had promised to dismantle. Armed gangs, the police, and authoritarian methods kept him in place until foreign-backed opponents drove him out in 2004, this time without the population rising to defend him.

Dupuy sets the crisis inside the relations of power binding a poor peripheral country to the core capitalist states.

Thirteen essays gathered by Bellegarde-Smith treat the African-derived faiths of the Americas as more than matters of belief. They are read here as a means by which people under European domination held their ground, and kept on holding it.

The writers assembled for the volume—among them Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Ina Johanna Fandrich and Miguel "Willie" Ramos, and others—work in different academic fields, come from several countries, and stand largely apart from the scholarly lineage of the West. Their methods differ just as widely, ranging from archival study and fieldwork to interviews and, in some cases, reflection on their own spiritual lives.

What binds the essays is a shared claim about continuity. Ancestral practice, on this account, neither survived intact nor disappeared; it crossed the ocean in pieces, and those pieces were rewoven into creolized ritual, into systems of symbol, and into the sense a community has of who it is.

Fatton's term for post-Duvalier Haiti is predatory democracy. The forms are in place — parties, associations, a free press, elections held with some regularity — but the actors have never agreed on rules for competing, and each faction believes only it is fit to govern.

What fills that vacancy is a fight over the small number of offices through which public power converts into private wealth. Rival wings of the Lavalas petite bourgeoisie pursue it with armed gangs; everyone with resources has built a security apparatus, so coercion is dispersed among private forces that may escape whoever created them. A negotiated transition protected members of the old dictatorial coalition and installed them where they could veto, leaving authoritarian habits inside the new order.

Appearances mislead, as the Creole proverb has it: Préval held the office while power stayed elsewhere. Fatton stops short of calling the arrangement sealed — opposition, press and peasant organisations still leave openings.

Haiti is the one post-emancipation society where the enslaved freed themselves by arms and took the state along with their freedom. Sheller asks what control and resistance could look like under those conditions, once colour and class still divided former planters from the field labourers who had risen through the revolutionary army.

Her title comes from a peasant retort to anyone enforcing a labour contract: the signature binds nothing if the signer can walk away. Sheller reads it as an embodied tactic, continuous with pre-independence flight from the plantation, and finds its cumulative effect in the collapse of large-scale agriculture across the nineteenth century, as land passed to veterans by military rank and estates broke up.

She frames the inquiry with Trouillot's argument that the revolution was unthinkable to contemporaries and remains marginal to accounts of modernity, then asks how much of the peasantry's own history the archive has silenced.