Johnson writes the American Revolution as a story with two theatres, setting rebellion in the thirteen colonies alongside acts of resistance by free and enslaved people in French Saint-Domingue. The method is contextual rather than causal: events five hundred miles apart, with no documented connection between them, are read together to reveal a shared Atlantic situation after the Treaty of Paris of 1763.

Newspapers do much of the work. Reports from Port-au-Prince and Cap-Français are placed in conversation with those from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and Savannah, whose editors and correspondents told readers about escapes from slavery and about colonial defiance of imperial power alike.

The result folds free and enslaved Afro-Caribbean life into the history of early United States foreign relations, and rereads founding documents against the diplomacy surrounding them. Johnson disclaims any exhaustive treatment, offering the book as an invitation to keep connecting the early republic to its Caribbean neighbours.

Léger asks who is missing from the Caribbean writing that made the Haitian Revolution canonical. Her answer is the African and Africanised captives, the bossales, whose Ginen thought and Vodou practice she treats as what actually drove the Revolution to succeed. Canonical texts instead populate it with creole revolutionists, above all the affranchi generals, and so leave standing the colonial framework they meant to overturn.

Reading the country as Ayiti Ginen and its people as Ginen, she describes a praxis that declines the master's demand for recognition rather than struggling for it — reflecting, refusing, moving on. Chapters clear the conceptual ground granted to Louverture, then take up Carpentier's Kingdom of This World and his marvellous real, Césaire's Christophe read beside Pontecorvo's Queimada on colonial time, and finally Danticat's short stories, whose women carry the Revolution's unfinished future.

Refusal, in her account, is what these works transmit, and what reactionary violence has always worked to convert into consent.

Henry Christophe, born in 1767 and dead by 1820, was famous across the world in his own lifetime and remains one of the most puzzling figures the Americas have produced: rebel, traitor, and the only man ever to rule Haiti as king.

Daut's biography works at that unresolved puzzle, which the publisher presents as the essential account of a man whose reputation is still contested.

Johnston follows more than a decade of foreign money into Haiti and comes back with a different question than he set out with. Tracking the roughly ten billion dollars pledged after the January 2010 earthquake through contracting databases and NGO reports, he found he could learn more from an office in Washington about the reconstruction than Haitians could on the ground, and that the deeper puzzle was not where the funds went but why.

His answer is the aid state: a governing arrangement in which Haitian institutions answer to donors and a small domestic elite rather than to Haitians, the latest in two centuries of outside attempts to manage the country. He traces it from the militarized relief operation of 2010 through the assassination of Jovenel Moise and the international backing of an unelected prime minister.

Talk of a failed state, he argues, obscures the point. Intervention never paused; the only real choice is whether it continues.

Between the end of the Seven Years' War and the outbreak of revolution, a loose coalition of reformers tried to build something new in France's Caribbean colonies: a patriotic community held together by honor and civic virtue as the Enlightenment understood those terms. Harvey examines that attempt.

They were not an organized party but a scattered and frustrated set of enlightened figures. Defeat by Britain had wounded French pride, and they saw the renewal of empire as the remedy: steadying the Antillean colonies, strengthening them, and binding them more tightly to the metropole.

In January 1822 the Haitian president replied to four Greek expatriates in Paris who had written to him seeking support for the rising against Ottoman rule. Sideris and Konsta present that letter in English translation, with a short account of its recipients and of how it survived.

Boyer declines to send money, explaining that the treasury is exhausted and that absorbing the eastern part of the island has proved ruinously expensive. What he offers instead is recognition: a people who broke their own chains cannot be indifferent to others fighting the same fight, and he closes by invoking Leonidas, Miltiades, Marathon and Salamis.

The editors note that the text comes down through a Greek translation preserved in a revolutionary secretary's papers, and read the classical allusions as a deliberate pairing of the citizen-soldier of antiquity with the volunteers of Haiti and of the Greek revolt.

Haitian Vodou holds that its lwa come from twenty-one spiritual nations, and Daniels reads that count as a record of who was carried to colonial Saint-Domingue. The nanchon amount to a confederation of spirits assembled by enslaved Africans of many origins, and devotion to them lets Haitians and other Africana practitioners claim a continental inheritance rather than a single ancestral line.

She works outward from Andre Pierre's painted pantheon, whose figures appear largely in ritual order along a winding path, then offers a religious genealogy of the four best-known nanchon: Rada and Nago, Gede and Petwo-Kongo, with briefer treatment of the less-studied nations. Rada is traced to Allada and Dahomey, and the Fon roots of Vodou vocabulary are set out in detail, from the word Vodou itself to the terms for priest, initiate and sacred drummer.

The argument that results is for a Pan-Africanism lodged inside Haiti's national religion.

Ehret assembles archaeological and historical linguistic evidence into a continuous account of Africa from the deep past to the early centuries CE, arguing that the continent belongs inside world history rather than at its margins, a misplacement he traces to the catastrophes of recent centuries.

The chapters on technology make the case concretely. Africans invented ceramics more than eleven thousand years ago, wove cotton earlier than anyone else, and were smelting iron at least four thousand years back, with women prominent among the innovators. Agricultural invention followed between the ninth and seventh millennia BCE, and on balance Africa exported more of it to Eurasia than it took in, including a dozen staple crops and the domesticated donkey.

Later sections take up long-distance trade and the merchant class it produced, the African foundations of Egyptian culture and belief, early Christianity on the continent, and how a revised periodisation might carry all of this into global history.

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.

This chapter tracks Haitian currency through the decades after independence and reaches an uncomfortable conclusion: by the 1840s, every additional sack of coffee Haitians grew and shipped was enriching the private holders of their country's sovereign debt.

The hinge is France's demand that the 1825 indemnity be settled in francs rather than in gourdes. Instead of treating Boyer's 1827 paper issue as a doomed expedient and the currency's collapse as the natural consequence of deficits, the author asks who engineered that collapse, and recasts the paper experiment as an attempt to make coffee serve as money.

The argument runs from the silver that colonial Saint-Domingue exported alongside sugar, through Christophe's and Boyer's use of coffee as an international currency, to a forged-banknote scandal of the 1840s. Consuls, merchants, bankers and counterfeiters together kept a cash crop from being spent as cash.

Alexander recovers a story that has gone largely untold: how free and enslaved Black people in the United States moved to defend the young Caribbean republic against those determined to keep slavery and white supremacy intact. The arrival of a sovereign Black nation, the book argues, gave Black communities across the African diaspora a source of hope.

Placing Haiti at the center of Black internationalism's history, Alexander traces how the island's independence shaped Black thought and Black action in the United States. Haiti was what white society dreaded most, since it proved that a revolution by enslaved people could end in victory. Black activists responded by claiming a shared identity with Haitians and treating the two peoples' futures as one struggle. The book ties the revolution to a wider pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.

Fitch Solutions forecasts a fifth consecutive year of contraction for Haiti's economy in FY2023, with real GDP falling 0.3 percent as protracted security and humanitarian crises keep economic activity from functioning normally.

Growth of 1.0 percent is projected for FY2024, which the analysts treat as a meagre result given how low the statistical base has fallen. Political and security risk is expected to stay elevated through 2023, with little room for an elected government to be re-established, and lawlessness and violence continuing without foreign troops arriving to stabilise matters.

For households, the outlook is severe: high inflation, food shortages and mounting humanitarian pressure in the months ahead.

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.

The ordinance Charles X signed in 1825 is remembered for its second article, the 150-million-franc indemnity. Kwass turns to the first: the demi droit, a halving of duties on French goods intended to restore the commerce France had enjoyed when the colony was the richest in the Atlantic world.

Where the indemnity succeeded in extracting money, this commercial privilege failed. Haitian customs officers obstructed it from the outset through a series of deliberate tactics, and the government eventually abolished it; a French consul, casting Haiti as a duplicitous woman, compared the resistance to Penelope weaving by day and unpicking her work by night. Kwass reads this as statecraft rather than mere evasion, driven by fiscal need, revolutionary principle, and a rural population unwilling to purchase an independence already won by arms.

Set against French mercantilism and recent work on sovereignty, the affair shows a young Black republic acting effectively against an informal empire that nonetheless did it lasting harm.

The ransom France imposed on Haiti in 1825 as the price of recognition is usually treated as a story that starts in the 1820s. Ghachem pushes it back a century, to John Law's debt-financing experiment of 1719–20 and the collapse that followed.

That, he argues, was when France first bent its Caribbean colony to the borrowing needs of the metropolitan economy. The indemnity is a decisive episode in a much longer subordination rather than its origin, and the repeated devaluation of Haitian currency at the urging of North Atlantic financial interests belongs to the same lineage.

The practical conclusion follows from the historical one. If the dependence is structural, restoring Haiti's monetary sovereignty will take more than settling one debt: it requires confronting an international financial order that has narrowed the country's chances of building durable democratic institutions. The bicentenary of 1825, he suggests, is the moment to attempt it.

The essays collected here take up a question posed sharply in the opening chapter by Souleymane Bachir Diagne: whether African thought should keep asking who and what Africans are, or turn instead to what they are becoming. Diagne traces the identitarian answer through the founding of Presence africaine, through Cheikh Anta Diop's account of African origins and Nkrumah's consciencism, and through the parallel language of rebirth in North Africa, before arguing that the pressing work now lies in religious and cultural pluralism rather than in return to a foundation.

Later contributions push in other directions. One reads marronage as the ground of a feminism built on flight rather than on recognition. Another treats writing and thinking in Africa as a kind of weaving. A further section examines how African personal status law is handled in Western jurisdictions.

The recurring claim is that meaning should be drawn from what is coming rather than from what has been.

Catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, approached from several directions at once. The editors gather work by anthropologists, historians and literary scholars, among others, and set these accounts of disaster beside one another.

The volume is assembled less to settle the question than to open it. The arguments differ from chapter to chapter, and the point of housing them together is to get researchers who study disaster from separate disciplinary bases into conversation.

This collection gathers papers from the Workshops of Thought held at Dakar and Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal, where the invited scholars first argued among themselves and then met a wider public in open sessions. The stated aim was to start from Africa as a place rather than treat it as a case, and to build frameworks of analysis equal to what is actually in motion across the continent.

The contributions take up decoloniality, the construction of social utopias, the standing of the African question in a global frame, how the universal and the singular are joined, the rebuilding of collective self-regard, and what it takes to think together. Their authors come from a wide spread of disciplines. Mamadou Diouf opens by putting European universalism to the test of indigenous histories, setting the tone for a volume more interested in producing new terms of intelligibility than in arriving at a single position.

Why Christians and Vodouists in Haiti have so often stood in opposition is the question the editors begin with, tracing the hostility to both historical circumstance and competing ideas. From there the collection turns practical, proposing ways the two communities might live together with less friction.

Contributors approach the problem from several directions, among them memoir, anthropology and fieldwork, the study of religious experience, and gender analysis, and the volume also supplies concrete material for those who want to run interreligious dialogue or teach it in Haitian settings.

Three convictions hold the project together: that religion is a good worth defending, capable of serving dignity and justice; that a country cannot be built democratically without cooperation across differences, which the editors take to be a central task of religious traditions; and that religion's public standing can be turned toward reconciliation and friendship rather than division.

Nwokocha's subject is the tight weave of sacred and secular life in Haitian Vodou, where spirits bear on what Black practitioners do from one day to the next.

That connection, she argues, shows itself in the interplay among four things: ceremonies held in public, the material aesthetics that surround them, the adornment of the body, and possession by the spirits. The book treats these as one dynamic set of relations rather than separate topics.

Grace Sanders Johnson follows a group of Haitian women whose lives ran well beyond Haiti's borders — through the Caribbean and on to the United States, Canada, and the Belgian Congo — during and after the years of US occupation.

The book is framed as transnational history, taking gender and radical politics as its subject. By staying with this particular cohort of elite and middle-class women, Sanders Johnson examines how ideas of womanhood, nation, and race were worked out together in their lives rather than treated as separate attachments.

Mary D. Lewis writes in the wake of a New York Times series from May 20, 2022 on what the "ransom" Haiti paid to former French planters, compensation for property they lost in the revolution, did to the country.

Her own subject is the pressure that French merchant interests brought to bear on their government over the question of recognizing Haitian independence. Only the opening lines of the piece are available in this record, so the argument itself cannot be reported here.

Jean-Charles builds a framework she calls a Black feminist ethic and tests it on contemporary Haitian fiction, principally novels by Kettly Mars, Évelyne Trouillot and Yanick Lahens. Her title is deliberate: seeing the world through women's eyes, a phrase she takes from Myriam Merlet, is where the work starts rather than where it ends, since the point is to imagine other worlds and eventually to build them.

Thinking ethically, in her account, has four moving parts: the internal logic of a novel, the thinking its characters do, what happens in readers as a result, and what all of this discloses about the worlds the authors make. She draws on Spivak's definition of ethics as inquiry pressed from below and on recent Black feminist writing about care, reading closely and always intersectionally.

Alongside the novels she analyses visual, popular and sonic work by Haitian women, keeping the study anchored in the present and in ordinary life.

Since the earthquake of 2010, evangelical Christians and the international LGBTQI rights movement have competed for influence in Haiti, each accusing the other of doing outsiders' work. Durban points to what both share: a willingness to call for still more foreign involvement in a country marked by European colonial rule and American imperialism.

Two frames, she shows, govern how such intervention gets justified. The first casts Haiti as a place so hobbled by its own culture that outside supervision is needed to push it forward against Haitian resistance. The second grants Haiti modernity but calls it a failed state, one whose only functioning capacity is violence, homophobia included.

Between those claims the book turns to Haitians themselves. Durban follows people who desire others of their own sex and people whose gender is lived creatively, and the resourceful ways they meet both the violence directed at them and the outside intervention that has never stopped.

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.

Hebblethwaite builds a history of Haitian Vodou running from West Africa to Saint-Domingue to the recording studios of contemporary Haiti, drawing on four centuries of political, social and religious history alongside fieldwork and language documentation.

The book comes in two halves. The African chapters look at Dahomey, Allada and Hueda, taking in economics and culture as well as politics, and attend closely to how Europeans stoked local tensions. The Haitian chapters follow two rites to their sources: the Rada Rite, traced to Allada, and the Gede Rite, traced to Abomey. Both are approached through song, specifically the tracks on two rasin compact discs, Rasin Figuier's Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman's Guede, issued by Jean Altidor on the Miami label Mass Konpa Records.

Every song on the two discs is read through a procedure Hebblethwaite names Vodou hermeneutics, which pulls together history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism and ethnomusicology to put the study of Vodou songs on scholarly footing.

Bellegarde-Smith writes the history of his country through one family member: Dantès Bellegarde, his grandfather, a diplomat and thinker who spent his career representing Haiti abroad. The book first appeared in 1985 and answered a long silence, since scholarship had rarely taken Haitian intellectual and political life seriously as a subject.

The setting is a nation made by enslaved people who overthrew their masters, and then punished for it. Governments on both shores of the Atlantic saw a threat and set about draining Haiti's wealth: trade barriers, fines heavy enough to cripple it, and finally occupation by the United States. Haitians endured this, and some of them became figures of consequence in world affairs.

Byrd's foreword to the reissue describes Bellegarde as pushing a racially inclusive idea of progress and arguing that Haiti, black people, and colonized nations generally should be able to exist outside the reach of the great powers.

The manifestos Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau wrote between 2000 and 2009, collected in English for the first time, together with two op-eds they signed jointly.

Some were composed in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election in 2008, and they land now in the middle of arguments about divided identity and the case against multiculturalism. Each piece answers to a particular political moment in France, the Caribbean or North America rather than to a general condition.

Across the collection the two writers take up the climate catastrophe, extractive industry, toxicity and the survival of colonial power, working through the poetic vocabulary they had developed elsewhere: Relation, globalization, globality or mondialité.

Mbembe, a critic of colonial rule and its aftermath and a leading voice in a recent wave of French critical theory, gathers essays on what decolonization has meant for African ways of being in the world. The collection dwells on the contradictions of the postcolonial present and looks for models of community and shared humanity that might come out of them.

Working across European and African intellectual traditions, Mbembe intervenes in arguments over citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity, and takes the measure of conventional habits of writing and thinking about the continent. He faults European thinkers, French ones especially, for ignoring postcolonial critiques that expose how appeals to universal principle keep certain people out.

The book also advances a reading of African modernity built around Afropolitanism, a way of inhabiting the world that emerged from decolonized Africa amid both ruin and the founding of new societies, with South Africa treated as its testing ground.

Morgan builds an account of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Black Atlantic out of the lives of enslaved African women. What they lived through, she argues, brings into view how early modern people understood trade, race, and the turning of human beings into property.

Trouillot's first book, published in 1977 as Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti, appears here in English for the first time, the earliest work by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

The subject is the generation of formerly enslaved people who fought in the revolution and the war of independence between 1791 and 1804. Trouillot places them at the center of the story, as the people who founded the modern Haitian state and seeded the culture that thrives in the country today. Against standard readings, he argues that two centuries of Haitian history look different once that generation is put first.

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.

A reader gathering writings by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot: the essays that made his reputation alongside pieces that are less familiar or hard to track down. Taken together the selection shows the range of his influence, on Caribbean studies, anthropology, history and postcolonial thought, and on scholarship that takes political commitment seriously.

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.

The essays here work toward a more sophisticated social history of colonialism, concentrating on the eighteenth century and running from roughly 1700 to the close of the Age of Revolutions in the 1830s.

Their method is to read legal practice and litigation across the French colonial world, in its Atlantic as well as its Oceanic reaches, in order to question an assumption that has come to seem natural: that law and empire amount to the same thing, with doctrine and codified procedure formed in the metropolis and then transmitted outward to the colonies. Against that, the contributors treat state authority as unsteady and open to challenge, and offer new approaches to writing the history of the French empire.

The volume also addresses a gap. France's first colonial empire has drawn far less scholarly and theoretical attention than its imperial forms after 1830, and the book positions itself as a corrective.

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.

Four lectures and six interviews, arranged so that Glissant's central preoccupations arrive in the middle of conversation rather than in formal exposition. Creolization, langage, and the distinction between atavistic and composite cultures are among the topics covered, along with culture and identity.

Because Glissant is working against other people's positions throughout, the material is unusually approachable without the range of his concerns narrowing.

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.

White elites across Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico spent two centuries invoking Haiti as a warning, proof of barbarism and a reason to refuse black populations any larger share of civic life. Valdés gathers essays tracing how writers and artists in those three countries answered back, turning Haiti into a figure for liberation instead.

The premise is that language never kept these populations apart: exchange has been continuous since 1804, whatever the region's school curricula and the fields of Latin American and Caribbean studies have implied by silence or caricature. Contributors follow that exchange through Cuban film and poetry, Ana Lydia Vega's story of three men adrift in a raft, Edwidge Danticat on the killings of 1937, and Dominican fiction that keeps the old hostility alive.

A closing essay supplies a syllabus for teaching Hispaniola's two nations together, written after the 2013 ruling that stripped Dominicans of Haitian descent of citizenship.

Seven women stand at the center of Joseph-Gabriel's account of mid-twentieth-century decolonization, figures whose contributions later analysis has tended to shrink or miss altogether. Some were wounded by German torpedoes, some held in concentration camps, some declared enemies of the Vichy state.

Working from archives in France, Haiti, Martinique, and the United States, Joseph-Gabriel places these women at the heart of anticolonial movements and argues that they formulated a decolonial citizenship — more capacious than what was on offer precisely because it answered the intersecting oppressions they met in the French empire.

Citizenship in their hands became a way of claiming attachment to several political and cultural worlds at once: France, Africa, the Caribbean, the diaspora, the global South. Joseph-Gabriel reads this as pushing the idea past the boundaries of both nation-state and empire, toward Pan-African, Pan-Caribbean, and global South identities grounded in a feminist practice of anticolonial resistance.

Scott starts from a puzzle about states and people who move — pastoralists, foragers, vagrants, runaways — and arrives at something larger: the state's need to make its subjects legible. Permanent surnames, standardized measures, cadastral surveys, freehold tenure, uniform legal language, planned cities and scientific forestry all appear as devices for converting local complexity into a grid that can be read, taxed and conscripted from a center. Such abridgments do not merely describe; joined to power, they remake what they claim to record.

He then asks why so many well-meant schemes to improve human life ended in catastrophe. Four things together, he argues, are required: administrative simplification; a high-modernist faith that borrows the prestige of science and mistakes geometric regularity for rational order; an authoritarian state prepared to impose it; and a civil society too battered to object. Collectivization, the Great Leap Forward and compulsory villagization supply his cases.

Scott reconstructs the webs of communication that linked enslaved and free people across the eighteenth-century New World. Working through obscure official records in three imperial languages, Spanish, English and French, he writes history from the vantage point of those at the bottom.

The book follows talk of coming freedom as it moved, and the people who carried it: sailors and military deserters, buccaneers, runaways living in maroon settlements, from Venezuela up to Virginia. Out of these traced routes Scott builds a detailed account of how mutiny and revolt spread, and in effect a history of thought among the enslaved.

Its own history is unusual. The manuscript went unpublished for thirty-two years, gathering a reputation among historians of slavery for having opened the study of the Black Atlantic to serious work, before Verso finally issued it with a foreword by Marcus Rediker.

Haiti was the second nation in the hemisphere to become independent, and the first black one to break free of European colonizers, yet its history stays largely unknown to Anglophone readers. This anthology sets out to change that by presenting the country through the words of Haitians from every social position.

Dozens of selections, most of them appearing in English for the first time, range across scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political culture: poems, novels, political tracts, essays, legislation, songs, folk tales. The span runs from indigenous Haiti before contact to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.

Familiar episodes appear, among them the United States military occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship, but so do stretches that usually get skipped, such as the decades following the second independence of 1934. Political upheaval, the environment, and modernization all come into view through the documents themselves.

Grüner reads the Haitian Revolution as the moment when the contradiction inside modernity becomes impossible to miss. Working from Marxist theory and from Adorno and Horkheimer, he treats the period not as one forward movement but as an age at war with itself: the decades that produced the French Revolution's language of universal liberty also required inventing new forms of racial slavery to underwrite an emerging capitalism.

The book declines the choice between writing about Haiti and writing about the modern, arguing that the choice is itself a Eurocentric one. When enslaved people took the promises of liberty and equality literally, they exposed how narrowly those promises had been drawn — reserved in practice for men who were white, European and free. What Grüner names counter-modernity is not a position outside or before the modern but the place where its violence and its emancipatory claims are stretched furthest apart, and he writes it deliberately from the South.

Casimir writes a history not of Haiti but of Haitians — of the political imagination of the population rather than the machinery that governed it. His organising distinction is between a state that expresses a people's sovereignty and a public administration that governs from outside on behalf of outsiders. Saint-Domingue had only the second, and independence, he argues, did not dissolve it.

The generals who defeated France took over the conqueror's claim instead of refusing it, treating the land as spoils and trying to keep plantation agriculture running. What they ran into was the counter-plantation system built by people who had been captives and never conceded the legitimacy of their captivity: their own arrangements for land, markets, family, language, worship and movement.

Moving back and forth between the arrival of Columbus and the American occupation, Casimir reads the country through Kreyòl, rural insurgencies and the sovereignty the majority built without a state.

Orcel's novel unfolds on the Grand-Rue in Port-au-Prince, in a neighborhood known for its trade in flesh, sex, and desire, where women young and old make their living. In fragments and glimpses, readers learn about lives shaped by attachment to television images, to the romance found in novels, and to the prospect of getting out. Then an earthquake levels the capital and its brothels.

The narrator, unnamed, discovers that one of her clients is a writer and strikes a bargain with him: sex in return for setting down the stories of the friends left under the rubble. She recounts the lives of women who were lovers, friends, mothers, and daughters, in a trade that used pseudonyms and artifice to erase any sign of intimacy or inner life. What emerges is their insistence on being named in life and remembered in death.

Translated by Dize, the book mixes poetry with prose and won France's 2012 Prix Thyde Monnier.

Britton's introduction presents a book that shifts without warning between registers - memoir, poetry, polemic, literary criticism - and coheres through a small number of insistent ideas: Relation, diversity, and the refusal of any single universal measure.

Glissant reads widely and unevenly on purpose, moving between major French writers, obscure ones, and founding texts of Asian and Arabic traditions, and takes an equal interest in computing and audiovisual technique for having reset the old division between speech and writing. He prefers islands and archipelagos to continents, holds that culture is inescapably political, and is scathing about multinational companies both for exploiting the poor and for dissolving the very idea of place.

Other passages are concrete proposals: an ecological plan to reclaim Martinique, a scheme of refuge towns for persecuted writers. Alongside them run adolescent memories of Martinique under wartime privation and of the dissidents who slipped away to fight, and an account of how medieval multiplicity hardened into classical universality.

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.

Immigration, movement to the suburbs, and gentrification run through this collection on the shifting terrain of Black politics in the United States. Candis Watts Smith opens it under the heading of Black flight; Christina M. Greer closes by asking where things go from here.

One group of chapters stays in the city, taking up relations among African American, Black ethnic, and Dominican constituencies in New York, the different shapes ethnic respectability assumes in New York and in Los Angeles, what sanctuary policy has meant for the Black public sphere, and how political incorporation works where no single group holds a majority.

The rest follow Black residents outward — into majority-white suburbs, into multiracial neighbourhoods, and across regions — weighing how time, place, and class shift political attitudes, what sets neighbourhood change in motion, and how its effects settle on African Americans. Contributors include Sharon D. Wright Austin, Niambi M. Carter, and Reuel R. Rogers, among others.

Small Caribbean Community economies keep turning in weak performance — low productivity, low competitiveness, too little diversification. Persaud-Ready examines that problem through Jamaica and Haiti, asking what migrant remittances, foreign direct investment and national competitiveness scores have to do with growth across the thirty years from 1987 to 2017.

The conceptual frame draws on several propositions: that remittances lift GDP growth in less financially developed countries, that the gain shrinks when the money goes to consumption, that foreign direct investment raises growth, and that competitiveness and growth are linked. Secondary data are analysed with inferential statistics. Tests show a strong relationship between growth and all three variables in both countries, with trade openness, financial development, productivity and economic freedom emerging as important determinants too.

Recommendations follow for both countries: engage the diaspora to draw more remittances and channel them into productive investment, strengthen democratic institutions to build investor confidence, and act to attract and keep skilled people.

Dubois and Turits begin where most Caribbean histories hurry past. The indigenous peoples of the islands have been told they were vanishing for five hundred years and have not vanished, surviving in descendants who claim the identity and in lifeways, crops and practices that outlasted invasion. The authors take up Melanie Newton's point that aboriginal disappearance was a founding imperial myth, one that persisted even in twentieth-century anticolonial writing, and they follow the Garifuna from St Vincent into Central America and beyond.

The plantation follows, treated as an anomaly rather than a norm. Nowhere else had the enslaved formed eighty-five or ninety per cent of a population, and nowhere had slavery been so thoroughly racialised, with indentured European labour abandoned in favour of Africans and their children.

They trace the system from early Spanish sugar in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico through the British and French colonies to the Cuban boom that followed Haitian independence.

Rachel Douglas treats The Black Jacobins not as a fixed text but as one C. L. R. James kept reopening. Following it from the 1930s forward, she compares the 1938 and 1963 editions, the stage version of 1967, and the earlier Toussaint Louverture play of 1936, drawing as well on manuscripts, notes, and interviews.

What the revisions register, in her account, is James's own movement — his shifting politics and his changing engagement with Marxism, each rewriting of the Haitian Revolution's history marked by where he stood at the time. Douglas also argues that theatre was no sideline for him: it shaped how he understood history itself.

The figure she settles on is the palimpsest. Layer written over layer, the book keeps renewing itself, and keeps issuing its call to readers who were not there for the earlier versions. It remains, she holds, both a major work of the last century and the foundation of Haitian revolutionary studies.

Haiti's standing as the one state produced by a successful revolt of the enslaved is widely known; its first decades are not. Gonzalez fills that gap with a study built on rarely used primary sources and centred on what people grew, who held land, and the unsanctioned rural settlements that former slaves of the plantation system built for themselves.

The transformation he traces runs from the eighteenth century's most profitable and most exploitative slave colony to a comparatively free society of small farmers. Out of that shift came lasting institutions: marketplaces operating in the open air and outside formal regulation, and the lakou, the clustered agrarian compounds of the countryside.

His central claim gives communities of runaways and conflict over land a formative weight equal to the Revolution itself, arguing that Haiti's farming, its commerce and its religious life all carry their imprint.

Dupuy follows the long aftermath of the only slave revolt that ended in an independent state. Reading the Haitian Revolution through race, class, and slavery, he accounts for where the revolution fell short and for the pattern of underdevelopment that has marked the country since.

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.

Dominican national identity has long been built on a negative: Dominicans are what Haitians are not. Wigginton and Middleton trace how that construction, sharpened under Trujillo, whose regime encouraged European immigration, ordered the 1937 border massacre and coined the term dominicanization, has been carried into the classroom.

Their method is to read primary-school social science textbooks through critical race theory, a framework developed for the United States that they argue travels, pointing to Freire's own Latin American grounding. Curricula on this view are never neutral. They transmit a pigmentocracy in which lighter skin confers standing, and the profusion of available colour terms lets people of visible African descent avoid ever calling themselves black.

What the textbooks actually show, though, is not flat anti-Haitianism. The script is under pressure, and the materials register a slow and uneven movement toward a Dominican identity willing to acknowledge its African inheritance.

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.

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.