The league argues that learning to see beauty changes how people live

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale ran its education programme on a proposition about beauty. Knowledge and intellect, its members held, carry an aesthetic value. A woman who can tell what is beautiful can tell what is shoddy, and once she can do that she can raise the standard of the things around her, which is to say the standard of her life. On that reasoning taste was not ornament and not a badge of class. It was a faculty of judgement, and judgement was what the league was trying to build in women who had been given no reason to trust their own. The organisation celebrated schooling and celebrated the range of Haitian women at the same time, and the two were connected. A member who could weigh what she saw could weigh what she was told to be. The courses that followed were practical enough, but the argument underneath them was that a critical eye is where a changed household and a changed country begin.

Nation and nationalism sit awkwardly on postwar Africa. Territories had to turn themselves into nation-states out of administrative units in a very short time, and in some cases the work is still unfinished. Movements that called themselves nationalist were frequently defending a region or a group, as concerned with who would hold the territory after the Europeans left as with getting them out. Searching for a shared consciousness inside colonial boundaries usually misleads, because those boundaries were drawn for European convenience and carried no ethnic, linguistic or historical logic. In practice nationalism in Africa often meant sharper competition between ethnic, religious, regional and economic groups, some of those rivalries manufactured by colonial rule and some far older. Polities that had been dominant in the nineteenth century pursued their own aims inside the anti-colonial struggle and sometimes sought to leave it. The task facing postwar leaders was to gather political associations, trade unions, militant Christianity and Islam, negritude and pan-Africanism into something that could force a departure and then govern.

The Griot writers had built a politics out of racial authenticity, arguing that the assimilation of French values had impaired Haitian development, that African polities were communitarian while Haitian individualism was an import, and that only culturally authentic black Haitians could meet the needs of a black country. At the base of this lay a strong anti-liberal component, including an authoritarian and exclusive state, on the argument that liberal democracy in a country full of colour prejudice would divide black Haitians of different classes to the benefit of the mixed race elite. When Italy invaded Ethiopia the noiristes, like most other black intellectuals in the region, backed Haile Selassie and attacked Mussolini. The book uses this to mark the point at which the group's framework was fully outlined, before the war, and available for political use in the following decade.

Radio arrived with the marines in 1926, as jazz had, and the first commercial station followed in the middle of the decade. By 1948 seven stations operated in Port-au-Prince. In its early phase radio spread ideas through music and discussion, with Dantes Bellegarde and Felix Magloire debating weekly on the air. Wartime import shortages cut the supply of French and American records just as demand rose, so entertainment stations expanded in-studio concerts by groups such as Jazz des Jeunes, which were very popular because the country had no developed recording industry. The book argues that this infrastructure is what carried black consciousness out of the drawing rooms of the black intelligentsia to the popular classes, and that in the following decade radio would bring Haitians closer to international events and give political figures a route to the illiterate majority.