The study of the international repercussions of the Haitian Revolution has flourished over the past ten to twenty years. As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler argue in their introduction, the United States and Haiti had much in common in their early history and the two neighbors shaped each other in the late eighteenth century and beyond. Far from setting Haiti and the United States as opposites, Dillon and Drexler propose a new geographical imaginary premised on the idea that the “mutually entwined” relationship between the two countries “is not a non-relation but a relation of obscured interdependence” (14). The volume is a welcome corrective to the marginalization of Haiti in US and world history. In doing so, it builds on the scholarship of Carolyn Fick, David Geggus, and Laurent Dubois, who also contributed to the volume. However, the seventeen essays, including the introduction and the epilogue, owe their heaviest intellectual debt to Michel-Rolph Trouillot. His foundational work, Silencing the Past (1997), is mentioned in every essay. Even more than the specter of the Haitian Revolution in the United States, it is the specter of Trouillot that haunts this collection – and North American scholarship on the Haitian Revolution in general.

The essays are all tightly argued and are organized into three sections: “Histories,” “Geographies,” and “Textualities.” The volume's most impressive accomplishment is its interdisciplinary approach to the topic. Duncan Faherty's compelling essay on how the threats of Haiti and black revolutionaries were negated and isolated in the United States coexists with Ivy Wilson's analysis of the iconography of Toussaint Louverture as revisionary countermemory. Two exciting essays draw from the history of science to rethink the geopolitics of the revolutionary Atlantic through a study of a yellow fever pandemic (Cristol Silva) and of the interactions between mesmerism, Vaudoux, and the Enlightenment (Kieran M. Murphy).

A danger in exploring US–Haitian relations is to forget one of Trouillot's points on the writing of history: the Haitian Revolution was silenced by the West but so were Haitian voices. While the title of the book emphasizes the interactions between the Haitian Revolution and the United States, the essays mostly explore Haiti's impact on the early United States: for example, on northern novelists (Gothic romance writers for Gretchen J. Woertendyke and Leonora Sansay for Siân Silyn Roberts) and on African American activists (Colleen O'Brien). Most essays expertly show how Haiti, or rather the ideas of Haiti, represented both fear and hope in the United States. The volume manages to correct this US-centric perspective thanks to Marlene L. Daut's essay on Baron de Vastey using the US press to influence narratives around Haiti and provoke political discussions. Other Haitian actors also appear in the volume: while Michael Drexler and Ed White trace the genealogy of the African American literary canon to Toussaint Louverture's 1801 Constitution, Carolyn Fick explores the Saint-Domingue leader's political negotiations with the United States and the construction of national and popular sovereignty. Edlie Wong studies the efforts of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer to encourage US emigration and Laurent Dubois explores the diplomatic exchanges between Frederick Douglass and Antéonor Firmin.

This collection invites us to internationalize the United States and place Haiti “in a central position with respect to the geography of modernity and its countercultures and erasures,” as Dillon and Drexler argue in their introduction (15). However, the definitions of US and Haitian “geographies” remain a bit narrow. The Atlantic seaboard, especially Philadelphia, the home of many refugees from Saint-Domingue, looms large in this volume: James Alexander Dun and Peter Dun explore how the Revolution was represented in the press and on the stages of the city. New Orleans, another major destination for refugees, is curiously absent from the essays. Only Louisiana makes an appearance in David Geggus's detailed account of Napoleon's decision to sell the colony to the United States. Haiti's influence did reach beyond the Appalachian mountains. Organizations agitating for Haitian emigration sprang up in Cincinnati and Indiana in the 1820s, for example. Similarly, the Haitian statesmen and writers mentioned in the collection mostly came from the two cities of Cap Henry and Port-au-Prince. The intellectual and political impact of the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo also deserves further investigation.

The breadth of the essays brilliantly manages to bring together the sum of scholarship of the last decade or so and also create avenues for future research. We are only beginning to realize the complexity of the relationships between the two neighbors. Overall, this volume demonstrates the exciting possibilities in approaching early American and Haitian studies with an eye towards interdisciplinarity.