In this engaging study of the bacá—a Black, shape-shifting spirit demon—Lauren Derby argues that this figure is a “historical artifact of the imagination,” serving as a searing “point of memory” for the mass death of Indigenous and African peoples (xv). Derby challenges the presumed cultural divisions between Haiti and the Dominican Republic by highlighting the perception that people of both nations shared of the bacá. Drawing on extensive oral histories with the Dominican Republic’s founding ranch families, the book’s seven thematic chapters trace the historical entanglements of imperialism and capitalism, ultimately framing these spirit demons as “specters of a long history of foreign extractivism” (9).

The introduction contextualizes the bacá through comparisons to zonbi and zemis, tracing its etymology to either a “derogatory Dutch term for Amerindian” or an Ibo word for “white man” (5). In the first chapter, Derby examines how bacá shape-shift into animals—cows, horses, dogs, and pigs—that are inextricably linked to the ecological trauma of Spanish colonization. By alluding to eighteenth-century marronage and the colonial conflation of Black bodies with beasts, Derby shows how both Haitians and Dominicans have come to perceive these spirit demons as specifically “Haitian,” embodying Blackness through their stealth and appearance. Chapter 2 grounds these theories in the story of Javier, a man the community believes was murdered. His cousin, Rafael, purportedly kept a “large herd of phantom cattle across the border in Haiti” where Javier’s spirit had been sold, only to reappear “as an animal” in the herd (43). Derby connects this lore to the eighteenth-century cross-island cattle economy, where Santo Domingo’s livestock served as the literal currency and sustenance for the sugar-refining process that fueled slavery in Saint-Domingue.

The third, fourth, fifth, and six chapters demonstrate how bacá stories can be of terror, loss, theft, and masculinity. Clément Barbot, head of the Tonton Macoutes, escaping from prison as a black dog revisits the terror of slave-hunting dogs through a bacá associated with a terrorizing paramilitary leader. Creole pigs, once “a symbol of family, comfort, and nourishment,” came to haunt the borderlands after their slaughter via United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the 1980s (111). It is shown how, shifting from a form of agency for the poor, bacá narratives are employed by some to conceal their own roles in corruption. The story of José, in the sixth chapter, reveals the “social construction of masculinity” for rural Dominican men through their encounters with horses. The final chapter serves as a conclusion, discussing the roles of animals in popular culture from Carnival to animal nicknames such as Bad Bunny. Derby notes, “The baka channels histories of trauma and fear, yet as a ‘veiled assertion of a clandestine countermemory’ of marronage and unsanctioned forms of power, it has also become a source of empowerment and delight for Haitian and Dominican men alike, who need this cultural object as an identity props that keeps lives the promise of freedom” (186).

Written primarily for a scholarly audience, the book assumes a high degree of foundational knowledge; its chapters are best read as an “entangled” whole rather than in isolation. However, the work is not without its historical lapses. Derby mistakenly associates Makandal with the Bois Caïman ceremony—the 1791 event that “sacralized the Haitian Revolution” (103). Furthermore, the study does not adequately discuss the demographics of enslaved populations, the complexity of the institution of slavery in Saint-Domingue (beyond sugar productions). It also largely sidesteps the contentious relationship between Vodou and Haiti’s various political regimes. Nonetheless, through her innovative analysis of bacá narratives, Derby encourages us to look beyond the written archive and across time and space when researching and writing about the Caribbean.