In reflecting on “Avengers of the New World” The story of the Haitian revolution, Dubois has the ability to pull one in and help us see the dynamics of this place, of all the contradictions, of the chaos, the cruelty.  This is quite something large to wrap your head around.  There are so many absurdities with the racial classification aspect alone it is hard to address.  I think of the enslaved people taken from these various African cultures caught up in this madness, and I am reminded of some earlier works I’ve read several years ago, one being King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, King Leopold’s reign in the Congo has some parallels with Avengers of the New World in in the treatment of the African peoples, to seek out goods at any cost, to use and profit off a people. “Leopold set about establishing a rule of terror that would culminate in the deaths of 4 to 8 million indigenous people, "a death toll," Hochschild writes, "of Holocaust dimensions."(Editorial review, Gregory McNamee, amazon.com review)

On a different note, however tying these two parallels together,  I enjoyed Dubois describing the Bois-Caiman ceremony and stating “These were perhaps early versions of two traditions of worship that were later brought together in Haitian Vodou.”(102).  I found this incredibly interesting, as I have seen tribute from Haitian street artist to Ogou in Haitian Vodou Flags in various art museums and now have a better understanding as to what some of these images represent, The Haitian Revolution!