The Road to Adjame-Santey.
This story was inspired by an event that took place in Guadeloupe in 1995, when a baby was found with her throat slashed on a heap of garbage. The incident sparked the imagination of many throughout the island, mine included. IVORY COAST 1901-1906 THIS WAS...

Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763.
Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763, by Kenneth J. Banks. Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002. xvi, 319 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). This superb book offers a revisionist history of France's colonial empire in the eighteenth century. Kenneth...

Sakesho.
Perhaps a name like the "New French Caribbean Jazz Quartet" would best describe the music and talents of this new collaboration of four master musicians. Instead, they named the group Sakésho after a Japanese restaurant the group experienced eating at before a gig in Paris; yet the meaning of...

Francophone Literatures: A Literary and Linguistic Companion.
Francophone Literatures: A Literary and Linguistic Companion. By MALCOLM OFFORD, LAILA IBNLFASSI, NICKI HITCHCOTT, SAM HAIGH, and ROSEMARY CHAPMAN. London and New York: Routledge. 2001. ix+283 pp. 60 [pounds sterling] (pbk 18.99 [pounds sterling]). ISBN 0-415-19839-9 (pbk 0-415-19840-2). This collection of thirty extracts from key francophone novels since the...

Latin American Catholicism.
CARIBBEAN In comparison to North America's almost 20 million square kilometers, the 24 countries or territories of the Caribbean cover only a little more than 200,000 square kilometers. Population density is much higher, with nearly 161 people per square kilometer in the Caribbean, compared to 16 in...

From the editor.
From a photographer who has revolutionized our understanding of an ancient people, to a widening and thriving family of market-wise weavers, this issue of Americas focuses on the preservation and persistence of cultures. Caleb Bach talks with Justin Kerr, whose peripheral camera has captured the rich details...

French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848.
by Lawrence C. Jennings. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2000. x, 320 pp. $54.95 U.S. (cloth). The movement for the "second emancipation" of slaves in the French empire has attracted less scholarly attention than the liberation of slaves after the French Revolutionary revolts on Saint-Domingue. Lawrence Jennings...

Two visions of paradise.
Mario Vargas Llosa El Paralso en la otra esquina. Ediciones Alfaguara, 485 pages, $19.95 In Peru in the 1950S when he was a student, Matio Vargas Llosa read Flora Tristan's selfrevealing Peregrinations d'une paria (1838), with its vivid and often scathing impressions of Peruvian society,, a book...

Michel Villand: French pastries for the masses. (Newsmakers).
The Golden Arches haven't yet sprouted up on every Havana street corner, and Pizza Hut is still nowhere to be seen. But Pain de Paris--a franchised bakery chain specializing in French bread and pastries--is rapidly becoming a household name here among tourists and habaneros lucky enough to have access...

Cuba and the EU: the new honeymoon.
After various diplomatic tensions with the EU and some minor skirmishes with Spain--mainly over human-rights issues--Cuba's relations with the European Union appear to be warming up again. The most concrete indication of this is Fidel Castro's decision last month to allow the euro to circulate for the...