[Review of: L. Hurbon (2023) Esclavage, religions et politique en Haïti]

From the get-go, this book proposes two monumentally innovative critical gestures. The first is that European secularism is based on a Hegelian notion of “state,” which informs a European notion of the secular. In fact, Laënnec Hurbon proposes that the European “State” is an unacknowledged apotheosis of a certain form of Protestantism whose teleology is to consecrate capitalism and as such to discursively mitigate the moral implications of transatlantic slavery. Second, Hurbon explicitly calls for a politics-by-women, with a feminist focus. For an esteemed, multigenerational scholar such as Hurbon, publishing between Haiti and France, to meticulously trace the importance of women’s contributions to civil society, especially in our current moment, is monumental.