"Bêtes Noires ranks first as the most theoretically rigorous, intellectually ambitious and epistemologically disruptive of the 40 books reviewed by the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award Committee. … [It] dismantles colonial discourses that demonize Haitian and Dominican cosmologies as merely “superstitious” [and] approaches indigenous memory, the animal world, spirits, and colonial histories as legitimate archives of knowledge…"