Talk about haiti: The archive and the atlantic’s haitian revolution

In thinking about the legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World it is tempting to think in binaries. The revolution produced fear and terror among whites, hope and inspiration among slaves and free people of color. The revolution resulted in the radical end of slavery in SaintDomingue; elsewhere (for instance, in Cuba, southeastern Brazil, and parts of the southern United States) it served as a catalyst to further enslavement. And in postcolonial Haiti itself the promise of radical revolution went unfulfi lled as the despotism and mass poverty of colonial servitude were reconfi gured in the postcolonial period.