Joseph surveys the recent wave of literary and historiographical writing on the Haitian Revolution and assesses what it has changed.

The starting point is what the revolution accomplished: formerly enslaved Africans founded a state without slavery, wrote a permanent ban on colonial slavery into the republic's first constitution, and asserted equality and human rights for all people. Dessalines, who took over as general in chief after Toussaint Louverture, proclaimed Haiti on the first day of 1804, following years of fighting against France, Spain, and Britain.

The central claim is that scholarship in North America has undergone an intellectual shift Joseph names the Haitian Turn. He reads the revolution as both a world event and a reference point for present arguments about equality, social justice, freedom, and universal human rights, closing with suggestions about where the field should go next. The piece offers itself as selective critical reflection rather than an exhaustive review.