Trouillot's account of how the Haitian Revolution was silenced has a second half that scholarship has largely passed over: the demand that history be told from the perspective of the colonized. Daut takes it up by reading two Haitian writers who were themselves participants — Boisrond-Tonnerre, whose Mémoire appeared in 1804, and the Baron de Vastey, whose Système colonial dévoilé followed a decade later.

Both wrote, she argues, to keep the former colonists from having the last word: to shape foreign opinion through the press, and to fix a national memory in which the revolution is an origin story rather than an atrocity. She also traces how they were dismissed. Nineteenth-century European and American commentators questioned whether Haitians had written their own books, or whether the books mattered; later historians who explained Haiti's troubles by color prejudice among Haitians extended the same logic, relocating blame onto the country itself.