Struggles against colonialism and slavery are not inevitably, but rather circumstantially, aligned, even within the same hemispheric region and historical period. Haiti's literature, from the 1804 independence onward, was postcolonial: it remained infused with anticolonial fervor and was sometimes oriented toward future regional decolonizations. In the U.S., the Afro-diasporic population focused its political imagination on emancipation from slavery. The slave narrative, despite its dominant themes of human subjugation in a racialized context, is difficult to situate with regard to colonial or postcolonial dynamics. Although William Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin proposed in 1989 that the independence of the United States from Britain constituted an example of eighteenthcentury postcolonialism, independence from Britain certainly did not entail a historical rupture with racial hierarchies and contingent practices of enslavement as they had developed in this New World space. Through the mechanisms of U.S. journalistic media, however, Jean-Jacques Dessalines's independence proclamations, which were in many ways manifestoes of postcolonial freedom, circulated in the same environments in which the slave narrative was being produced.

Haitian independence documents are a literary form par excellence of early nineteenth-century postcolonial thought, whereas the slave narrative stands as a bulwark of evidence against enslavement practices. One could argue that a fundamentally individual or humanist ethos of emancipation marks the narrative subjectivity of the slave narrative, while a specifically political, military, and economic engagement with revolutionary statehood and its domestic and international infrastructure and identity marks Haitian independence documents. Yet any systematic attempt to distinguish them based on content would be artificial. Even if the slave narrative illuminates the subjugation of the individual, where the Haitian independence documents highlight the group's need for collective autonomy, Haitian collective identifications are often symbolized in individual terms, and individual discourses of independence overlap with political constructs.