In the wake of the ‘decolonial turn’, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977) has made a comeback into philosophy curricula that would be inexplicable if it were not for its much-quoted ‘master–slave dialectic’. The configuration thus named relies on a particular interpretation (by Alexandre Kojève in the 1930s) and translation (into French by Jean Hyppolite in 1939–1942) of Hegel's terms ‘Herr’ and ‘Knecht’ as ‘maître’ and ‘esclave’, respectively, that have shaped the French and transatlantic reception of Hegel's work ever since (Hyppolite [1947] 1974; Kojève [1947] 1980). This is the translation that has become entrenched in common parlance, with accounts of Hegel's figural dialectics moving all the way through the knowledge chain – from Hegel via Kojève and Hyppolite to Jean-Paul Sartre (despite the fact that Hyppolite and Sartre did not directly attend Kojève's lectures; see Arthur 1983), Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and latter-day Africana phenomenology and existentialism, right down to Wikipedia entries and Spark Notes on Hegell – and, not least, into our own teaching of post-Enlightenment history of philosophy over the years.

Kojève's and Hyppolite's interpretation and translation of Hegel's Phenomenology, and the ensuing reception, proved formative, in turn, for engagements in the ambit of the French academy under the impact of anticolonial struggles, including those of Jean-Paul Sartre – particularly Sartre's 1961 Preface to Fanon's Les damnés de la terre (Sartre 1961) – and Frantz Fanon, and since then for Africana phenomenology and Africana existentialism. They have more recently received renewed impetus from Susan Buck-Morss's eminently undergraduate-teachable work on ‘Hegel and Haiti’ (Buck-Morss 2000, 2009), which insists that Hegel cannot be thought (and taught) without Haiti (2009, p. 16); it suggests that neglect of Haitian history would be tantamount to complicity in the exclusion of the colonial experience from Western thought (2009, pp. 16–19).

In reviewing Buck-Morss's book, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009), David Scott – who can hardly be accused of ignoring or occluding Haitian history – casts doubt on Buck-Morss's conjecture. How is it possible, Scott asks, to stipulate Hegel's reading about the events of the Haitian slave uprising on the pages of the journal Minerva as evidence for the conception of the figures of lordship and bondage in the Phenomenology (Scott 2010, p. 157)?