In 2011 the New York Historical Society opened Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn, the first exhibition to relate the American, French and Haitian revolutions as a single, global narrative. Spanning decades of tremendous political and cultural changes, the exhibit traced how an ideal of popular sovereignty, introduced by the American Revolution, soon sparked more radical calls for a recognition of universal human rights, and set off attacks on both sides of the Atlantic against innate

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... ge and slavery. The novelty of the approach hinted at the problematic ways in which the transatlantic slave trade has so far been confronted and remembered, as well as the complexities of addressing its actual legacy as a long standing international system. The following year Laurent Dubois's remarkable Haiti, the Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan Books, 2012) confirmed the strict connection between Haiti's doomed fate and the Atlantic sequence of events over the last centuries. A relevant number of cultural activists, scholars, political experts and artists from different contexts have also tried to circumscribe the specificity of the perception of what slavery has represented for both the individual subject and the collective imagination; and yet, the question seems nonetheless in need of further investigation. True, much time has passed since artists unfolded in unequivocal terms the viciousness of narratives aimed at freezing the horrors of slavery in a barbarous past, declining its contemporary materializations. As a rule, the artist deeply felt the call to revisit slavery in its broadest