This talk will investigate the legacy of Toussaint Louverture as a New World cultural figure, investigating his recuperation and refashioning by authors such as Cesaire (Toussaint Louverture), Glissant (Monsieur Toussaint), and Metallus (Toussaint Louverture). Through these multiple transformations, Toussaint comes to stand as a complex and contradictory figure of Caribbean and postcolonial autonomy. His incipient world-historical project is to concretize the drive for a universal ethical imperative that would sustain the singularity of African Diasporic experience while categorically putting an end to human slavery.