The article restores the place that the Master-Slave dialectic occupies within the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), then traces its path to Sartre to outline the originality of the reading that the French philosopher imposed on the Hegelian original and its importance for postcolonial literatures. It illustrates the extent to which the dialectic symbolically traveled from the periphery in Hegel to the center (in Kojève as well as in Marx) to exert its liberating power on new peripheries, discovered by Sartre.
Finally, the text addresses the existentialist legacy and the importance that Hegelian and Sartrean thought might have for our time.