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Episodes of slave rebellions such as Nat Turner's are central to speculations on the trajectory of black history and the goal of black spiritual struggles. Using fiction, history, and oral poetry drawn from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, this book analyzes how writers reinterpret episodes of historical slave rebellion to conceptualize their understanding of an ideal \"master-less\" future. The texts range from Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave and Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World to Yoruba praise poetry and novels by Nigerian writers Adebayo Faleti and Akinwumi Isola. Each text reflects different \"national\" attitudes toward the historicity of slave rebellions that shape the ways the texts are read. This is an absorbing book about the grip of slavery and rebellion on modern black thought.

Lenora Warren tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction: Olaudah Equiano, Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinqué, Madison Washington, and Washington Goode. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. Pairing well-known texts with lesser-known figures (Billy Budd and Washington Goode) and well-known figures with lesser-known texts (Denmark Vesey and the work of John Howison), this book reveals the richness of literary engagement with the politics of slave violence. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative-from slavery to freedom and literacy-that emerged from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.

Toni Morrison's reflections on the \"'discredited knowledge' that Black people [have]\" initiate this essay's reflection on biography, history, and evidence in the lives of Black religious practitioners--on the ship, in the hold, on the plantation, and in the afterlives of chattel slavery. The esteemed literary figure's iconographic musings on \"cosmology,\" or the \"superstition and magic,\" of \"the ancestor\" in African American literature--especially within her own corpus in such works as Beloved--incite rumination on the place of the sacred and the occult in the lives of the enslaved and her descendants. Morrison rightly begins her meditation in \"the Black church.\" With these things in mind, this essay looks to the slave narrative as a site of both the material and immaterial reality of Black religions in order to evidence the significance of biography for taking seriously and revering knowledges discredited by the master class.

This article traces the reproduction of whiteness in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the lens of domestic labor. Articulated in dialogue—and at times in tension—with Britain, what it meant to be white was forged through representations and practices of domestic service and household management, shaped by the legacies of slavery and the shifting colonial relationship. Anxieties about a declining white population and attempts to rejuvenate the island's image contributed to prescriptions of domestic labor management that positioned the white creole mistress as a model of respectability and colonial modernity. Black domestic servants were repeatedly presented as the mirror through which white creole womanhood was constructed, and this article argues that these representations served to consolidate class/color hierarchies that privileged whiteness into the twentieth century. Yet mapping these discourses onto the daily interactions between mistress and maid also exposes the persistent work required to secure racialized hierarchies. Through photographs, diaries, and correspondence read alongside published oral histories, the article argues that domestic servants persistently exercised agency that disrupted and spoke back to popular depictions, demonstrating the fraught reproduction of creole whiteness at the intersections of race, class, color, gender, and colonial identity.

This article tracks the circulation of literary and visual representations of the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in order to explore how early nineteenth-century printing practices intersected with debates over slavery. I show that a woodblock engraving published alongside Samuel Warner's understudied narrative of the rebellion was repurposed to depict an entirely different uprising. And I use this recycling to suggest that the aesthetic and technological exigencies of antebellum print culture undermined the proslavery claim—widely repeated in texts like Thomas Gray's better-known Confessions of Nat Turner—that Turner was an exceptional figure whose actions were not exemplary of broader slave unrest. The image's generic style and inherent reproducibility made available a subversive antislavery reading of the revolt that exploited, rather than resisted, the homogenizing logics of race, capitalism, and print to project an insurrectionary black collective whose threatening potential existence demanded abolition. Uniting African American Studies and the history of the book, I attribute this ideological reversal not merely to these texts' form or content but also to their multimedia materiality. Ultimately, the article complicates assumptions about authorial, readerly, and textual agency and offers a way to overcome the limitations of liberal individualism as a framework for black liberation.

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson's magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson's contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the fidi corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson's previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery.

This essay examines global networks and alliances in Martin Robison Delany's serialized novel, Blake (1859–60, 1861–62). I read Delany's writing on Cuban annexationism and the poet Plácido in relation to the voluminous writing about the latter that was circulating in the US and South American periodical press after the poet's public execution in 1844. I contend that Delany's novel performs what I call an \"affective translation\" of Plácido's poetry, an oblique translation that models itself on what Delany called \"harmony in sentiment,\" which reproduces his anti-annexationist stance and sense of anticolonial fraternity. My essay sees the work of citation, literary interpretation, and translation as key factors in the novel's vision of hemispheric emancipation, topics I discuss in relation to the work of Delany's immediate contemporaries, including James McCune Smith, who was writing for some of the same newspapers and publications to which Delany contributed.

A white, wealthy, educated male, Victor Frankenstein spends a good portion of Mary Shelley's novel complaining about being a slave to his Creature. Victor's laments draw attention to Frankenstein's engagement with debates about race, slavery, and abolition. The novel seems to ask what a slave is and thereby challenges notions about racial difference and the ideals of cultural/intellectual superiority that support enslaving populations. Foundational studies by H. L. Malchow and others on race in Frankenstein have defined the views of Shelley's father, William Godwin, as well as the pervasive ideas of the era, to clarify the ways in which the Creature is racially coded to align with stereotypes about Blacks in particular. Using these studies as a starting point, Maisha Wester specifically examines the ways in which Shelley's text engages the anxieties born out of slave insurrections and Britain's abolition of the slave trade. To this end, she explores Shelley's depiction of the turbulence in British society arising from these issues, showing how the Creature's attacks metaphorize the insurrections that disturbed the era's notions of racial difference. Ultimately, her essay explains how Victor is, indeed, a \"slave\"—as are many others like him.