[On September
9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in
South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ve
AmericanStudied Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to this
weekend post on cultural representations of such revolts.]
To wrap up this
week’s series, and in anticipation of the upcoming film Harriet, brief thoughts on five
examples of cultural representations of slave rebellions:
1)
Dred: A Tale of the Great
Dismal Swamp (1855): Harriet Beecher Stowe’s follow-up to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a quite different and
unjustly forgotten novel, the tale of a fictionalized escape slave and a potential
slave revolt based in equal measure on Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner (Stowe even
included Turner’s Confessions as an
appendix to her novel), as well as other histories and stories of slavery. I
haven’t read the whole of Dred since
graduate school, but passages still stick with me nearly two decades later, and
the novel as a whole makes for both a vital complement to UTC and a compelling contemporary representation of slave
rebellions.
2)
The
Confessions of Nat Turner (1967): I said much of what I’d want to say
about William Styron’s controversial historical novel in the first paragraph of
that hyperlinked post. Styron certainly made some troubling choices, and they
deserve (indeed, demand) our attention and critique; but I am not willing to
agree with the idea (advanced by some of his critics, past and present) that a
white author could never write a historical novel from the perspective of an
African American figure like Turner. Such an author could never have the last
or the definitive word, of course—but the act itself, fraught as it may be, is
not outside the bounds of historical fiction; and the resulting novel should to
my mind be read and critiqued specifically, not hypothetically.
3)
The Birth of a Nation
(2016): Ironically, the most recent cultural representation of Turner’s revolt,
this time in the form of Nate Parker’s dramatic film, suffered from its own (far
more overt and troubling) controversy
surrounding its creator, which no doubt contributed to its relative lack of
prominence. Perhaps for similar reasons, I haven’t had a chance to see the film
yet, so can’t speak to its particular representation of Turner and his
histories. But as I wrote in Thursday’s post, those histories deserve a
consistent and central presence in our collective memories, and I believe both
Styron’s novel and Parker’s film can (without eliding their controversies and
failings) help us better engage this crucial American story.
4)
Black
Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt, Virginia, 1800 (1936): But there’s also
something to be said for works that don’t come with such baggage, and Harlem
Renaissance author
and librarian Arna Bontemps’s historical novel about Gabriel Prosser’s
thwarted revolt is one such text. I haven’t read Black Thunder since I was a teenager, but even then I was struck by
its boldly unapologetic focus on and celebration of Prosser’s perspective and
goals, elements that were even more striking in the 1930s (but remain so into
the 21st century). Bontemps’s book isn’t as stylistically or
thematically impressive and important as roughly contemporary works like Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Native
Son (1939), and maybe it wouldn’t work as well in a literature class as a
result; but it’s a vitally important historical novel, ground-breaking in its
time and still significant in ours.
5)
Barry
Jenkins on Gabriel Prosser (2019): The New
York Times’s inspiring and important 1619 Project, a PDF of which is
available at that hyperlink, features among its many stand-out pieces a short
piece about Prosser (page 46 in that document) written by the talented young
filmmaker Barry Jenkins (who is now at work on a film adaptation of Colson
Whitehead’s historical novel of slavery The
Underground Railroad). In just a few paragraphs, moving from Prosser’s
individual identity to the broadest cultural and historical contexts for his
planned revolt and then back to Prosser once more, Jenkins reminds us—as his
films, like all the best cultural texts, consistently do—of how art can
illuminate history. All the histories on which I’ve focused in this series need
continued artistic attention, including and beyond this group of texts.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other cultural works you’d highlight?
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