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Other Books
on Nathaniel Turner
(1800-1831)
Nat
Turner A
Slave Rebellion in History and Memory by Kenneth
Greenberg
Nat
Turner Before the Bar of Judgment by Mary Kemp Davis
Nat
Turner's Tragic Search by
Catherine Hermary-Vielle
The Rebellious Slave
Nat Turner in American Memory by Scot French
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Nat
Turner Before the Bar of Judgment
Fictional Treatments of the
Southampton Insurrection
By Mary Kemp Davis
An icon in African American history, Nat Turner
has generated almost every kind of cultural product, including
the historical, imaginative, scholarly, folk, polemical, and
reflective. In
Nat
Turner Before the Bar of Judgment.
Mary Kemp Davis offers an original, in-depth analysis of
six novels in which Turner figures prominently.
This Virginia rebel, she argues, has been re-arraigned,
retried, and re-sentenced repeatedly during the last century and
a half as writers have grappled with the social and moral issues
raised by his infamous 1831 revolt.
Though usually lacking a literal, the novels Davis examines
all have the theme of judgment at their center, and she
ingeniously unravels the "verdict" each author
extracts from or her plot.
Davis begins by dismantling the historical scaffolding that
surrounds her subject. She decodes Virginia governor John
Floyd's "official' assessment of the revolt, which, she
says, exemplifies the dialogism between the earlier texts about
the rebellion and the incipient novel tradition.
She also considers three classes of documents that
triangulate the trial trope: court records, selected newspaper
accounts, and Thomas Gray's seminal work, The Confessions of
Nat Turner (1831).
The remainder of her study treats in expansive detail the six
novels:
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The Old Dominion, or
The Southampton Massacre (1856), by the English
historical novelist George Payne Rainsford James;
Dred: A Tale of the
Great Dismal Swamp (1856), by Harriet Beecher Stowe;
Homoselle (1881),
by Mary Spear Tieman;
Their Shadows Before: A
Story of the Southampton Insurrection (1899), by
Pauline Carrington Rust Bouve;
Ol' Prophet Nat (1967),
by Daniel Panger; and best known,
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by
William Styron. |
Discussion of Dessa Rose (1986), Sherley Anne William's
response to Styron's novel, shapes the conclusion.
According to Davis, all of the novelists derive their
fundamental understanding about Turner from Gray's
overdetermined text, but they recreate it in their own image
In this fictional tradition that begins with a
nineteenth-century romance and ends with postmodern revisions of
the form, Davis shows the turner persona to be multivalent and
inherently unstable, each novelist laboring mightily and
futilely to arrest it within the confines of art.
--Fred Hobson, Editor, Southern Literary Studies
Source:
Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 1 December 2011
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