How the slave rebellion haunts the black imagination.

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.

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With this volume, Adéèkó (Adeeko) (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) makes a valuable contribution to studies of the black diaspora by drawing together observations of slave rebellions from the US, Africa, and the Caribbean. As he did in Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998), the author reads widely in oral and written literatures. He argues that, because accounts of antislavery violence tend to look to both the past and the future, they are uniquely useful in revealing a continuing arc of black intellectual thought. Beginning with African American fiction from before the Civil War and continuing through Reconstruction and into the anticolonial movement that spread through Africa and the Caribbean in the mid, 20th century, Adéèkó (Adeeko) applies Hegel's allegory of lordship and bondage to a consideration of texts by Nat Turner, Charles Chesnutt, Arna Bontemps, C. L. R. James, Alejo Carpentier, et al., and also of Yoruba oriki (praise poetry). His conclusion, that stories of slave rebellions can inform a corrective to the intellectual passivity of black poststructuralism, is satisfying and well earned. Like many works of postcolonial criticism, this volume is marked by language dense with the jargon of critical theory. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

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Adéèkó . . . makes a valuable contribution to studies of the black diaspora by drawing together observations of slave rebellions from the US, Africa, and the Caribbean. June 2006