Black Prometheus

Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-027258-6
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 544 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 1071 g

Black Prometheus addresses the specific conditions under and the pointed implications with which an ancient story about different orders of gods dueling over the fate of humanity became such a prominent fixture of Atlantic modernity. The Prometheus myth, for several reasons--its fortuitous geographical associations with both Africa and the Caucasus; its resonant iconography of bodily suffering; and its longue duree function as a limit case for a Platonic-cum-Christian political theology of the Absolute, became a crucial site for conceptualizing human liberation in the immanent space of a finite globe structured by white domination and black slavery. The titan's defiant theft of fire from the regnant gods was translated through a high-stakes racial coding either as an "African" revolt against the cosmic status quo that augured a pure autonomy, a black revolutionary immanence against which idealist philosophers like Hegel defined their projects and slaveholders defended their lives and positions. Or as a "Caucasian" reflection of the divine power evidently working in favor of Euro-Christian civilization that transmuted the naked egoism of conquest into a righteous heteronomy-Euro-Christian civilization's mobilization by the Absolute or its internalization of a transcendent principle of universal Reason. The Prometheus myth was available and attractive to its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalists and reinventors-from canonical figures like Voltaire, Percy Shelley, Frederick Douglass, and Karl Marx to anonymous contributors of ephemera to abolitionist periodicals-not so much as a handy emblem of an abstract humanism but as the potential linchpin of a racialist philosophy of history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hickman, Jared

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Sklaverei
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Acknowledgements

- Introduction Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

- Chapter 1 Globalization and the Gods: A Theory of Race and--or as--Modernity

- Chapter 2 The Terms of Prometheus's Liberation: Romanticism, Slavery, and the Titan's Triumph

- Chapter 3 Africa versus the Absolute Idealism and Its Others

- Chapter 4 The Afro-Promethean "Science of the Stars"

- Chapter 5 Re-binding Prometheus to the Caucasus: Idealism's Other Solution

- Chapter 6 Imam Shamil or, the Modern Prometheus of Caucasus

- Chapter 7 Rebellious Fictions: Black Prometheus and the Undoing of the Novelistic Form

- Chapter 8 Byronic Abolitionism

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jared Hickman is Assistant Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University.