The Black Avenger In Atlantic Culture

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values—honor, loyalty, love—reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates-authored Black Panther comic book series (2016); recent films Django Unchained (2012) and The Birth of a Nation (2016); Nate Parker's cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion; and screen adaptations of Marvel's Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018); violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however, that the black avenger has always been with us: the trope has fired the news and imaginations of the United States and the larger Atlantic World for three centuries. The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas. Even as he is portrayed as a heathen and a barbarian, his values-honor, loyalty, love-reflect his ties to the West. Yet being racially different, he cannot belong, and his qualities in turn make him an anomaly among black people. The black avenger is thus a liminal figure defining racial borders. Where his body lies, lies the color line. Regularly throughout the modern era and to this day, variations on the trope have contributed to defining race in the Atlantic World and thwarting the constitution of a black polity. Pierrot's The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture studies this cultural history, examining a multicultural and cross-historical network of print material including fiction, drama, poetry, news, and historical writing as well as visual culture. It tracks the black avenger trope from its inception in the seventeenth century to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915. Pierrot argues that this Western archetype plays an essential role in helping exclusive, hostile understandings of racial belonging become normalized in the collective consciousness of Atlantic nations. His study follows important articulations of the figure and how it has shifted based on historical and cultural contexts.

Although few recognize the name of Bras-Coupé today, Bryan Wagner’s riveting history The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé illustrates why the saga of this notorious escaped slave should be a touchstone among scholars and students of the African diaspora. After losing an arm in a pitched battle with the New Orleans police in the 1830s, Bras-Coupé hid for several years in a swamp near the city. During this time, law enforcement widely publicized their manhunt for him through newspapers, wanted posters, and other media. Messages from the mayor’s office promoted a violent image of Bras-Coupé, casting him as the primary reason police needed the right to use deadly force in the course of their duties. After a former friend betrayed and killed the bandit in July 1837, local officials displayed Bras-Coupé’s corpse in the Place d’Armes, where they ordered slaves to bear witness. The Bras-Coupé legend grew after his death and took on fantastic dimensions. Storytellers gave him superpowers. His skin, it was alleged, could not be punctured by bullets. His gaze could turn men to stone. Folklorists have transcribed many such examples of the tradition, and writers, including George Washington Cable and Robert Penn Warren, have adapted it into novels. Over time, new details appeared in the mythology and the legend transformed. Some said that he was an African prince before he was kidnapped and brought to Louisiana; others, that he was the most famous performer at Congo Square, playing an indispensable role in the preservation of African music and dance. Sidney Bechet, one of the city’s most celebrated composers and reed players, even suggested it was Bras-Coupé who invented jazz. Including fugitive slave advertisements, arrest records, and journalism from the 1830s, this critical edition collects the most important primary materials related to Bras-Coupé’s story. Wagner’s timely and deft examination of this unique historical figure reveals how a single man’s life, shaped by the horrors of slavery and the cultural mélange of Louisiana, can evolve into legend.

Few urban critters are more reviled than the hipster. They are notoriously difficult to define, and yet we know one when we see one. No wonder: they were among the global cultural phenomena that ushered in the 21st century. They have become a bulwark of mainstream culture, cultural commodity, status, butt of all jokes and ready-made meme. But frightening as it is to imagine, for more than a century hipsters have been lurking among us. Defined by their appearances and the cloud of meaning attached to them--the cool vanguard of gentrification, the personification of capitalism with a conscience--hipsters are all looks, and these looks are a visual timeline to America's past and present. Underlining this timeline is the pattern of American popular culture's love/hate/theft relationship with Black culture. Yet the pattern of recycling has reached a chilling point: the 21st century hipster made all possible past fads into new trends, including and especially the old uncool. In Decolonize Hipsters, Grégory Pierrot gives us a field guide to the phenomenon, a symptom and vanguard of the wave of aggressive white supremacist sentiment now oozing from around the globe.

The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander’s study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti’s place in the history of Black internationalism, Alexander illuminates the ways Haitian independence influenced Black thought and action in the United States. As she shows, Haiti embodied what whites feared most: Black revolution and Black victory. Thus inspired, Black activists in the United States embraced a common identity with Haiti’s people, forging the idea of a united struggle that merged the destinies of Haiti with their own striving for freedom. A bold exploration of Black internationalism’s origins, Fear of a Black Republic links the Haitian revolution to the global Black pursuit of liberation, justice, and social equality.

Black Women and Energies of Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Haitian and American Literature intervenes in traditional narratives of 19th-century American modernity by situating Black women at the center of an increasingly connected world. While traditional accounts of modernity have emphasized advancements in communication technologies, animal and fossil fuel extraction, and the rise of urban centers, Mary Grace Albanese proposes that women of African descent combated these often violent regimes through diasporic spiritual beliefs and practices, including spiritual possession, rootwork, midwifery, mesmerism, prophecy, and wandering. It shows how these energetic acts of resistance were carried out on scales large and small: from the constrained corners of the garden plot to the expansive circuits of global migration. By examining the concept of energy from narratives of technological progress, capital accrual and global expansion, this book uncovers new stories that center Black women at the heart of a pulsating, revolutionary world.

"This book brings together the author's personal and professional link to the long American Revolution in a narrative that spans more than 150 years and places the Revolution in multiple contexts -- from the local to the transatlantic and hemispheric and from racial and gendered to political, social, economic, and cultural perspectives. A descendant on his father's side from a long line of Kentuckians, the author grew up torn between a father who embodied the Revolution's poor white male driven by economic self-interest and racial prejudices and a devoted and pious mother who saw life and history as a morality play. The author's intellectual and professional 'encounter' with the American Revolution came in the 1960s as a young historian specializing in U.S. foreign relations and Latin American history, an era when the U.S. encounter with the Cuban Revolution in the hemisphere and the civil rights movement at home served as reminders of the lasting and troublesome legacy of a long American Revolution. In a sweeping narrative that incorporates both the traditional, iconic literature on the Revolution and more recent works in U.S., Canadian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic world history, the author addresses fundamental questions about the Revolution's meaning and legacy"--

ISSN 2769-4100