The Slave Sublime

In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of the plantation era—namely the economic dispossession and structural violence that still haunt the island. Lettman contends that the impact of colonial violence is so embedded in the language of Jamaican literature and music that violence has become a separate language itself, one that paradoxically can offer cultural modes of resistance. Lettman codifies Paul Gilroy's concept of the "slave sublime" as a remix of Kantian philosophy through a Caribbean lens to take a broad view of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and their political and literary history that challenges Eurocentric ideas of slavery, Blackness, and resistance. Living at the intersection of philosophy, literary and musical analysis, and postcolonial theory, this book sheds new light on the lingering ghosts of the plantation and slavery in the Caribbean.

Examines the return of the sublime in post-modernity, and at intimations of a 'post-Romantic' sublime in Romanticism itself. This work looks at 18th-century, Romantic, modernist and post-modern 'inventions' of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics and history.

The book uses an innovative prism of interorality that powerfully reevaluates Caribbean orality and innovatively casts light on its overlooked and fundamental epistemological contribution into the formation of Caribbean philosophy. It defines the innovative prism of interorality as the systematic transposition of previously composed storytales into new and distinct tales. The book offers a powerful consideration of the interconnections between Caribbean orality and Caribbean philosophy, especially as this pertains to aesthetics and ethics. This is a new area of thought, a new methodological approach and a new conceptual paradigm and proposition to scholars, students, writers, artists and intellectuals who conceive and examine intellectual and cultural productions in the Black Atlantic world and beyond.

Set against the backdrop of the Atlantic slave trade, this book traces the development, exhibition and final disposition of one of J.M.W. Turner’s greatest and most memorable paintings. Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) in Great Britain produced unprecedented wealth and luxury. For artists and writers this period was particularly noteworthy in that it gave them the opportunity to both praise their country and criticize its overreaching ambition. At the forefront of these artists and writers were men like J.M.W. Turner, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, and John Ruskin, who created some of the most enduring works of art while exposing many of the social evils of their native land. The book also analyzes the man behind the painting. Aloof, gruff and mysterious, Turner resisted success. He worked as a solitary artist, traveling to Europe, sketching towns along the way, studying nature, and transferring his experiences to finished paintings upon his return to London. The son of a barber, he grew up in London and experienced many of the social issues of the age: slavery and freedom, poverty in the slums, monarchy and democracy, stability and anarchy. He was a poet of nature and its innumerable mysteries.

Doing Democracy examines the potential of the arts and popular culture to extend and deepen the experience of democracy. Its contributors address the use of photography, cartooning, memorials, monuments, poetry, literature, music, theater, festivals, and parades to open political spaces, awaken critical consciousness, engage marginalized groups in political activism, and create new, more democratic societies. This volume demonstrates how ordinary people use the creative and visionary capacity of the arts and popular culture to shape alternative futures. It is unique in its insistence that democratic theorists and activists should acknowledge and employ affective as well as rational faculties in the ongoing struggle for democracy.

Slavery, both in its historical and modern forms, continues to be a matter of undiminished political and social relevance. This is mirrored by an increasing interest in scholarly research as well as by critical statements from within the field of contemporary art. The present volume is designed to bring together artists and scholars from various fields of study discussing trauma and visuality, or more precisely, memory and denial of traumatic history within visual discourses. The purpose of this project is to put the phenomenon of contemporary art production dealing with the issue of slavery into a wider, interdisciplinary and transcultural context. The book covers current case studies focusing on different media and including visual, literary and performative approaches of dealing with the history of slavery in West-African, American and European cultures.

NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent the crucial cultural debates that arose during the sixties.

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust." This graphic novel biography relates the forward looking inspirational life of the great author, philosopher and pioneering ecologist. Henry David Thoreau was also the father of the concept, still fresh today (viz "Occupy Wall St."), of "civil disobedience" which he used against slavery and the encroachment of government.