Black Prometheus

Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

Jared Hickman

Recovers the powerful, enduring legacy of antiquity's Prometheus for a phalanx of writers and thinkers in the Age of Atlantic Slavery
Establishes a rich transnational network for understanding Atlantic slavery, challenging traditional views of race, religion, and globalization
Recasts responses to slavery by Voltaire, the Shelleys, William Blake, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, and the astronomer Benjamin Banneker
Enlivened by an interdisciplinary approach that draws on theology, intellectual history, philosophy, and literary studies

Black Prometheus

Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

Jared Hickman

Description

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.

Black Prometheus

Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

Jared Hickman

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

Black Prometheus

Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

Jared Hickman

Author Information

Jared Hickman, Assistant Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University

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

Black Prometheus

Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

Jared Hickman

Reviews and Awards

"In this meticulous treatment, the well-known story of Prometheus becomes the basis for an extensive allegorical and historical investigation into the transatlantic slave trade. Hickman (English, Johns Hopkins Univ.) shrewdly chooses the metaphor, which undergirds the self-referential mythology of European expansionism, subverting it to provide a surprisingly different outlook when moved from identification with the oppressors to identification with the oppressed. ... the idea itself is interesting and fresh ... He shines in matters of literary interpretation and cultural resonance ... The concluding part (of four), "A Literary History of Slave Rebellion", is inspired ... Of most value to scholars of literary theory. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - D. E. Wigner, CHOICE

"Black Prometheus is an exhilarating account of modernity as neither secular nor religious but comprised of a series of competing, fragile, and often flawed experiments in being human. In tending to the globalizing and racializing effects of these cosmic wagers in history and in literature, Jared Hickman writes with joyous erudition across an impressive range of debates, texts, and events. In doing so, Hickman offers nothing less than a counter-myth to the 'bad feedback loop' of European Christianity and its momentous mélange of faith and reason, immanent frames and transcendental claims, enchained bodies and wills to cognitive autonomy." - John Modern, Franklin & Marshall College

"Setting a new standard for postsecular scholarship, Black Prometheus rewrites modernity's global cosmology by focusing on Atlantic slavery in the misnamed New World. Here, race-making is theological warfare and the myths that service it are as powerful as scripture. Part philosophy, part literary criticism, part anti-racist critique, Black Prometheus dismantles the secularization thesis of modernity to devastating effect. It is impossible to imagine how Jared Hickman could have written a better book." - Robyn Wiegman, Duke University

"Black Prometheus is an ambitious and learned study. Arcing from Aeschylus to the Shelleys, from Banneker to Byron and Douglass to DuBois, Jared Hickman discloses our finite globe as the theater of titanic — and fundamentally racial — struggle. Like a powerful magnet, the ancient figure of Prometheus draws to it over the centuries a dizzying array of metacosmic speculation. Projecting Blumenberg's insights onto a global scale, Hickman here offers an unusual look at what 'work on myth' can be today." - Jonathan Elmer, Indiana University — Bloomington