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Nat Turner after 9/11: Kyle Baker's Nat Turner

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2015

TIM BRUNO
TIM BRUNO*
Affiliation:
English Department, University of Maryland, College Park. Email: tbruno@umd.edu.
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Abstract

Scholars have questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews's injunction to read “Prophet Nat's” 1831 insurrection through the US's encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel slave's contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker's popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an iconic black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist” circulating in post-9/11 discourses. By doing so, Baker safeguards not only Nat Turner but US “blackness” from Islamophobia during the age of the global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker's comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article updates the archive on Nat Turner and complicates the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of cultural memory.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 923 - 951
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

1 Sterling A. Brown, “Remembering Nat Turner,” in The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Michael S. Harper (Evanston: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 1996), 209–10.

2 Many summaries of the facts of the Southampton insurrection are available, often including important primary materials. See in particular Henry Irving Tragle, The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971); Eric Foner, Nat Turner (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971); and Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1996). See also Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), for the standard narrative account of the revolt; and Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), for a comprehensive history of Nat Turner in cultural memory through the 1970s.

3 Sharon Ewell Foster, The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part Two: The Testimony (New York: Howard Books, 2012), 252.

4 Ibid.

5 Sharon Ewell Foster, The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part One: The Witnesses (New York: Howard Books, 2011), 207.

6 Foster's texts hedge their depiction of Muslims. For example, Nat Turner's grandmother Afework insists that “All Muslims cannot be evil. [The Muslim kidnappers] are the greedy ones, the connivers who use religion to get what they want.” Ibid., 209. Yet the novels never actually depict any Muslim characters: Islam only appears obliquely, either as a metonymy for the threat of enslavement in Africa or as the implied other to Nat Turner's “Knights Templar.”

7 President George W. Bush provides an early example in a speech from 16 September 2001. Speaking of the 9/11 hijackers at the White House, Bush declares that “we need to be alert to the fact that these evil-doers still exist. We haven't seen this kind of barbarism in a long period of time … This is a new kind of – a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.” George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President upon Arrival,” White House South Lawn, Washington, DC, 16 Sept. 2001, Presidential Remarks, at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html.

8 I do not argue that Kyle Baker's Nat Turner belongs in the by now well-established canon of 9/11 literature, a collection of texts that directly respond to the event, including David Foster Wallace's “The Suffering Channel” (2004), Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge (2013). Rather than engage 9/11 per se, Nat Turner exhibits, through its representational strategies, anxiety about the instability of US blackness under the post-9/11 War on Terror's regime of global white supremacy.

9 Charles Burnett, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002, California Newsreel), DVD.

10 William L. Andrews, “The Confessions of Nat Turner: Memoir of a Martyr or Testament of a Terrorist?”, in Vincent L. Wimbush, ed., Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 79–87, 83.

11 Ibid., 84.

12 Ibid.

13 See Janani Balasubramanian, “Zimmermans and Drones: Antiblackness and Global Domination,” Black Girl Dangerous (blog), 8 Aug. 2013, at www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/08/201388zimmermans-and-drones-antiblackness-and-global-domination, as well Cornel West, interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, 22 July 2013, in which West declares that “President Obama is a global George Zimmerman” for his use of drone warfare, drawing a comparison between US racist imperialism and the vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin. For example, the War on Terror and US antiblackness converge in the 2009 plot of the so-called Newburgh Four. Four black Muslims from a Newburgh, NY mosque were convicted of plotting terrorist acts, yet their plan was actually concocted by a paid FBI informant who aggressively courted their involvement. The four men variously display undiagnosed mental illnesses, have been incarcerated, or have suffered dire poverty. According to Paul Harris in The Guardian, “It is not a portrait of radical Islamists. It is a sad picture of life in an urban ghetto.” In the case of these four men, the state rhetorically transubstantiated the consequences of its racist socioeconomic policies into a terrorist threat that could sanction the state's national security apparatus. Paul Harris, “Newburgh Four: poor, black, and jailed under FBI ‘entrapment’ tactics,” The Guardian, 12 Dec. 2011, at www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/12/newburgh-four-fbi-entrapment-terror.

14 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell, 1962), 66.

15 Barry Blitt, “The Politics of Fear,” New Yorker, 21 July 2008, cover.

16 I consider it an open question whether the same will hold true for Nat Turner in the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the case of Trayvon Martin's murder. Perhaps Black Lives Matter will ultimately shift that cultural context for Nat Turner from the convergence of antiblackness and Islamophobia to something else, to something even liberatory and movement-oriented.

17 Greenberg, Confessions, 48.

18 Furthermore, since I aim to move critical engagement with Nat Turner beyond the 1960s and 1970s, I intentionally spend little time on his intertexts from those decades in the present essay.

19 One scene stands out as an exception as it depicts a young Nat Turner with fellow slave children eating from a trough in a visual allusion to the famous “mush” scene in Frederick Douglass's 1845 autobiography, as Baker himself points out in the footnotes. See Kyle Baker, Nat Turner (New York: Abrams, 2008), 70, 204.

20 Ibid., 6.

21 Ibid.

22 Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964), 179.

23 Jamin Brophy-Warren, “Rebel Yell: A Book Tells the Story of Nat Turner's Uprising – in Cartoon Form,” Wall Street Journal, 2 Aug. 2008, W2, at http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB121764057720406573.

24 Baker, 7. Urging black self-reliance, Baker admonishes readers to “Think about it” and trumpets the fact that this, one of his first independently published works, is about a self-educated, “self-freed slave.”

25 The body of criticism on Baker's comic has been most concerned with the implications of retelling the Nat Turner story through the medium of comics; in particular, scholars have focussed on the precise nature of the relationship between text and image in the comic given Baker's juxtaposition of his own pictorial narrative with excerpts from historical documents from the archive on US chattel slavery. In the main, critics hold that text and image in Nat Turner function ironically, as I have said: for Andrew Kunka, the image–text tension is an example of the comic's signifying on Nat Turner's intertexts, including the original Confessions; for Consuela Francis, the ironic contrast revises the generic conventions of the slave narrative; and for Jonathan Gray, image/text functions to critique the historical archives on both Nat Turner and slavery. Although I will draw on their work for key critical interventions, I do not read Baker as being so ambivalent or openly critical about Nat Turner's legacy as do some of these scholars. See also Celeste-Marie Bernier, Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); and Chaney, Michael A., “Slave Memory without Words in Kyle Baker's Nat Turner ,” Callaloo, 36, (2013), 279–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at http://muse.jhu.edu, for other recent work on Baker's comic.

26 Baker, 107–8, 174–75.

27 Ibid., 6.

28 Greenberg, Confessions, 46–47.

29 Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 21, 31.

30 William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 72.

31 Sundquist, 37.

32 Andrews, 77.

33 Greenberg, 44.

34 Andrews, 73.

35 Consuela Francis, “Drawing the Unspeakable: Kyle Baker's Slave Narrative,” in Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted, ed., Comics and the U. S. South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 119.

36 See Kunka, Andrew J., “Intertextuality and the Historical Graphic Narrative: Kyle Baker's Nat Turner and the Styron Controversy,” College Literature, 38, 3 (2011), 168–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 187–88, at http://muse.jhu.edu, for a succinct summary of comics' two competing theoretical camps. He also asserts that Kyle Baker's Nat Turner “presents particular challenges” for both of the primary definitions of the comics form.

37 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 9.

38 Robert C. Harvey, “How Comics Came to Be: Through the Juncture of Word and Image from Magazine Gag Cartoons to Newspaper Strips, Tools for Critical Appreciation plus Rare Seldom Witnessed Historical Facts,” in Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., A Comics Studies Reader (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 26.

39 Chute, Hillary, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” PMLA, 123, 2 (2008), 459–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at www.mlajournals.org.

40 Francis, 120.

41 Baker, Nat Turner, 10.

42 Ibid., 36.

43 Ibid., 57.

44 Francis, 131.

45 Baker, 33.

46 Ibid., 36.

47 Quoted in Jonathan W. Gray, “‘Commence the Great Work’: The Historical Archive and Unspeakable Violence in Kyle Baker's Nat Turner,” in Marlene D. Allen and Seretha D. Williams, eds., Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television, and Other Media (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012), 183.

48 For a discussion of Baker's silhouette of Will in relation to Walker's work, see Marc Singer, “Week 8: Kyle Baker, Nat Turner,” I Am NOT the Beastmaster (blog), 18 March 2010, at http://notthebeastmaster.typepad.com/weblog/2010/03/week-8-kyle-baker-nat-turner.html.

49 Baker, 178–79.

50 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), 42. For an overview of the spectrum of “realism” to “abstraction” see 36–53.

51 For a discussion of the four book titles as signifying on the trajectory of the classic slave narratives, see Bernier, Characters of Blood, 139.

52 Baker, 186.

53 Ibid., 188.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 189.

56 Ibid., 190.

57 Andrews, Free Story, 75.

58 Sundquist, Wake the Nations, 81.

59 Ibid., 72, 69, 81. It is worth noting that accounts of Nat Turner's execution and his afterlife in black folklore also depict him Christologically, notably including reports that his corpse bore the stigmata. Ibid., 82–83.

60 Andrews, 72.

61 Ibid., 61–62.

62 Baker, 85.

63 Ibid., 86–87.

64 Ibid., 104–5.

65 Ibid., 91.

66 Ibid., 132.

67 Ibid., 191–93.

68 Ibid., 193.

69 Ibid., 194.

70 Ibid., 195–96.

71 Ibid., 197.

72 Ibid., 204.

73 Ibid., 198–200.

74 Ibid., 200.

75 My interpretation of Baker's Nat Turner as an unambiguously Christ-like figure runs counter to readings by Gray and Kunka. Gray, “Commence the Great Work,” 186, asserts that Baker pointedly rejects “a hagiography of Nat Turner.” Kunka, “Intertextuality,” 186, makes an intriguing argument that Baker's Nat Turner is an intertextual composite of competing representations of the iconic figure, including of him as “a devil to be driven out by a white savior,” namely Benjamin Phipps. However, Kunka misidentifies Phipps with an unnamed, vaguely “Christ-like” white character whom Will actually decapitates.

76 “Document: Manhunt Manifesto,” Los Angeles Times, 7 Feb. 2013, at http://documents.latimes.com/christopher-dorner-manifesto.

77 The LAPD's response, however, often resembled vigilante justice as officers fired upon people they mistook for Dorner and eventually burned down his hideout while he was still inside. During a shootout at the cabin which Dorner had occupied, police used incendiary teargas that set the building ablaze. The LAPD asserts that Dorner committed suicide by gunshot once the cabin caught fire. For a summary of events see “Timeline: The Christopher Dorner manhunt,” Los Angeles Times, 8 Feb. 2013, at http://timelines.latimes.com/statewide-manhunt-ex-lapd-officer.

78 It is worth contrasting the rapid obscurity of the Chris Dorner affair with the national prominence of Trayvon Martin's contemporaneous murder. Despite the entrenched and violent racism that the Dorner case revealed, Dorner's militancy precluded the kind of sympathizing and coalition building that transformed Trayvon Martin into a rallying figure.

79 “We Stand with Christopher Dorner,” Facebook page, 7 Feb. 2013, at www.facebook.com/WeStandWithChristopherDorner; “We Are All Chris Dorner,” Facebook page, 7 Feb. 2013, at www.facebook.com/WeAreAllChrisDorner/info; “Chris Dorner and the Revolution,” Facebook page, accessed 8 March 2013, at www.facebook.com/ChrisDornerRevolution.

80 See SupremeSpearChuckr, Twitter post, 7 Feb. 2013, 11:45 a.m., at https://twitter.com/KingSpearChuckr; Ella Septima-Hamer, Twitter post, 8 Feb. 2013, 10:04 a.m., at https://twitter.com/Jbrous14; MadScientistJX, Twitter post, 13 Feb. 2013, 1:09 a.m. at https://twitter.com/MadScientistJX (deactivated); and Travis Simpkins, Twitter post, 8 Feb. 2013, 1:34 p.m., at https://twitter.com/givegooddick, respectively. See also “Forget Django: Christoper Dorner is now the new Nat Turner,” 9 Feb. 2013, from conservative pundit Michelle Malkin's Twitter aggregator Twitchy.com, at http://twitchy.com/2013/02/09/forget-django-christopher-dorner-is-now-the-new-nat-turner, for more tweets comparing Dorner with Nat Turner as well as Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained.

81 West, interview.

82 Balasubramanian, “Zimmermans and Drones.”

83 Baker, 6–7.

84 George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 213: “Counter-memory looks to the past for the hidden histories excluded from dominant narratives. But unlike myths that seek to detach events and actions from the fabric of any larger history, counter-memory forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past.” Counter-memory thus also intervenes in the politics of the present. It can serve, as per Paul Gardullo, for instance, as “a wellspring of revolutionary action.” Writing on the paintings of Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, Gardullo explains that “they served as examples of a wave of cultural representations that strove to reorient the wider culture's memory of slavery by recovering a sense of slaves' historical agency. They attempted to dismantle the myth of the Old South and mobilize a version of slavery that foregrounded militant resistance, freedom struggles, rebellions and interracial insurgency.” See Gardullo, Paul, “‘Just Keeps Rollin’ Along’: Rebellions, Revolts and Radical Black Memories of Slavery in the 1930s,” Patterns of Prejudice, 41, 3–4 (2007), 271–301 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 275, 274, at www.tandfonline.com.