The Black Avenger Trope in Atlantic Literature
Open Access
- Author:
- Pierrot, Gregory
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 07, 2012
- Committee Members:
- Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Paul Youngquist, Committee Member
Carla Mulford, Committee Member
Linda Furgerson Selzer, Committee Member
Shirley Moody, Committee Member
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Special Member - Keywords:
- Black Diaspora
Haitian Revolution
African American Literature
American Literature
Comparative Literature - Abstract:
- The fear that an African American nation might rise out of the Atlantic slave trade has been on Western minds since the late seventeenth century. The black avenger trope is a singular and lasting cultural product of this anxiety, which my dissertation explores more specifically in French, English and American culture and history. A variety of authors, among whom Aphra Behn, Abbé Raynal, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Marcus Rainsford, Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Charles Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, Boris Vian, Chester Himes, illustrate the trope’s ubiquity and persistence through time in cultures of the Atlantic world. The modern nations of the Atlantic world imagined, analyzed and represented black revolt through the prism of black avenger narratives, whose reach and influence knew no national or linguistic bounds. The significance of the black avenger trope goes even further: this dissertation demonstrates that the trope was central to the way nations of the Atlantic and related communities of the African diaspora imagined and re-imagined themselves as they evolved. This dissertation explores a line of black avenger narratives and their connection and relevance to their immediate historical context, showing how the black avenger trope contributed crucial patterns to national narratives at defining moments in the history of France, Great Britain and the United States. Modern nations imagine themselves as reading communities; producing and interpreting black avenger texts have ranked among the self-defining actions they perform, and remain a pertinent key to better analyze the textual ties that bind notions of race and nation.