Black Prometheus : Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution--scientific, political, and spiritual--and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself? The answer Black Prometheus gives is that certain features of the myth--its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology--made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus--whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel, Frankenstein, Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus-- is a profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation and unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, and modernity and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique. Provided by Amazon How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution - scientific, political, and spiritual - and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself? The answer this book gives is that certain features of the myth - its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology - made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus - whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel, Frankenstein, in Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or in popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus - is a profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation and unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, and modernity, and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique. -- Provided by Amazon How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution--scientific, political, and spiritual--and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself ? The answer Black Prometheus gives is that certain features of the myth--its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology--made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus--whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel, Frankenstein, Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus-- isa profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation and unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, and modernity and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique. An Innovative Transnational Literary Study, 'black Prometheus' Tracks The Mythical Figure's Surprising Resonance In Anglo-american Antislavery Discourse From 1800 Until The End Of The Us Civil War. Part I: Historical Conditions And Contexts Of Black Prometheanism. Globalization And The Gods : A Theory Of Race And -- Or As -- Modernity -- The Terms Of Prometheus's Liberation : Romanticism, Slavery, And The Titan's Triumph -- Part Ii: Prometheus Of Africa. Africa Versus The Absolute : Idealism And Its Others -- The Afro-promethean Science Of The Stars : Toward A New Metahistory Of African Survivals -- Part Iii: Prometheus Of Caucasus. Rebinding Prometheus To The Caucasus : Idealism's Other Solution -- Iman Shamil, Or The Modern Prometheus Of Caucasus -- Part Iv: A Literary History Of Slave Rebellion. Rebellious Fictions : Black Prometheus And The Undoing Of Novelistic Form -- Byronic Abolitionism. Jared Hickman. Includes Bibliographical References (pages [471]-507) And Index. The Prometheus myth, for several reasons 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