{"title":"Prologue","authors":"C. Tomlins","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691198668.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691198668.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This introductory chapter considers what called William Styron's fictive realities into being, and how they were crafted. Styron had written The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which represented itself as the autobiographical narrative of the African American slave-turned-rebel leader, Nat Turner. The chapter asks what made his work a “meditation on history”—and why it failed. It also takes a look at whether it might be possible to redeem Nat Turner from endless deferral—the effect of multiple attempts to “understand” him as a figment of text without listening to (or for) him as a person. African American popular culture has tried, with some success, to retrieve Nat Turner, to recognize and assimilate him to itself, without deferral. However, this chapter considers whether or not he will ever be able to achieve a historical presence of his own that is other than past, and how.","PeriodicalId":314278,"journal":{"name":"In the Matter of Nat Turner","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130939136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Guilt of Fragile Sovereigns","authors":"C. Tomlins","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvp7d55d.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvp7d55d.9","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the guilt of the “fragile sovereigns” who were threatened by Turner's actions and how he had highlighted the problems of slavery. It shows how these vulnerable, fragile sovereigns against whom Turner was rebelling were also guilty sovereigns. Slaves could not be emancipated unless the emancipists were removed from Virginia. But the cost of removing them was too great, and nobody knew what to do. Turner's brusque intervention in white Virginia's affairs caused a panic that only heightened public anxiety. Thus the chapter reveals a tyrannical regime that does not change, that resists the politics of change, that ends up decrying the messages of politics altogether and embracing political economy to explain and justify its stasis.","PeriodicalId":314278,"journal":{"name":"In the Matter of Nat Turner","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131086336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Shudder of the Thought","authors":"C. Tomlins","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvp7d55d.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvp7d55d.7","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter attempts to understand how Turner had arrived in his decision to rebel—and thus, to kill—and what gave him the conviction to see the enterprise through. The Confessions contains little information regarding that aspect of Turner's thought, though it does provide a few clues. The chapter shows that the Turner whose invisible decision exists in the text's cleft is not a tragic hero. Everything that Turner has revealed of himself in the first part of The Confessions underlines not tragic heroism, but faith. But Turner was no gloomy fanatic, according to this chapter, which goes on to describe Turner as the “knight of faith” embodied in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard.","PeriodicalId":314278,"journal":{"name":"In the Matter of Nat Turner","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126120721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Epilogue","authors":"C. Tomlins","doi":"10.23943/princeton/9780691198668.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691198668.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This concluding chapter conjoins, in one constellation, the three texts from which certain observations have been drawn, and ourselves as readers of texts, and thereby attempt to provide this story with meaning and purpose. The first text is The Confessions of Nat Turner. The second is Max Weber's famous lecture “Science as a Vocation,” delivered in 1917 in Munich, on the eve of the Russian revolution. The third is Walter Benjamin's abbreviated fragment “Capitalism as Religion,” written in 1921, unpublished in his lifetime. In this chapter the second and third texts become prisms from the future, as we are ourselves. They, and we, refract and enliven the first, and so reveal its image. They are as unlike each other as each is unlike The Confessions, except in one regard—the glance each casts at the demonic. Though brief, these glances are of significance if we are to assess the final meaning of the “full faith and credit” held due the decision of the Southampton County Court to convict Nat Turner of fomenting “insurrection,” and order that he hang.","PeriodicalId":314278,"journal":{"name":"In the Matter of Nat Turner","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121767146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}