Contact Information
Biography Information
I am an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Nottingham. I have worked in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University since August 2003. My PhD was on slave ship revolts and titled, “‘Dusky Powder Magazines:’ The Creole Slave Ship Revolt in Nineteenth Century American Literature.” My first book was jointly published by the University of North Carolina and Edinburgh University Press and titled, African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present (2008). I have published articles in journals such as Slavery and Abolition, Nineteenth Century American History, Journal of Atlantic Studies and Journal of American Studies. In January 2009, my co-edited book (with Judie Newman) titled, Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery was published by Routledge. I am contracted to write a monograph on Horace Pippin titled, “Suffering and Sunset”: Horace Pippin’s World War I Paintings and Prose (contracted to the University of Virginia Press). I am also revising the draft of my monograph, Slave Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (due to Routledge in 2010). At Nottingham I teach a range of courses including undergraduate and graduate modules such as American Literature I: 1607-1900, North American Children’s Literature, African American Visual Culture, Slavery and Freedom and Thought and Culture, to name but a few. I supervise PhD students in topics in African American Studies, Caribbean Studies and American Studies more generally. I am a Contributing Editor for the UK for the Journal of American History and I was awarded a Gilder Lehrman Institute Fellowship (2002) as well as a full scholarship to attend a Salzburg ACS Seminar on Race and Slavery (2001). I have served as the European Cluster for American Studies Organiser (2004-6) and I recently organised the British Association for American Studies Conference for 300 national and international delegates (2009).
Project Description
Contracted to Routledge, my monograph Slave Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination examines the historical, literary, and visual legacy of slave heroism in the African Diaspora. I adopt a transnational framework to define the ways in which authors of African and European descent working within Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe revise and critique representations popularised by writers and artists in the United States. I examine the following Caribbean, African and African American heroic figures: Toussaint Louverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. This book adopts an ambitious time-frame to investigate literary, historical, political and visual texts produced at key epochs. These include the height of abolitionist activity in the 1850s, the Great Depression and reform movements of the 1930s, the era of black radical activism in the 1960s and the “post” Civil Rights context of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The introduction, “The Heroic Slave, Spectacle, Rhetoric and ‘Characters of Blood’” in the Transatlantic Imagination’, opens with William Wells Brown’s contemplation of Nelson’s Column in London. A former slave, Brown stands in Britain’s capital city and is comforted. “Here was the Negro, as black a man as was ever imported from the coast of Africa”, he writes, “represented in his proper place by the side of Lord Nelson, on one of England’s proudest monuments. How different, thought I, was the position assigned to the colored man on similar monuments in the United States”. This brief vignette provides an apt introduction to this exploration of heroism in relation to transnational politics, aesthetic experimentation and constructions of a diasporic selfhood. A repeated contention concerns the fundamental role played by the imagination in visual and literary representations of black heroism produced throughout the period. Given that black heroism has been dismissed and/or distorted within dominant representations produced in the U.S., it is possible to identify a transnational tradition within which writers and artists adopt an experimental poetics. In the face of a lacuna within official discourse, key creators develop a transgressive visual and literary language via aesthetic experimentation.
The first chapter, “‘I Shed My Blood’: Toussaint Louverture, Myth, History and the Transatlantic Imagination”, compares Harriet Martineau’s, The Hour and the Man (1841) with Frederick Douglass’s manuscripts memorialising L’Ouverture’s heroism. I then examine Leslie Pinkney Hill’s historical play, Toussaint L’Ouverture (1928) alongside Jacob Lawrence’s Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1941), to contrast literary with visual constructions of black masculinity. This chapter continues by exploring representations of Toussaint L’Ouverture in the 1970s Golden Legacy Comic Book series while the final section discusses Madison Smart Bell’s 1990s trilogy. The second chapter, “N.T. 11 11 31: Nathaniel Turner, Symbolism, Memorialisation and Experimental Poetics”, analyses early drawings of Turner in the context both of popular press descriptions and Thomas Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1831). The next section explores Randolph Edmonds’s play, Nat Turner (1935) alongside poetry by Sterling Brown and paintings by Charles White and William H. Johnson. I then compare William Styron’s controversial text, The Confessions of Nat Turner, not only with Ten Black Writers Respond, but also Daniel Panger’s novel, Ol’ Prophet Nat. As a way of theorising these representations within a diasporic framework, I examine French writer, Catherine Hermary-Vieille, Nat Turner’s Tragic Search for Freedom: From Deprivation to Vengeance, A Novel (2002). Multifaceted representations of Nathaniel Turner provided by Charles Burnett’s documentary, A Troublesome Property, and Kyle Baker’s graphic novel, Nat Turner (2006-7) conclude the chapter.
‘“You had better be killed:” Sengbe Pieh’, the third chapter, begins by examining newspaper reportage in relation to paintings, drawings and phrenology diagrams. This chapter continues by exploring Owen Dodson’s play, Amistad (1939), and Hale Woodruff’s mural series of the same title. I then contrast graphic representations of Sengbe Pieh in the Golden Legacy comic book with Robert Hayden’s epic dramatisation in Middle Passage. The chapter develops by comparing plays by African dramatists, Charlie Haffner – Amistad Kata Kata (1988) – and Raymond De Souza - The Broken Handcuff (1994) – with works by Sierra Leonean street artists and ends with Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1998). The fourth chapter, ‘“Tickety-ump-ump-nicky-nacky”: (Re)creating, (Re)knowing and (Re)figuring Sojourner Truth’, introduces black female heroism to examine multiple editions of Truth’s narrative in the light of her much neglected oratory. I also explore repeated portrayals of Truth in daguerreotypes as well as William Storey’s sculpture, The Libyan Sibyl (1860). Moreover, the chapter considers representations of Sojourner Truth in John Biggers’s mural, Contribution of the Negro Woman. In the final section, First Nations writer, Lee Maracle’s, short story collection, Sojourner’s Truth and Other Stories (1990), becomes the focus to get to grips with ideas of memory and myth across African American and First Nations cultures.
Chapter five, A “Work of Art”: Frederick Douglass’s “Living Parchments” and “Chattel Records” , examines Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853) in the context of his transatlantic speeches dramatising slave heroism. As the most daguerreotyped African American figure in the nineteenth century, I investigate pictorial representations of Douglass not only in photographic media but also in painting, drawings and sculpture. This chapter then examines Jacob Lawrence’s Frederick Douglass series and William Branch’s In Splendid Error (1954) as well as poetry by Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden. Irish playwright, Donald O’Kelley’s The Cambria (2005) concludes the chapter by addressing the contemporary resonance of Douglass’s multifaceted legacy. The final chapter, “I’ve seen de real ting”: Harriet Tubman, Performance and the Folkloric Imagination, explores Sarah Bradford’s three narratives (1869, 1886, 1901) in relation to early daguerreotypes and woodcuts. I examine Jacob Lawrence’s Harriet Tubman series (1930s) in light of his experimental visual aesthetics. The chapter then considers Marcy Heidish’s novel, A Woman Called Moses (1976) and moves on to discuss Caribbean writer, M. Nourbese-Philips’s Harriet’s Daughter (1988). Finally, the book’s conclusion - ‘Transatlantic Slave Heroism, the Middle Passage and “Millions of Black Men, Women, and Children”’ - signifies upon the wider moral, intellectual, political, aesthetic and social implications of transatlantic slave heroism.