Pendulum Time, Collective Freedom, and Rethinking the Neo-Slave Narrative in Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder
Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia, 1800
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272050 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christine Montgomery, Christine L Montgomery (Santa Clara University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Pages | mlw041 |
| Publication date | 2016-11-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlw041 |
| OpenAlex | W2547035364 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936) re-envisions Gabriel Prosser’s slave revolt in 1800 as he attempted to marshal eleven hundred slaves to fight for freedom. Instead of escaping slavery to become fugitives in the “free” North, he demands collective freedom in Richmond, Virginia. For Bontemps, pendulum-time is a potentially revolutionary construct of temporality. In Black Thunder, the pendulum swings from an imagined Africa pre-Middle Passage to a free future post-1968 and between times of real resistance, from Gabriel’s revolt to the Haitian Revolution and the ideology of the French Revolution to forms of black radicalism in 1936 and 1968. These repeated sets of gestures (past, present, and future) and divergent sets of hemispheric spaces (Virginia, France, and Haiti) are conceptually yoked together by the pendulum’s arc. In this essay, I argue that pendulum-time resists Gabriel’s revolt as a failure and offers instead a reading of slave revolt as a foundation for black radical traditions and visions of collective freedom. My discussions of pendulum-time and collective freedom redefine the neo-slave narrative, modern narratives that return to the time of slavery, by reorienting the individualist account of slave “escape” to collectivized slave revolt. I ultimately argue that Bontemps’s use of anachronism and prophecy, two constitutive features of pendulum-time, produces a temporality of indeterminacy that marks a vacillation between progress and defeat. Pendulum-time also makes visible emancipatory moments within the constraints of slavery and reveals predictive, even prophetic, temporalities of slave revolt.
Art · Epistemology · Geography · Individualism · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Temporalities · Temporality · Thunder · African history and culture studies · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society
The Afro-American novel and its tradition
Neo-Slave Narratives
To wake the nations
Taking Haiti
Ghostly Matters
The Black Jacobins
The Epistemology of Slave Conspiracy
The Last “Darky”
The Wretched of the Earth
American Negro Slave Revolts
Haiti, History, and the Gods
The Freedom to Remember
Renaissance Man from Louisiana
Rebels, Reformers, and Revolutionaries
Let Nobody Turn Us Around
Go Slow Now
To Wake the Nations
Slavery and Social Death
The Slave’s Narrative
Black Thunder's" Call for a Conjure Response to "American Negro Slavery
Haunted by the Past
Women in Chains
The Hammers of Creation
Voodoo Fascism
Beloved
Gabriel's Rebellion
Women, Race and Class
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |