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The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts THE BLACK AVENGER TROPE IN ATLANTIC LITERATURE A Dissertation in English by Grégory Pierrot © 2012 Grégory Pierrot Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2012 The dissertation of Grégory Pierrot was reviewed and approved by the following*: Aldon Lynn Nielsen George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Carla Mulford Professor of English Paul Youngquist Professor of English Linda Furgerson Selzer Associate Professor of English Jonathan Eburne Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English Shirley Moody‐Turner Assistant Professor of English Garrett Sullivan Professor of English Director of English Graduate Studies *Signatures are on file at the Graduate School 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. iii CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I 20 Changing Moors: Oroonoko and the Revenge Tradition CHAPTER II 72 The Haitian Revolution, a Tale of Two Avengers CHAPTER III 135 Going to America CHAPTER IV 215 An American Tradition CONCLUSION 289 WORKS CITED 303 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to François and Germaine Pierrot, my parents, in hopes that they eventually get to read it in my native language. To Peggy and Philippe Pierrot, my siblings, who may get to read it sooner. To the members of my committee: Aldon Nielsen, Linda Selzer, Carla Mulford, Jonathan Eburne, Shirley Moody‐Turner, with a special mention to my friend and model in all things scholarly, Paul Youngquist. To Dustin Kennedy, Nancy Cushing, Micky New, Emily Sharpe, Hannah Abelbeck, Jesse Hicks, Angela Ward, Michael DuBose, Josh Tendler, Yann, Johanna and Sascha Heuzé, Manolis Galenianos, whose friendship, questions, comments and presence proved central to this endeavor. To Katharine Tune Pierrot, whose love and support made this project possible, and Chloë Pierrot, my beacon in the darkness. Here’s to the next stage of our trip. Tshenbé red, pa moli! v Introduction The July 1966 issue of Marvel Comics hit series Fantastic Four is mostly remembered for the guest character it featured: the "sensational Black Panther." The Black Panther's story was in many respects rather formulaic. Much like Batman, with whom he shared an entirely black, animal‐inspired costume, the Black Panther was a wealthy heir with access to the most advanced technology, and who initially became a vigilante in order to avenge the murder of his father. Yet the Black Panther made history for something much more singular, something that set him apart from every other superhero in 1966: under the Panther's mask was comic book history's first black superhero. The Black Panther is T'Challa, son of T'Chaka, king of Wakanda, a mysterious and virtually unknown country hidden in the middle of the African continent. Wakanda is the only place in the world with access to vibranium, a mineral extracted from a meteorite, which helped Wakanda become the most technologically advanced country on Earth. Wakanda still respects tradition, though: the country designates its kings through a centuries‐old ritual in which incumbent Black Panthers have to prove their worth against challengers in hand‐to‐hand combat. Wakanda, as represented by scenarist Stan Lee and illustrator Jack Kirby, was an odd juxtaposition of the racist visuals typical of Western popular culture's depictions of the dark continent (spear‐shaking warriors wearing animal skins and tooth necklaces) and of the ultra‐technological science‐fiction for which the 1 Fantastic Four had become famous. The strong contrast was in part a function of Lee and Kirby's naked attempt at subverting the racist conventions of the “jungle comics” which until then had dictated portrayals of Africans: in the words of popular culture scholar Gerald Early, “the jungle of the civil rights/Black Power era is not a backward place of savages who need white colonialism, Africans who act like children and have no scientific understanding of the world, but rather a place of technology and advancement disguised as jungle.”1 Early sees the Black Panther as the expression of the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights movement in comic book form. Lee and Kirby's Black Panther was the educated expression of its cultural surroundings, resounding with both the racial hang‐ups and the progressive intentions of its time. But I will argue that he was also grounded in a Western tradition of commentary on, and appropriation of, African and African diasporic culture and politics. More specifically, the Black Panther is but one iteration in a cultural history of representation of black rebellion across the Atlantic world spanning some four hundred years. A cultural product of the transatlantic slave trade, the black avenger has played an important role in the construction of the very notions of race on which it appears to rest. In the image of its early incarnation, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), the black avenger was born—and regularly reborn—at the crossroads of African (and African diasporic) cultures and Western culture. A sophisticated (i.e., European‐educated) African prince kidnapped by 1 Gerald Early, “The 1960s, African Americans, and the American Comic Book,” in Strips, Toons and Bluesies: Essays in Comics and Culture, D.B. Dowd and Todd Hignite, Eds. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 68‐69. 2 British slave‐traders, Oroonoko goes through the middle passage and arrives in British‐occupied Surinam where he leads an ill‐fated slave revolt and is executed by the colonial authorities. Sometimes considered the first British novel, Behn's Oroonoko is also often portrayed as groundbreaking for featuring a positively portrayed African as its main character. It is also worthy of note for setting the standards of the black avenger trope. African characters were not unheard of at the time; Behn's creation breathed into a stock character inherited from the revenge tragedy tradition the novelty of modern racial relations as revealed in such brutal, head‐on encounters as portrayed in the novel. Part of the novelty of this trope is precisely how black avenger narratives tend to downplay their cultural origins and emphasize the alleged newness of the cultural clash. From Oroonoko onwards, one can read through black avengers and recover a history of the cultural representations of these clashes and encounters. We can see how these representations of black avengers in turn influenced the terms in which these encounters were, and would be, understood. Each iteration adds layers to a phenomenon that can be read like a two‐tone palimpsest of cultural representation and interpretation. Thus Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts on the Evil of Slavery (1787) works in contrast to the “black avenger of America” figure presented in the texts of abbé Raynal and Sébastien‐Louis Mercier in the preceding decade to introduce the possibility of a collective black agency in the service of godly revenge. These two related but distinct sources announce in turn the modes of representation of the Haitian revolution (1791‐1804) in Atlantic (French, British and U.S. American) newspapers and fiction in treatments of Haitian 3 revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, and later more specifically in U.S. American variations on the black avenger theme, from Confessions of Nat Turner (1832) to Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1854) and Martin Delany’s Blake (1859‐ 1861). I trace the figure through the nineteenth century and its revisionist adaptation to the postbellum African American context in Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio (1899), Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Robert L. Waring’s As We See It (1910) and show the connections between the Americanization of the turn of the century and the fundamental reconsideration of the figure in the writings of Chester Himes and Boris Vian in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This cultural phenomenon promotes and is necessarily dependent on a notion of races as distinct, separate and often irreconcilable, notions that gain extraordinary valence in the modern era and around the issue of the Atlantic slave trade. The early black avenger figure was a sign of the rise of modern notions of race that it, in turn, contributed to install. At the risk of stating the obvious, the black avenger is not just any literary avenger or national redeemer.
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