Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Brewer, Holly

Titel

“Hearing Nat Turner”: Within the 1831 Slave Rebellion

Ist Teil von

• Law & social inquiry, 2021-08, Vol.46 (3), p.910-916

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

PAIS Index

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Abstract In this chef d’oeuvre , Tomlins offers a heuristic for how to extract the words, ideas, and actions of Nat Turner, the Black, enslaved man who led the most important slave rebellion in American history. Tomlins makes such an effort from within a cluster of different kinds of sources, each one a small window on the past, none of which Turner personally wrote. How to see beyond these particularly distorted glass windows on the past is not obvious. Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner provides a key not only to Turner, and to his powerful sense of how to fracture the fragile legitimacy of the southern slaveholding elite, but also a metaphysics of interpretive strategy that can serve as a theoretical model.