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Egerton sees Turner's rebellion sharing similarities with other slave rebellions in the Americas. Louis P.
Masur argues that Turner's rebellion contributed to the sectional conflicts leading up to the Civil War. Mary Kemp Davis looks at the role of female slaves in the rebellion. Obviously, these brief summaries do not do justice to the complexity of the arguments in the volume. This is followed by interviews, conducted for the documentary film, with William Styron and one of his critics, Dr.
Alvin Poussaint. Styron's novel was a dramatic retelling of Nat Turner's rebellion and helped shape a popular reinterpretation of Southern history and American race relations.
Styron's novel helped bring an end to the myth of the happy slave, popularized in movies like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. Styron's critical decision to look at slavery through the eyes of a black man reflected the optimism of the later years of the Civil Rights movement in America, when many liberals believed that blacks and whites might finally be able to come together through mutual understanding and put behind them the divisions and rancor that had long separated them.
Styron's novel, however, quickly generated an intense reaction from many blacks, some of whom put their criticisms into a book, William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.
If you like this page consider making a donation online through PayPal. This must have been Trezvant, the judge, the man who dispatched the relay express to Petersburg, the former colonel now approaching Estimates range from scores to hundreds of black people slaughtered, most of whom evidently had no intimate connection with the uprising. American Negro Slave Revolts 6th ed. Under the header JavaScript select the following radio button: Allow all sites to run JavaScript recommended.
Styron, they argued, had ignored Turner's relationships within the black community, and especially ignored Turner's wife. For Styron's critics, Nat Turner was a heroic figure who acted rationally to protect his family and to fight against the injustice of American slavery. The Nat Turner of William Styron's creation, on the other hand, they argued, was an indecisive, sexually tormented, pathological creature, who irrationally struck out at the white people who dominated his life. He was a figment of Styron's own psychological conflicts rather than an accurate representation of an important historic figure.
In this argument, neither Styron nor his critics can be credited with a mastery of objective historical scholarship. Styron and his critics, however, would probably agree that history should be useful, and should address contemporary issues.
The two groups, however, had starkly contrasting perspectives on the uses of history. For Styron and his defenders, his book was first of all a novel.
Nat Turner's name rings through American history with a force all its own. Leader of the most important slave rebellion on these shores, variously viewed as a. Editorial Reviews. From Publishers Weekly. In August , Nat Turner, a year-old slave claiming divine inspiration, led a band of rebels in the murder of.
It was an exercise in the creative imagination, and it was also a mostly virtuous attempt at understanding and healing racial wounds. To Styron's detractors, Nat Turner was not only a historic figure but a role model in the struggle for black freedom. Styron's Turner, they argued, merely reinforced white racist stereotypes of black men as irrational, hyper-sexual, and aggressive.
In the concluding epilogue of this book, Kenneth Greenberg describes the effort to turn Styron's book into a movie. Very quickly a group of blacks in Hollywood, led by novelist Louise Meriwether and actor Ossie Davis, organized an opposition to the movie. In negotiations with Wolper they were able to get him to agree to a "more positive image of Nat Turner as a black revolutionary," and to use a title for the movie other than "The Confessions of Nat Turner" the title of Styron's book.
At the same time Wolper, through an agent, was negotiating with the white community in Southampton, Virginia, where the filming was to be done.
Some of the white community were descendents of individuals who had died during the attack, and they were able to get the film company to agree that the movie would portray their ancestors in a favorable light. Styron, by this time, had left the project, and shortly thereafter Twentieth Century Fox canceled the project citing financial reasons. When the novel first came out, the black novelist, James Baldwin, a friend of William Styron's, praised it. Styron, he said, "has begun the common history--ours.
Poussaint, M. See All Customer Reviews.
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USD Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Temporarily Out of Stock Online Please check back later for updated availability. Overview Kenneth S. Greenberg gathers a distinguished group of historians to offer provocative new insights into the most important slave rebellion in American history.
They explore Nat Turner's slave community, the place of women in his insurrection, and his religious visions. Greenberg notes the impossibility of ever knowing such basic facts as Nat Turner's real name, the nature of his physical appearance, and his place of burial. Louis Masur places Turner against the backdrop of the nation's sectional crisis, and Douglas Egerton puts his revolt in the context of rebellions across the Americas.