Overview

How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution--scientific, political, and spiritual--and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself ? The answer Black Prometheus gives is that certain features of the myth--its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology--made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus--whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel, Frankenstein, Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus-- isa profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation and unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, and modernity and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique.

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9780190077792

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Reviews

Black Prometheus is an ambitious and learned study. Arcing from Aeschylus to the Shelleys, from Banneker to Byron and Douglass to DuBois, Jared Hickman discloses our finite globe as the theater of titanic * and fundamentally racial * Setting a new standard for postsecular scholarship, Black Prometheus rewrites modernity's global cosmology by focusing on Atlantic slavery in the misnamed New World. Here, race-making is theological warfare and the myths that service it are as powerful as scripture. Part philosophy, part literary criticism, part anti-racist critique, Black Prometheus dismantles the secularization thesis of modernity to devastating effect. It is impossible to imagine how Jared Hickman could have written a better book. * Robyn Wiegman, Duke University * Black Prometheus is an exhilarating account of modernity as neither secular nor religious but comprised of a series of competing, fragile, and often flawed experiments in being human. In tending to the globalizing and racializing effects of these cosmic wagers in history and in literature, Jared Hickman writes with joyous erudition across an impressive range of debates, texts, and events. In doing so, Hickman offers nothing less than a counter-myth to the 'bad feedback loop' of European Christianity and its momentous melange of faith and reason, immanent frames and transcendental claims, enchained bodies and wills to cognitive autonomy. * John Modern, Franklin & Marshall College * In this meticulous treatment, the well-known story of Prometheus becomes the basis for an extensive allegorical and historical investigation into the transatlantic slave trade. Hickman (English, Johns Hopkins Univ.) shrewdly chooses the metaphor, which undergirds the self-referential mythology of European expansionism, subverting it to provide a surprisingly different outlook when moved from identification with the oppressors to identification with the oppressed. ... the idea itself is interesting and fresh ... He shines in matters of literary interpretation and cultural resonance ... The concluding part (of four), A Literary History of Slave Rebellion, is inspired ... Of most value to scholars of literary theory. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * D. E. Wigner, CHOICE * Black Prometheus is an ambitious and learned study. Arcing from Aeschylus to the Shelleys, from Banneker to Byron and Douglass to DuBois, Jared Hickman discloses our finite globe as the theater of titanic * and fundamentally racial * Setting a new standard for postsecular scholarship, Black Prometheus rewrites modernity's global cosmology by focusing on Atlantic slavery in the misnamed New World. Here, race-making is theological warfare and the myths that service it are as powerful as scripture. Part philosophy, part literary criticism, part anti-racist critique, Black Prometheus dismantles the secularization thesis of modernity to devastating effect. It is impossible to imagine how Jared Hickman could have written a better book. * Robyn Wiegman, Duke University * Black Prometheus is an exhilarating account of modernity as neither secular nor religious but comprised of a series of competing, fragile, and often flawed experiments in being human. In tending to the globalizing and racializing effects of these cosmic wagers in history and in literature, Jared Hickman writes with joyous erudition across an impressive range of debates, texts, and events. In doing so, Hickman offers nothing less than a counter-myth to the 'bad feedback loop' of European Christianity and its momentous melange of faith and reason, immanent frames and transcendental claims, enchained bodies and wills to cognitive autonomy. * John Modern, Franklin & Marshall College * In this meticulous treatment, the well-known story of Prometheus becomes the basis for an extensive allegorical and historical investigation into the transatlantic slave trade. Hickman (English, Johns Hopkins Univ.) shrewdly chooses the metaphor, which undergirds the self-referential mythology of European expansionism, subverting it to provide a surprisingly different outlook when moved from identification with the oppressors to identification with the oppressed. ... the idea itself is interesting and fresh ... He shines in matters of literary interpretation and cultural resonance ... The concluding part (of four), A Literary History of Slave Rebellion, is inspired ... Of most value to scholars of literary theory. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * D. E. Wigner, CHOICE * A massively erudite and elegantly written book, Anxieties of Experience takes its readers on a hemispheric journey through modern times, leading up to the present. Comparing and contrasting the literatures of North and South America is ultimately, for Lawrence, a means of examining whether a bookish life is a life lived to the fullest. With its sustained line of inquiry across corpora, the volume makes a valuable contribution to several fields of study-while also introducing general readers to hemispheric studies. * Hector Hoyos, Stanford University, author of Beyond Bolano: The Global Latin American Novel * Anxieties of Experience offers an exceptionally bold and mind-expanding reconnaissance of the counterpoint and interweave between distinctive traditions of U. S. and Latin American literary thought and practice over the past two centuries. Anyone seriously interested in the past, the present, and the likely future of 'hemispheric literature' will want to read this book from start to finish. * Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, author of The Dream of the Great American Novel * An exciting, lucid reframing of the interactions between North American and Latin American literatures over the course of the past two centuries, Anxieties of Experience shows the critical and conceptual gains to be made from rethinking the hemispheric through the lens of world literature. Moving nimbly between close analysis and distant views to map the shifting, dialogic, dialectical relation between literatures north and south, the book's central concern and achievement is to reboot and reorient hemispheric literary studies; stowed-away in its coda is a thrilling supplement, a mapping of an entirely new scene of the contemporary. Lawrence's is a witty, incisive, eloquent new voice in literary and cultural criticism. * Michelle Clayton, Brown University, Poetry in Pieces: Cesar Vallejo and Lyric Modernity *

Author Information

Jared Hickman is Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University.

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