Abstract

The new book Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination by Celeste-Marie Bernier charts is the first full mapping of a black heroic tradition and asks us to reconsider the memory of six individuals in particular: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nathaniel Turner, Sengbe Pieh, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. This roundtable features five responses to the book. Robert Levine, Patricia Hills, Alan Rice, Eddie Chambers and Richard Newman use it as a jumping-off point to debate heroism, diasporic memory, the black Atlantic, and the relationship between art and activism. Responding to these commentaries, Bernier expands upon some of her book’s themes.

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