Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery by Jared Hickman (review)

Jared Hickman has found an ingenious method to juxtapose British Romantic writers with Black Atlantic activists and authors engaged in the struggle against slavery. The myth of Prometheus, Hickman argues, offers at bare minimum a heuristic device to take measure of Romantic rebellion against tyranny on either side of the Atlantic. For Prometheus, stealer of the fire of the Gods, was emplotted differentially in a variety of genres from poetry, fiction, and drama to philosophy, natural science, and intellectual history from the time of Columbus's first voyages through the Age of Revolutions and up until at least the American Civil War (for this is roughly the span of Hickman's study). In the Euro-Christian tradition that predated the invasion of the Americas, Prometheus, the Titan, could be called upon to represent the necessary submission of the ancient Gods to the trinitarian unity of Christ. In accepting his punishment, the everlasting suffering imposed by Zeus, the bound Prometheus was a figure of the Christian supersession of the Mosaic law, and his ultimate unbinding was received as a promise of the Second Coming. The encounter between Euro-Christianity and the many alternative cosmologies of the Americas, Hickman argues, encouraged a reconsideration of Prometheus because of the meta-cosmic competition for supremacy it staged. Instead of identifying with the Christian submission to an absolute power, Euro-Christian invaders could be cast as the bearer of the Absolute themselves, their God Almighty regnant over the lesser deities embraced by the Amerindian other. This meta-theological contest, Hickman writes, gave rise to the modern idea of race, for race "is what is produced when the various parties of global cultural encounter strive to make ultimate sense of their and others' respective places within an unfolding cosmic reality that now encompasses them all" (48).

Note must be made here of Hickman's provocation that his model is superior to intellectual histories wherein race is a product of secularization and the triumph of empiricism in the sciences. Rejecting the disenchantment of the globe, Hickman explains that the secularization thesis misses how "Euro-Christians can be seen as in actuality making a bid for divinization." Race then is the very stuff of modernity. "Modernity is structured not by the agon between God and Man but by the agon between apotheosized Euro-Christian and anathematized non-Euro-Christian heathen" (61). The ascendancy of the Euro-Christian invader to the structural position of the Olympian Zeus, however, left room for the Amerindian and African other to reoccupy that of the rebellious Prometheus, hungry to topple the Absolutist will to power of the oppressive white conquerors, while retaining the residual cosmological force of their own enchained gods. And then there is the Romantic appropriation of Prometheus of Percy and Mary Shelley to consider, too. So yes, Hickman presents us with quite a mouthful to chew, ranging from descriptions of first encounters and warfare to Hans Blumenberg's Paradigms for a Metaphorology (Cornell, 2010) and all of this in chapter one. Remarkably, however breezy the foregoing may seem, Hickman finds Prometheus everywhere in the literature of the mid-18^th to the mid-19^th centuries. These give structure to the meat of the book beginning in chapter two, "The Terms of Prometheus's Liberation: Romanticism, Slavery, and the Titan's Triumph," and continuing through three more lively parts encompassing six additional chapters, Part II entitled "Prometheus of Africa," Part III, "Prometheus of Caucasus," and Part IV, "A Literary History of Slave Rebellion."

I cannot do justice to the multilayered close readings that Hickman offers; this is a book that demands to be experienced. Within, readers will find provocative rereadings of Frederick Douglass, Mary and Percy Shelley, Victor Hugo, and Herman Melville alongside refreshing and for many, I suspect, introductory analyses of Benjamin Banneker, Imam Shamil, and Avellaneda y Arteaga. At stake in these rich explorations are the...