The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (review)

Consisting of nine chapters, Adélékè Adéèkó's The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature expounds on the renarrativization of historical slave rebellions in African, American, and Caribbean literary and cultural praxes. Adéèkó's argument is based on the assumption that the dehumanizing dynamics of slavery are inseparable from the slave's rebellious striving for freedom. His book opens with the problematization of the flawed Eurocentric hermeneutical statements of black intellectualism about modern black identity. Adéèkó locates his core argumentative scale outside of the theoretical paradigms offered by two of the most respected and intellectually-engaging black scholars, Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe, because of their inscription of black modernity within the dominant narratives of slavery and colonialism, which occludes blacks' pre-modern experiences and historicity and associates their origins with negativity and depersonalization. Although critics mostly inveighed against Gilroy's conceptualization of the Black Atlantic as a purely modern phenomenon, they failed to articulate his theoretical limitation through the prism of Hegelian dialectics and to redeploy this critical mode for the reconstruction of the slave's subjectivity. The interest of the book lies in its counterhegemonic rhetoric to the monolithically-constructed master-slave dynamics and in its affirmation of the slave's struggle and will to freedom. Weaving his redefinition rhetoric of slave rebellions into chronologically-organized chapters, Adéèkó has expanded the literary and historical scope of the narratives of slave rebellions produced hitherto with respect to such individual geographical locations as America or Brazil.

One of the central issues in the book revolves around the complexity and difficulty of representing the subjectivity of black subalterns in different historical settings. In the antebellum period, African-American novelists did not have vast narrative options to capture the liberationist scope of slave rebels by virtue of the demands of abolitionist readers. Moreover, the emergence of a new class of "masters" among ex-slaves, who gained the socioeconomic privileges of Emancipation, stymies the basic rationale of anti-slavery struggles, because of the differential interests opposing black antebellum slaves and "white" post-emancipation blacks. This shows the extent to which the meaning of racially-motivated struggles for freedom and justice under slavery becomes reshaped by class related factors, which question the viability of the insurrectionist path to freedom. In contemporary critical discourses, race and class are mostly viewed as intertwined categories. Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth offers a sound exemplification of this phenomenon. Placing a premium on the reconstitution of the subjectivity of the slave, Adéèkó relegates the importance of class factors to the racial legitimization of rebellion for freedom.

Through various historical rebellious slaves, embodied in the character of Nat Turner and Toussaint L'Ouverture, the counter-violence of the slave is situated within the survivalist framework against "social death" and for restorative dignity. In these examples, the failed slave rebellions are ancillary to the unerring exempla of heroism and black resistance to enslavement embedded in them. Accordingly, Adéèkó extends the meaning and significance of slave rebellions beyond the scope of slavery to the twentieth-century turbulent manifestations of colonialism, capitalism, and racism with a view to sketching spiritual and psychological connections between the oppressed.

Adéèkó's study does justice to the memory of the slave rebels by disinterring their subjectivity, particularizing their cultural and spiritual survivalist modes outside of the masters' epistemological reach, and recuperating their erased voices in oral as well as written historical records, through a meticulous re-presentation of their heroic deeds. The interpretation and celebration of such heroic deeds is articulated through theories of history that validate the usability and authoritativeness of the slave's past over both present and future sociohistorical determinisms and through folk-induced cathartic acts of survival that define the authenticity of black aesthetics.

Adélékè Adéèkó's The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature has instilled an invigorating dynamic to the scholarship on slave rebellions by magnifying the slaves' relentless battle...