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“Hearing Nat Turner”: Within the 1831 Slave Rebellion

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Tomlins, Christopher. In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2021

Holly Brewer
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Abstract

In this chef d’oeuvre, Tomlins offers a heuristic for how to extract the words, ideas, and actions of Nat Turner, the Black, enslaved man who led the most important slave rebellion in American history. Tomlins makes such an effort from within a cluster of different kinds of sources, each one a small window on the past, none of which Turner personally wrote. How to see beyond these particularly distorted glass windows on the past is not obvious. Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner provides a key not only to Turner, and to his powerful sense of how to fracture the fragile legitimacy of the southern slaveholding elite, but also a metaphysics of interpretive strategy that can serve as a theoretical model.

Type
Review Symposium on Christopher Tomlins’s In the Matter of Nat Turner
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 910 - 916
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation.

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References

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