Drawing the Unspeakable
Drawing the Unspeakable
Kyle Baker’s Slave Narrative
Nat Turner, a comic book written by Kyle Baker, is about the life of African American slave Nat Turner and his infamous 1831 slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia. Aside from its incredibly violent story, the book seems to be, as critic Marc Singer suggests, an attempt by Baker to “jazz up slavery.” Baker draws on Thomas Gray’s 1831 The Confessions of Nat Turner, rather than the now considerable body of historical and creative work devoted to Turner and his raid, as the text of his book. This chapter offers a reading of Nat Turner to analyze Baker’s visual rendering of the fugitive slave narrative form through a strategically violent aesthetic that takes issue with Gray’s 1831 account. In particular, it examines how Baker reinvents the basic rhetorical premises of the slave narrative with Nat Turner. It also cites the example of Denmark Vesey and his failed insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, to demonstrate the legacy of the respectability/morality required by the nineteenth-century slave narratives.
Keywords: comic book, Kyle Baker, Nat Turner, slave insurrection, slavery, Thomas Gray, Confessions, Denmark Vesey, slave narratives
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