"A Nat Turner in Every Family": Exemplarity and Exceptionality in the Print Circulation of Slave Revolt

Abstract

Abstract:This article tracks the circulation of literary and visual representations of the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in order to explore how early nineteenth-century printing practices intersected with debates over slavery. I show that a woodblock engraving published alongside Samuel Warner's understudied narrative of the rebellion was repurposed to depict an entirely different uprising. And I use this recycling to suggest that the aesthetic and technological exigencies of antebellum print culture undermined the proslavery claim—widely repeated in texts like Thomas Gray's better-known Confessions of Nat Turner—that Turner was an exceptional figure whose actions were not exemplary of broader slave unrest. The image's generic style and inherent reproducibility made available a subversive antislavery reading of the revolt that exploited, rather than resisted, the homogenizing logics of race, capitalism, and print to project an insurrectionary black collective whose threatening potential existence demanded abolition. Uniting African American Studies and the history of the book, I attribute this ideological reversal not merely to these texts' form or content but also to their multimedia materiality. Ultimately, the article complicates assumptions about authorial, readerly, and textual agency and offers a way to overcome the limitations of liberal individualism as a framework for black liberation.