The Reactionary Romance of American Slave Revolt: Scripting the Unthinkable in the Archive of the 1811 German Coast Uprising

Abstract:Enslavers and their allies wrote in terrified, apocalyptic terms about slave revolts, particularly in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US. This essay suggests that by consistently framing slave revolt in these ways, proslavery white Americans constructed and reproduced a dominant, normative narrative about the meaning of Black self-determination, which this essay calls a "reactionary romance." This "romance" deemed Black self-determination an apocalypse-signaling antagonist against which the privileged body politic must continually and violently struggle in order to reproduce itself. It perversely drew on the rebellious actions of Black people as a way to enclose the prospect of Black freedom in a shroud of terror, rendering the suppression of Black self-determination an esteemed civic duty for the American citizen. This essay critically and historically analyzes this romance as it functions in archival documentation of the 1811 German Coast Uprising in southeastern Louisiana, the largest slave revolt in US history. The way that Louisiana planters told the story of the 1811 Uprising weaponized the reactionary romance to compel an expanding American empire (and its citizens) to protect and expand both the social and material structures of plantation slavery and the limits on moral and political imagination that attended these structures.