"A night already devoid of stars": Illuminating the Violent Darkness in Kyle Baker's "Nat Turner"

• Published in: American studies (Lawrence) 2019-01, Vol.58 (1), p.25-47
• Main Author: Murray, William
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; Antebellum period; Children; Comics; Discrimination; Dissent; Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895); Graphic novels; Gray, Thomas (1716-1771); Guilt; Postmodernism; Racism; Reading; Slavery; Systemic racism; Television miniseries; Turner, Nat (1800-1831); Violence; White people; Women
• ISSN: 0026-3079; 2153-6856; 2153-6856
• DOI: 10.1353/ams.2019.0011

According to 2016 data from the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of whites in the United States believe individual rather than institutional racism is the bigger problem when it comes to discrimination against African Americans.4 In other words, most whites believe the racial ills plaguing the nation are the result of a few bad actors, usually located somewhere else.5 Baker intervenes against this tendency to fixate on individual guilt or innocence. [...]Baker's interplay between text and image also illustrates an advantage of the graphic genre.9 As comics scholar Coulton Waugh explains, "The special feature of [the graphic novel or comic] is that it jumps at the reader picture side first-you see the situation" and "the writing is a side explanation which the mind picks up, often without being aware of the process. "21 Craig Fischer similarly determines that Baker's text is "incoherent," which "provokes dissent and response" from readers.22 Both authors, though, conclude their essays before fully explaining what we are to do with multiple Nat Turners or an incoherent narrative-beyond simply recognizing that Turner was a complicated man or that history contains multiple perspectives. [...]while Kunka and Fischer call attention to the moral ambiguity of Baker's novel and its post-modern emphasis on multiple truths, they seem less comfortable with the full implications of the text's focus on a bloody and violent revolt, in which women and children, along with all of the novel's central characters, die. [...]by associating the style that continues throughout the text with the sword and blood, Baker indicates his decision to face the era's violence head-on. [...]even before opening the book, readers are prepared to navigate between two extremes of history and to focus on the all-consuming violence that damages every aspect of antebellum America.