“Good Wings”: Orality, Literacy, and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder

This reading of Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, which portrays Gabriel Prosser's 1800 rebellion, argues that the novel is both a tribute to the courage and to the largely oral culture of enslaved persons. The text is also a study of the broader spectrum of orality and literacy. Viewing oral...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Spectrum (Bloomington, Ind. : 2012) Ind. : 2012), 2021-10, Vol.9 (1-2), p.55-71
Main Author: Thompson, Joseph Downing
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American history
Black history
Black people
Bravery
Community colleges
Consciousness
Culture
Education
Fiction
Gabriel (Gabriel Prosser) (1776?-1800)
Literacy
Novels
Oral tradition
Political consciousness
Slavery
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This reading of Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, which portrays Gabriel Prosser's 1800 rebellion, argues that the novel is both a tribute to the courage and to the largely oral culture of enslaved persons. The text is also a study of the broader spectrum of orality and literacy. Viewing orality and literacy not in a dichotomous but rather in a symbiotic relationship, Black Thunder depicts the ways that these modes of communication interact to foment political consciousness and revolution. Long before scholarly engagement with print culture studies, Bontemps's fiction theorized the relationship between orality, literacy, power, and the struggle for Black liberation.
ISSN:2162-3244
2162-3252
2162-3252
DOI:10.2979/spectrum.9.1_2.05