Hero or Villain: Nat Turner as a Cultural Symbol Today

Complied by: Abby Fassig-Fletcher
B.A.: African American Studies, minor in Women’s Studies, The University of Alabama (UA), 2015
M.A.: Women’s Studies, The University of Alabama, May 2017

Abstract

The film A Birth of a Nation (2016) has sparked great hype and interest around Nat Turner’s life and rebellion. While the film uses him as a cultural symbol, up for discussion, Nate Parker’s film was not the first to do so with Turner’s life. Nat Turner has lived on in various forms since his death in November of 1831 and his memory has worn many masks, but how is Nat Turner remembered today? Is Turner a hero and inspiration for us regarding race relations and a more just society? Or is Turner remembered as a villain, meant to scare in order to perpetuate the problems of racial oppression and to continuously hide the horrors of slavery? Or, is it not so simple as to decide between the two? Could opinions around Turner waver even for the same person or communities? The sources below offer a variety of interpretations of Nat Turner as a cultural symbol through academic and scholarly works, fiction, film, poetry, song, theater, and reads for young persons.  The hopes for this project is that readers will see Turner as a heroic figure and a site for reevaluating and repairing the troubled race relations that still exist in the U.S today.

Primary and Secondary Sources

General Overview
  • David F. Allmendinger Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
  • Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion: Including the 1831 “Confessions”, Chelmsford, MA: Courier Corporation, 2012.
  • Scot French. The rebellious slave: Nat Turner in American memory, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
  • Kenneth S. Greenberg, Nat Turner: a slave rebellion in history and memory, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Stephen B. Oates, The fires of jubilee: Nat Turner's fierce rebellion, New York: Harper & Row, 1990, c1975.
  • Thomas C. Parramore, 1978. Southampton County, Virginia, Charlottesville: Published for the Southampton County Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1978, 65-121, 223-225. 

The Rebellion
  • Patrick H. Breen, The land shall be deluged in blood: a new history of the Nat Turner Revolt, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015. 

Fear of Insurrection
  • Clement Eaton. Freedom of thought in the old South, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1940, Ch. 4. 

Ending Slavery
  • David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, (Ch. 5) 135-178.
  • Patrick Rael, Eighty-eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865, Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2015, 163-171. 

Participation in the Age of Revolution
  • John Mac Kilgore, "Nat Turner and the Work of Enthusiasm", PMLA: Publications of The Modern Language Association Of America 130, no. 5 (October 2015): MLA International Bibliography, 1347-1362. 

1960s and the Civil Rights Movement
  • Albert E. Stone, The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. 

Fiction, Fictional Criticism and Treatment
  • Danielle Christmas, "The Plantation-Auschwitz tradition: forced labor and free markets in the novels of William Styron", Twentieth Century Literature no. 1 (2015): 1.
  • John Henrik Clarke, and Nat Turner, William Styron's Nat Turner: ten black writers respond, Boston: Beacon Press, c1968. 
  • Mary Kemp Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.
  • Mary Kemp Davis, "William Styron's Nat Turner as an Archetypal Hero", The Southern Literary Journal 28, no. 1 (1995): 67-84. 
  • Anthony Johnson, The Miseducation of Nat Turner, Montgomery, AL: E-BookTime, LLC, 2006.
  • D.W. Ross, "William Styron, James Baldwin, and The Confessions of Nat Turner: The dream of a common history", CEA Critic 74, no. 2-3 (2012): 88-99. 
  • William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Novel, New York: Random House, 1967.
 
Nat Turner in the Classroom/ Jim Crow
  • Jarvis R. Givens, "“He was, undoubtedly, a wonderful character”: Black Teachers’ Representations of Nat Turner during Jim Crow", Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture & Society 18, no. 2-4 (April 2016): 215-234. 

Cinema and Media
  • Charles Burnett, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, San Francisco: Kanopy Streaming, 2015. 
  • Steve Ryfle, "Nat Turner's Hollywood Rebellion", Cineaste 42, no. 1 (Winter 2016): Master FILE Premier, 31-33.
 
Plays and Theater
  • Nathan Alan Davis, “Nat Turner in Jerusalem”, 2016. 

Music
  • Jasiri X, “New Nat Turner”, Album: Black Liberation Theology: Old and New Testaments, Producer Religion, 2015. [Explicit Content]
  • Kendrick Lamar, “Mortal Man”, Album: To Pimp a Butterfly, Top Dawg Entertainment, 2015. [Explicit Content]
  • Lecrae, “Freedom”, Album: Church Clothes 3, S1, 2016. [Explicit Content] 

Poetry
  • Alicia A., Thunder Bay, ZZ, “My Name is Nat Turner”, Teen Ink, 2008.
  • Robert Hayden, “The Ballad of Nat Turner”, Collected Poems, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1985. 

For Young Readers
  • Terry Bisson, and Nathan Irvin Huggins, Nat Turner, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, c1988.
  • Michael Burgan, et al, Nat Turner's slave rebellion, Mankato, Minn.: Capstone Press, c2006. 

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