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"This book tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. The book centers on four black sailors, whose experiences with slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction. Through these sailors and their fictional avatars, Warren argues that a lost history of the politics of insurrection resurfaces. This history has been either largely ignored or subsumed under the generic political anxieties of the abolitionist movement and widespread fears of a large-scale slave revolt. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. This book is a call to consider, or reconsider, how the confluence of politics, language, and narrative are complicit in shaping the ways in which we think about race and violence. Using the backdrop of the ocean to highlight both the expansive imaginary and the perilous reality of undoing oppressive hierarchies through mutiny, Fire On the Water challenges scholars to consider how violence gets categorized as "revolutionary" or "aberrant.""-- "Lenora Warren tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction: Olaudah Equiano, Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinque, Madison Washington, and Washington Goode. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. Pairing well-known texts with lesser-known figures (Billy Budd and Washington Goode) and well-known figures with lesser-known texts (Denmark Vesey and the work of John Howison), this book reveals the richness of literary engagement with the politics of slave violence"-- Introduction -- 1. Witness to the Atrocities: Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Clarkson, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade -- 2. Denmark Vesey, John Howison, and Revolutionary Possibility -- 3. Joseph Cinque, The Amistad Mutiny and Revolutionary Whitewashing -- 4. The Black and White Sailor: Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor and the Case of Washington Goode -- Coda
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