Abstract
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.
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