The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot Robert Hawkins (bio) The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture grégory pierrot University of Georgia Press, 2019 264 pp. HBO's 2019 series Watchmen deservedly garnered attention for its treatment of the history of racial violence in the United States. Opening with gripping scenes of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, Watchmen explored intergenerational trauma, grappled with the raced and gendered nature of superhero stories, and, via the character of black vigilante Hooded Justice, encouraged viewers to empathize with black rage. Yet, for a narrative rooted in collective loss, a story that introduced the topic of reparations against a backdrop of lingering racial conflict, the political agendas of Tulsa's broader black community were virtually indiscernible. With The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture, Grégory Pierrot offers an explanation for this absence: figures similar to Hooded Justice, he contends, have long served to dismiss black collective agency. Pierrot's study is a sweeping exploration of textual incarnations of black avengers, fictionalized figures whom generations of writers have imagined rising from the masses to deliver retributive violence on the heads of their [End Page 877] oppressors. Though scholars have studied these characters before, largely within the bounds of national literatures, The Black Avenger builds on previous work to tell what the author describes as the "history of an essential trope of Atlantic modernity" (9). His aim is to reveal the persistent political purposes of black avenger narratives; despite the frequent association of black avengers with resistance to white supremacy—the book explicitly invokes responses in this vein to the film Django Unchained (2012)—Pierrot contends that the trope has served a very different agenda (7–9). Rather than a challenge to systemic black subjugation, he argues that the figure "always simultaneously contributed to maintain this system by promoting extraordinary, individual black heroism to the detriment of collective agency" (10). The legend of the exceptional black avenger, revised and adapted over centuries to suit changing national and racial contexts, functioned to narratively corral and exterminate any vision of a viable, autonomous black polity. The scope of The Black Avenger is expansive, encompassing the late seventeenth through early twentieth centuries and spanning the Atlantic to draw together literary, historical, and diplomatic writings from Great Britain, France, the United States, and Haiti. Beginning with Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1688), Pierrot dissects the anatomy of this vengeful black messiah: he is of royal or aristocratic lineage, is enslaved through trickery, is schooled in European culture, and exacts revenge primarily in response to personal rather than collective injuries—often in the form of the rape or abduction of his spouse. But above all, his insurrection invariably fails because he is the exception to the ostensible rule of black inferiority and incapacity for mass politics. Though molded to specific circumstances, the general composition of avenger narratives remained, in Pierrot's view, remarkably consistent through iterations in eighteenth-century England and France, the Haitian Revolution, and the United States of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In all of these adaptations Pierrot interprets the black avenger as a trope that writers deployed to delineate boundaries of national belonging. In the hands of British, French, Haitian, and US American authors, the figure became "either a model or a foil to design national visions and project them into the world," usually erasing the politics of the black masses in the process (14). To elucidate the role of avenger narratives in demarcating various bodies politic, Pierrot enlists Benedict Anderson's conception of the nation as an [End Page 878] "imagined political community" predicated on the limitation of membership and the cultivation of a sense of commonality among members that transcends even profound differences of station (Anderson, Imagined Communities [1983; 2nd ed., Verso, 1991], 6–7). In Pierrot's analysis, black avengers emerged as crucial components for such imagining as European nations increasingly defined themselves in racial terms. Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and its various adaptations, for example, drew together aspects of earlier black stage characters to create a protagonist uniquely suited to binding Englishness to whiteness. The novella's ostensibly sympathetic portrayal offered English readers at the time of the...