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Black Prometheus

By Jared Hickman

Black Prometheus

By Jared Hickman

0 - Default Title
Description
How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern, lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution--scientific, political, and spiritual--and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself ? The answer Black Prometheus gives is that certain features of the myth--its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology--made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus--whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel, Frankenstein, Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus-- is
a profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation and unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, and modernity and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique.
Product details
Edition:
illustrated
Number of Pages:
542
Release Date:
2016-10-26
Publication Date:
2016-10-01
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0190272589
ISBN13:
9780190272586
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
1071 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
36 cm
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