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O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
—thomas wolfe (1929)
This book attempts to recover both a historical personage and his way of thinking (his mentalité) from tiny shards of evidence on which—in the absence of anything else—I have pressed as hard as I can, and as often as necessary, guided (both positively and negatively, but always with appreciation) by the labors of others who have been this way before me. Notwithstanding the almost complete lack of the kinds of material from which intellectual history is customarily written, I have come to think of this book as an attempt to create an intellectual history of Nat Turner. As important, the book is also an attempt to demonstrate what the creation of history means to me as an intellectual practice.
My abiding impression of Nat Turner is overwhelmingly one of a person unavailed by history, a person whose very archival evanescence renders him, quite involuntarily, an enigma, a signifier pushed and pulled toward an extraordinary and contradictory array of signifieds.1Close To underline just how tenuous the conditions of Turner’s historical existence are, how vulnerable he is to those who would seek him, I have chosen to begin with a prologue that examines the most notorious attempt to construct a knowable Nat Turner—William Styron’s best-selling 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner—and its reception.2Close Addressing Styron’s interpretive trajectory and the controversies to which it led, the prologue asks the question “What is the past?”
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