“‘With their Own Weapons’: The Method-Making/Destroying Work of Violence in the Gospel According to Nat Turner”

• In Event: The politics of anti-carceral rebellion

Abstract

Returning to the violence enacted at Southampton, Virginia in 1831, this paper argues that the theological provocations proffered by the Gospel according to Nat Turner illustrates a pedagogical valence from which an insurgent means of method-making/destroying emerges. The Church of Nat Turner returned the devil’s fire with the same weapons and symbols the whites thought would secure their domination. In thinking with the liturgical sermon of Nat Turner, Sylvia Wynter, and Zora Neale Hurston – and against the historiography that ensnares the work of slave revolts in particular, and violent black rebellion more generally, to the telos of perfecting liberal democracy – I offer here that the violence of the insurrectionary and murderous chorus is a praxis of pure means, an eschatological reversal with its ends external and indecipherable to the this-worldly-plane.

Author

• Michael J. Myers II, university of california, riverside