Nat Turner's spirit still roams the US, to paraphrase Sterling Brown's poem “Remembering Nat Turner” (1939).Footnote ¹ It does so through depictions of the iconic slave rebel such as Sharon Ewell Foster's recent Christian novel series The Resurrection of Nat Turner (2011–12). Foster's novels consciously revise much of Nat Turner's afterlife, the legacy of cultural productions and discourses that have continually made and remade his image in popular culture. Although he has been portrayed as a patriot–martyr during the Civil War, a rallying figure for black radicalism in the 1930s, and variously as a religious fanatic or Black Power revolutionary in the 1960s, little is known about the man's life before 1831. That year, this slave preacher led an insurrection in Southampton, VA, claiming that God had sent him apocalyptic visions urging him to wage war against slavery. He and a handful of conspirators began traveling by night between houses in their neighborhood, freeing slaves and killing whites in their sleep. By the time that Nat Turner's growing band was stopped by a militia, the insurgents had killed approximately sixty whites. Nat Turner himself would escape arrest for two more months before being captured, dubbed a religious fanatic, tried, and executed. The uprising, meanwhile, had made national headlines and precipitated a wave of white insurrection anxiety and repressive slave codes.Footnote ² Foster supplements the gaps in Nat Turner's personal history and rewrites his accepted story. For example, she reimagines an Afrocentric Nat Turner, a humble, religious son of Ethiopian Christians who remembers and remains deeply in love with his African heritage. But in order to safeguard Foster's celebration of the self-identified prophet in all of his black positivity, The Resurrection of Nat Turner must also countenance the anxieties of a post-9/11 US. After Foster's Nat Turner and his fellow slaves spill the first blood of their insurrection, the slave-preacher-turned-freedom-fighter panics. Badly shaken by killing his owners, Nat Turner “closed himself to what he had seen and done” so that he might continue his war.Footnote ³ At this moment of disorienting violence, the text scrambles to reassure readers of the insurgents' righteousness by conspicuously dubbing them “Knights Templar executing a plan of battle.”Footnote ⁴

Here Foster deploys Christianity – specifically referencing the “Knights Templar,” historical Christian crusaders against Muslim peoples – as shorthand for Nat Turner's moral rightness. Having portrayed Islam as a sinister presence earlier in the story, the text now uses a Christian–Islam comparison to maintain readers' support for the bloody insurrection. Much of the series actually focusses on Nat Turner's Ethiopian Christian mother, Nikahywot, whose enslavement in Ethiopia is precipitated by a Muslim raid on her village: she and her family “fled … from the ones who said they were followers of Islam, the new religion, from the schemers who twisted the words of the prophet Muhammed for profit.”Footnote ⁵ Although the identities of her kidnappers remain unknown, the character's enslavement only occurs through her encounter with Islam.Footnote ⁶ The comparison of Nat Turner's band of rebels to Christian crusaders belies an impulse to absolutely distinguish his “Knights Templar” from the “schemers” of Islam by using the same Christian crusader rhetoric that, since 11 September 2001, has been incorporated into a clash-of-civilizations discourse that justifies US imperialism in the Middle East as a response to an “Islamist” threat to “the West.”Footnote ⁷

By deploying the racialized opposition of Christian–Muslim in support of this icon of black militancy, Foster complicates the way we should read Nat Turner after 9/11. Her novels should prompt critics to reconsider the cultural work that the sign “Nat Turner” now performs. As a controversial, contested black icon, Nat Turner also represents a site in which the very meaning of US blackness becomes contested and defined. Parsing his most recent cultural afterlife helps reveal that since 9/11 and the global War on Terror, race has been remade. By conflating blackness with the Islamophobic specter of the “terrorist” in recent years, the national (and local) security state's white imagination has birthed a truly post-9/11 racial formation. But anxiety over the stability of racial signs manifests in other recent Nat Turner texts besides Foster's novels. Eisner, Harvey, and Glyph award winner Kyle Baker offers the most salient and increasingly studied depiction of “Prophet Nat” in decades. Along with Mat Johnson's Incognegro (2008), Baker's comic Nat Turner (2005–7) has become a canonical example of African American literature in comics. And like Foster's novel series, Baker's comic reactively asserts the slave rebel's iconic image as inviolate: the comic visually redeploys Nat Turner's own Christological self-troping in The Confessions of Nat Turner of 1831. It doubles-down, so to speak, on his original rhetorical strategy in order to inoculate his legacy against comparisons with our own contemporary, racially coded image of religious zealotry: the “terrorist.”Footnote ⁸

The global War on Terror has rendered unstable the distinction between icon and terrorist, prophet and fanatic. Tentatively, scholars have begun drawing connections between Nat Turner and the nation's encounter with religio-political terrorism since September 11th. Bertrand Wyatt-Brown places the slave rebel in conversation with 9/11 when he praises Charles Burnett's 2002 documentary about the competing interpretations of Nat Turner, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. Wyatt-Brown writes, “In light of current dread of terrorist assaults, [Burnett's film] boldly takes on special meaning.”Footnote ⁹ Likewise, in a challenging 2008 essay titled “The Confessions of Nat Turner: Memoir of a Martyr or Testament of a Terrorist?”, William Andrews asks us to read the historical Confessions “in light of the late-twentieth-century rise of religious terrorism” in order to see what such a cultural formation might tell us about Nat Turner, and to see what he might tell us back about our own time.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, Andrews goes so far as to posit the rebellious slave as a “proto-religious terrorist.”Footnote ¹¹ Andrews acknowledges that a comparison between this iconic black figure and the events of 9/11 appears incendiary, but he insists that

My intention in this essay, like Andrews's, is to read Nat Turner via 9/11. Unlike Andrews, however, I want to take a particular term within the complex of 9/11-era discourses – namely the figure of the “terrorist” – and position it in relation to the black icon's textual afterlife rather than his historical person. Doing so both updates the ongoing story of Nat Turner as an active cultural presence and helps us to make sense of a salient feature of our contemporary racial landscape: the conflation of Islamophobia and anti-black racism.

The image of the “terrorist” that emerges after the September 11th hijackings is a composite of competing discourses. It is at once an imagined anti-American insurgent, Muslim extremist, and raced other. The figure is a fantasy, of course, what we now call an Islamophobic one. “Islamophobia,” however, proves an inapt description since the concept often fissures between religion and race, subsuming a diversity of racial identities regardless of religio-cultural identification. Rather, Islamophobia has become a nativist ideological formation of white supremacy that antagonizes not only Muslims but also people of color designated “foreign,” especially brown-skinned people and people of Middle Eastern, Central and South Asian, and North African descent. Slurred as “looking like terrorists,” they have become highly salient targets in the post-9/11 era's global War on Terror. Yet in the white imagination of the US, the racial signification of the “terrorist” becomes further unstable as our Islamophobia draws inspiration and occasion from, or often transforms into, anti-black racism.Footnote ¹³

Perhaps no one more memorably expresses the articulation of one form of oppression to the other than James Baldwin. When discussing black nationalism, the Nation of Islam, and Elijah Muhammad in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin allegorizes the relationship between blackness and Islam: “God, going north, and rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of power, and on the dark side of Heaven, had become – for all practical purposes, anyway – black.”Footnote ¹⁴ Here Baldwin points to the historical antecedent for the racial formation I am positing. However, for a uniquely post-9/11 rendering of the way Islam becomes racially coded as black, and vice versa, one needs to look no further than the controversial New Yorker cover of 21 July 2008. “The Politics of Fear” by Barry Blitt depicts then-presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed in a turban and shalwar kameez standing in the Oval Office; Michelle Obama is rendered like Angela Davis and wearing the garb of a stereotyped Black Power militant. She and her husband perform the so-called “terrorist fist-bump” that conservative pundits fixated on during the 2008 election. In the background, a portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs over the fireplace, in which a US flag burns.Footnote ¹⁵ Whether read as satire or played straight, the New Yorker cartoon aptly represents the growing union of and undecidability between two racial identities in the contemporary white imagination. Perhaps it was because the cartoon lays bare the marriage of blackness with the “terrorist” by way of the Obamas' own marriage that the image initially drew such condemnation.

I want to use Islamophobia in Foster's novels as a way to begin reading Kyle Baker's Nat Turner. To be sure, Islamophobia never manifests in Baker the way it does in Foster, whether on the surface or at a depth. Rather, the fraught relationship between Islamophobia and antiblackness that I have briefly outlined constitutes the cultural ground for any post-9/11 representation of the iconic slave rebel given that he lies at the intersection of racial and religious militancies.Footnote ¹⁶ Beginning with Foster's novels as I have done reveals the ways in which memorializing iconography can operate in this register of cross-racialization. Thus they provide critics with a productive reading of the representational strategies of other Nat Turner texts as well as of memory studies writ large.

Although others have celebrated Nat Turner as an icon in the past, Baker's depiction is perhaps unique in so thoroughly inhabiting the same Christological terms that he used in 1831. The comic's visual–verbal logic redeploys Nat Turner's own rhetorical strategy in order to short-circuit associations of the rebel preacher – and his blackness – with the anathematized specter of the “terrorist.” Like Foster's absolutist assertion of difference between the slave “crusaders” and Muslims, what I term Christological iconography functions in Baker's comic both to preempt Nat Turner's critics by aligning him with a privileged cultural category and to define his blackness against their criticism. By Christological iconography, I simply mean those representational strategies that visually render Nat Turner as Christ-like. In the historical Confessions of Nat Turner, the confessor himself frames his actions according to soteriological and apocalyptic Christian tropes, an interpretive schema that would make his “work of death” intelligible and justifiable to his nineteenth-century contemporaries.Footnote ¹⁷ Although less radical today, the redeployed Christological troping still performs a similar cultural work for contemporary audiences. What remains the same is that both depictions of Nat Turner attempt to marginalize readings of the man as a religious “enthusiast,” as his contemporaries called him, by identifying him with Christ himself. But the determinant difference lies in the 2005 comic's post-9/11 context. The image of Nat Turner-as-Christ now erases that of Turner-as-“terrorist,” the Islamophobic, raced category that also haunts Sharon Ewell Foster's more recent depiction. Baker leaves, then, no room for imputations of religio-political “terror,” our contemporary version of nineteenth-century “enthusiasm.”

Because scholarship on Nat Turner has so focussed on his competing depictions in the 1960s and 1970s, a time when the white southern novelist William Styron's portrayal of the rebel as a sexually repressed fanatic provoked a vociferous response from black cultural nationalists, no attention has been paid to the contemporary significance of Nat Turner himself, to his still unfolding afterlife. By theorizing the collective meaning of his most recent iterations, then, I not only offer a new interpretation of the black icon; I also expand his cultural archive, our record of his representations and remembrances in popular culture.Footnote ¹⁸

Serialized from 2005 to 2007, Kyle Baker's comic Nat Turner constitutes not only the first forthright depiction of the Nat Turner story since 9/11 (it is a retelling rather than, say, a documentary like Charles Burnett's 2002 film), but also his most significant cultural appearance since Styron's much-contested 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and John Henrik Clarke's riposte, Ten Black Writers Respond (1968). With Nat Turner, Baker retells the story of the iconic slave insurrectionist through a mostly wordless, black-white-and-gray comic. When Baker does utilize written text, typically for the purposes of narration, he draws primarily from the historical record on slavery: he excerpts most of the text from the sections of The Confessions of Nat Turner of 1831 that are written in Nat Turner's voice, although one of Baker's scenes utilizes the voice of the white amanuensis of the Confessions, while another scene utilizes a passage from Theodore Canot's Adventures of an African Slaver. However, historical text is not incorporated within the illustrated narrative itself through, for example, word or thought bubbles, but rather it remains in the comic's gutters.Footnote ¹⁹ Text and image in the comic are typically set against one another in such a way as to create a double narrative that begins in Africa before Nat Turner's birth and ends approximately at his execution in Southampton. At times Canot's text or that of The Confessions only serves as exposition for Baker's images. At others, his images supplement the historical texts with a more intimate look at the relationships and sufferings of black people than history has usually allowed. At still other moments, the tension between image and text, between slave experience and dominant history, becomes so stark as to create an ironic contrast.

Baker claims that his own self-education served as impetus for the project. In the preface to the Abrams edition, the black writer–artist explains, “I often choose to write books on subjects I wish to know more about. I wanted to know how a person nobody wanted to talk about could be arguably one of the most important men in American history.”Footnote ²⁰ Baker avows that his is a revisionist depiction,Footnote ²¹ one inspired by Malcolm X's telling of “the slave preacher Nat Turner, who put the fear of God into the white slavemaster” and whose “example is said to have inspired John Brown.”Footnote ²² Baker aims for his comic, which was eventually published by Abrams with an eye toward educating students, to break what he sees as the decades-long silence about the man.Footnote ²³ His intention to revise the historical record in the interest of black positivityFootnote ²⁴ should frame any approach to his comic. Thus I contend that Baker leaves us with a version of Nat Turner that is, like Foster's, celebratory, but a celebration accomplished by way of the comic's formal irony.Footnote ²⁵

Celebrating the black insurgent would not be possible, however, if the comic itself encouraged readers to draw connections between Nat Turner's struggle and contemporary instances of religio-political violence. But by telling Nat Turner using a diversity of artistic styles, Baker is able to deploy particular aesthetics at key narrative moments in order to shape reader interpretation. Of course, Baker's aesthetic across his oeuvre is eclectic. Comics such as The Bakers (2006) or Plastic Man (2004–6) are illustrated in a ludic cartoon mode, while comics such as Special Forces (2007–9) or “Hawkman” in Wednesday Comics (2009) employ a highly stylized aesthetic with pulp references. In Nat Turner, Baker uses this stylistic promiscuity to the fullest effect. Multiple visual styles track across the comic, such as Baker's use of photo-realistic houses, weapons, and a printing press for the purpose of shifting scenes, particularly in “Freedom.” No better example illustrates this type of polystylism than Will's last stand at the climax of the insurrection. Will's highly stylized physique and the hyper-violence of his final battle with the white militiamen spectacularize the revolt. Whereas Will is initially depicted using deep charcoal shading and crosshatching suggestive of realistic human form, emotional depth, and Will's concealed hatred for whites, in the final confrontation of the revolt he has exploded into full view with sharp, clean lines. His limbs now bulge out of all proportion to the rest of his body as he decapitates whites with a single swing of his axe and clutches severed arms while gore and bits of clothing spray around him.Footnote ²⁶ The result is the “compelling graphics,” “action and suspense,” and “superhuman abilities” that Baker sought to highlight in the Nat Turner story.Footnote ²⁷ By deploying a style reminiscent of superhero comics, Baker brings forth what he sees as the superheroic in militant slave resistance. As I will further discuss below, the sequence that portrays Nat Turner's execution also deploys a purposeful style, this time to signify reverence, holiness, and a degree of realistic physicality as components of a Christological iconography.

The ironic relationship between Baker's art and the text of The Confessions of Nat Turner bears significantly on the problem of Nat Turner's post-9/11 afterlife. Most of our knowledge of the man and his rising has come from this historical document, now a canonical work of African American literature. Most importantly, the text describes Nat Turner's alleged motivation: inspired by visions from the “Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days” to “take [Christ's yoke] on and fight against the Serpent,” “Prophet Nat” gathered a band of fellow slaves to attack local whites and strike for freedom as part of “the great day of judgment.”Footnote ²⁸ According to Eric Sundquist, the literary significance of The Confessions lies in its representativeness as “pathway from the world of colonial jeremiad to that of secular revolution,” as one among many “acts of resistance [that] have meant far more to readers of the day and generations to follow.”Footnote ²⁹ The text purports to be the insurrectionist's confession upon his imprisonment, but like other primary sources on slavery, including many slave narratives, The Confessions is conflicted and highly mediated. It was dictated to a white amanuensis, the lawyer (though not Nat Turner's) Thomas R. Gray, who copyrighted the text on 10 November 1831, the day before the rebel's execution. For most of its history, scholarship on Nat Turner has been ambivalent regarding the interpretation of such a poly-vocal text: who is confessing? Nat Turner or Thomas Gray? Precisely how much of Nat Turner do readers experience? Which are his words, his ideas, and which belong to his white interlocutor and the oppressive legal apparatus that he represents? Literary scholars such as Sundquist and William Andrews have split the interpretive difference, arguing that “this is a text divided against itself, in which there is a fundamental competition between two opposing wills for the power that comes from the act of appropriation, the power to endow and legitimate a self with mythic significance,”Footnote ³⁰ a series of “statement and counterstatement of revolutionary principles.”Footnote ³¹ Within the semiotic tension of The Confessions, just as in his textual afterlife, “The meaning of Nat Turner is perpetually postponed.”Footnote ³²

The most persistent criticism of the preacher rebel was leveled by Gray within the very pages of the Confessions. The white lawyer attempts to portray Nat Turner as both a demonic fiend and a religious fanatic by dubbing his religiosity “enthusiasm.”Footnote ³³ “Enthusiasm,” as William Andrews explains, “was a class-conscious word used pejoratively by high-church conservatives to denigrate evangelical fervor as little more than an anarchical excess of the imagination.”Footnote ³⁴ Despite Nat Turner's long-standing association with religious extremism, Baker's text actually precludes imputations of fanaticism: the comic skillfully pits Christian iconographic imagery against historical text as a principle strategy for short-circuiting readers' association of Nat Turner, as preacher-cum-insurgent, with racialized discourses on religious terrorism that arose in the aftermath of September 11th. Scholars of memory studies, neo-slave narratives, and other modes of historical fiction have long noted that setting a narrative within the historical past serves to critique a text's contemporary moment. Yet the comic's contemporary moment was one in which religious violence against the state – terrorism – had recently provoked a reactive nationalism against many people of color and preceded US occupations of multiple, predominantly Muslim, countries. In order to tell, in such a moment, the story of this black rebel who was inspired by God to kill whites in their homes and topple the central national institution of his time, Baker would have to disrupt presentist readings of his comic. In Sharon Ewell Foster's The Resurrection of Nat Turner, that disruption comes through establishing Muslims as a sinister, enslaving presence and figuring Nat Turner as an anti-Islamic crusader.

In contrast, Baker utilizes diverse visual modes in order to create countermeaning against the white archive, ending with a Christological iconographic sequence of Nat Turner's “passion” as a visual allusion to Christ's crucifixion. The conclusion visually encourages readers to interpret Nat Turner as like Christ rather than damn him as an “enthusiast” as Gray did or as a “terrorist” as US readers would. The image–text dichotomy that is so foundational to comics, deployed in tandem with the visual aesthetics of Nat Turner, wards off presentist readings of the comic and the specter of fanatical religious violence against the state that was still so prominent in the years following 9/11. What results is a celebratory counterimage of the rebel slave as icon, as Christ. As Consuela Francis so aptly puts the matter, “It is only when coupled with Baker's narrative images that Turner's prophecy, and the violence that ensues, takes on a righteous weight” rather than the madness that his detractors have long assigned him.Footnote ³⁵

In attempting to define the nature of the medium, comics theorists have pointed to the importance of interplay between text and image.Footnote ³⁶ Scott McCloud's now canonical definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” minimizes the significance of the written word for the art form, but subsequent theorists have dissented.Footnote ³⁷ In particular, Robert C. Harvey emphasizes instead “the economy of expression achieved by visual–verbal interdependence,” asserting that the comics form depends primarily on a mutual exchange of meaning between picture and word.Footnote ³⁸ Hillary Chute corroborates, writing that “Comics contain ‘double vision’ in their structural hybridity, their double (but nonsynthesized) narratives of words and images. In one frame of comics, the images and the words may mean differently, and thus the work sends out double-coded narratives or semantics,” producing a “contradictory flow” held “in tension.”Footnote ³⁹ These formulations are especially useful in studying Baker's comic of Nat Turner. Since the text of the historical Confessions is always set against Baker's art instead of incorporated within it, the two materials supplement one another but just as frequently critique or revise each other in the “contradictory flow” that Chute describes. According to Francis,

I contend that comics' disconnect between image and text that Harvey and Chute theorize, that Francis expressly cites in Baker as irony, frames the iconographic style that Baker eventually uses to depict Nat Turner. That is, by dwelling at length on an image–text irony that ultimately critiques the historical archive, the comic prepares readers to privilege Baker's Christological illustrations of Nat Turner that conclude the text.

Baker first introduces the ironic interplay of text and image in the initial book of Nat Turner, “Home.” The comic opens with a facsimile reproduction of the title page of The Confessions, clearly situating the illustrated narrative that follows in relation to the historical archive on slavery. The facsimile serves first, perhaps, as an authenticating device à la slave narratives, but ultimately as an object of critique and signification. It is Baker's comic with its look at the intimate details of slavery rather than the historical document that provides an account of the “WHOLE INSURRECTION,” as Gray advertises of The Confessions.Footnote ⁴¹ At the same time, Baker's deployment of the facsimile may well challenge Gray's own attempt at authentication as well as the antebellum racial logic that required whites to vouchsafe for the autobiographical accounts of black authors. Following this early interpolation of the archive into the comic, a wordless story unfolds in which an African woman is kidnapped by African slavers, is enchained and brutally marched to the coast, and finally sold to slave traders. She is, as the reader eventually learns, Nat Turner's mother, and as she is processed for transportation across the Atlantic Ocean a single-panel page depicts her being clutched by ghoulish, disembodied white hands as she stares fearfully at a glinting razor held in front of her. Below the panel is the first significant text of the comic:

From this point the pictorial narrative details the horrors of the Middle Passage – signified, in particular, by the threatening sharks in the ocean – which include starvation, deaths on board, beatings, and finally the auction block. Here the comic shifts, ending by juxtaposing Baker's images against text “FROM THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER” in which Nat Turner describes his divine knowledge of “things that had happened before my birth.”Footnote ⁴³

Thus “Home” is structured by beginning, middle, and end references to the historical archive. In between, though, Baker's pictorial narrative “fills the gaps” in the textual record on the Atlantic slave trade and US chattel slavery.Footnote ⁴⁴ Here again Baker utilizes multiple visual styles. When Nat Turner's mother is stripped for branding, Baker portrays her as a cartoonish silhouette, all black, with cartoonish white hands grasping from off-panel; both are set against a blurred photo-realistic image of a slave coffle with slave ships in the distance. The cartoonishness imparts a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and life-in-motion in contrast to the historical background even as the historical authenticates the foregrounded scene.Footnote ⁴⁵ Baker's depiction of Nat Turner's mother's face is still more significant for considering image versus text. Throughout this section and regardless of Baker's choice of artistic style in a given panel, her face is drawn with stark clarity. Her eyes in particular organize panels or draw readers' attention. The panel that includes Canot's text exemplifies this tactic. White bodies and hands dominate the panel yet remain obscured or vague because they are heavily shaded and merely sketched. Yet her face, her fists, her eyes, and the gleaming razor stand out due to Baker's sharp line work.Footnote ⁴⁶ The focus on her face in turn focusses readers on the personal. In this way, the comic indicts lacunae in official history by juxtaposing Canot's distant and dehumanizing description of slave trading against Baker's depiction of the intimate lived horrors of slavery. Nat Turner's original subtitle, “the master's masterpiece updated,” encapsulates this irony even as it suggests the privileged status of the comic's images.Footnote ⁴⁷

This interaction between image/text irony and visual style stands out in the affecting two-page spread in “Freedom,” in which a Kara Walker-esqueFootnote ⁴⁸ silhouette depicts Will being gunned down by four presumably white men (Figure 1).Footnote ⁴⁹ The highly stylized imagery of Will's last stand has here been reduced to cartoonish all-black shadows, but the focus on Will's body surrounded by his own bloodspray and the other dismembered bodies still proves chilling. In fact, the page implicates readers within the scene: as McCloud notes, higher degrees of visual abstraction, simplicity, or “cartoonishness” universalize and thus invite “viewer-identification,” whereas higher degrees of visual complexity and realism objectify the subjects being depicted.Footnote ⁵⁰ Reducing Will to his cartoonish silhouette, then, forces readers to empathize with the slave. But this full page is further juxtaposed against “A List of Persons Murdered in the Insurrection,” which is actually a list of the whites killed during the uprising as taken directly from The Confessions (Figure 2). Read together, the pages reveal that dominant history remembers neither the violence of slavery nor the names of most of the black people it destroyed. As with Baker's tracking of Nat Turner's mother's face in “Home,” there would be no irony, no emotive effect, between image and text in these two pages without the strategic use of form to create reader responses. The visual project works only if there is an assumption of insufficiency or deficiency in the (historical) text that Baker's images can supplement or revise by way of their strategic aesthetic. And it is precisely this dynamic that enables Baker to create a Nat Turner who is not a terrorist, but, instead, even more than a martyr: a Nat Turner who is visually Christ crucified.

Figure 1.

Nat Turner, written and illustrated by Kyle Baker, 178. Copyright © 2008, used by permission of Abrams Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Figure 2.

Nat Turner, written and illustrated by Kyle Baker, 179. Copyright © 2008, used by permission of Abrams Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Indeed, the title of the fourth and final book foreshadows a Christological victory-in-death. “Home” depicts a violent diaspora. “Education” depicts slavery's active disruption of cultural and social forms of knowledge. And “Freedom” depicts the failure, in the grossest sense, of a slave uprising. Finally, “Triumph” depicts the imprisonment and execution of the comic's eponymous protagonist.Footnote ⁵¹ Besides reinforcing the importance of irony throughout the comic, this paradoxical titling implies a logic of worldly-failure-turned-spiritual-victory that has a long history in Christianity. Just as Christ's death on the cross is refigured as a victory over sin and death, Nat Turner ultimately triumphs through the textual dissemination of his words despite his execution. In the Abrams edition, the title of the fourth book is even juxtaposed against a splash page depicting Nat Turner's limp body hanging by the neck from a tree.Footnote ⁵² This image initiates the comic's properly iconographic depiction of Nat Turner. The scene is notable for its scale: the massive tree, ray of sunlight, and long hanging rope all dwarf the human figures at the bottom of the page. Indeed, the distance needed to take in the entire scene swallows the identities of the subjects; this could as easily be any lynching as Nat Turner's execution. Yet readers understand that this is the end of the slave rebellion. They understand too that the scene is reminiscent of Christ's crucifixion. The light shining down from the sky, the taut lynching rope, and the trunk of the tree all converge at the hanged corpse. The effect is to connect Nat Turner not to the obscene, raucous crowd but to the sublime scale of the page's top portion. The effect is to render Nat Turner not in terms of the human but in terms of the divine.

Like “Home” especially, “Triumph” is all but wordless. In this book, however, Baker drastically manipulates the historical text, namely The Confessions, in a novel way: whereas excerpts of the 1831 Confessions have previously been introduced as “FROM THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER,” in “Triumph,” the same text is introduced as “FROM THE RECORD OF THOMAS R. GRAY.”Footnote ⁵³ That is, Baker separates the competing authorial voices of The Confessions. On one hand, this distillation poses Nat Turner's authorial voice earlier in the comic as unmediated by the white southern legal apparatus; on the other hand, this poses Gray as the culminating and representative example of the white archive, therefore enabling Baker to make a final critique of the historical text by contrasting it with his Christological images of Nat Turner. Set in the gutter below a single panel that depicts Nat Turner speaking to Thomas Gray in a jail cell, we find a key passage from The Confessions, now described as Gray's legal notes, that attempts to portray “Prophet Nat” as a madman:

The reader's gaze is positioned above the two men, at a distance (Figure 3). Baker's blurred line work and crosshatching emphasize the separation between viewer and viewed. The facing page is pivotal to the interpretive arc of the comic. Like the previous page, this one consists of a single panel with text below in the gutter. The reader's perspective is from over Gray's shoulder, thus obscuring his face, drawing attention to a close-up of Nat Turner's own face. Below the figures, arranged respective to the speaker, is the significant question–answer exchange between the two men as taken from The Confessions: “Question: ‘Do you not find yourself mistaken now?’ Answer: ‘Was not Christ crucified?’” (Figure 4).Footnote ⁵⁵ Nat Turner's gentle, almost beatific face foils the Gothic image of the “fiend-like” insurgent presented by Gray in the historical text. Though Baker's shading and crosshatching again might create obscurity from the reader's gaze, this technique also softens Nat Turner's features, visually transforming him from an apocalyptic prophet into a compassionate Christ-like figure. Further, the textual voice of Nat Turner in this passage is here deployed in tandem with the visual–verbal irony of the comic for the sake of a final, damning critique of the historical record now captured in the phrase “FROM THE RECORD OF THOMAS R. GRAY.” This sequence finally disrupts the relationship between image and text operating thus far in the comic, a rupture adroitly represented in the subsequent panel when Gray snaps his pen nib in shock at Nat Turner's self-identification with Christ.Footnote ⁵⁶

Figure 3.

Nat Turner, written and illustrated by Kyle Baker, 188. Copyright © 2008, used by permission of Abrams Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.

Nat Turner, written and illustrated by Kyle Baker, 189. Copyright © 2008, used by permission of Abrams Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

When Nat Turner casts himself as Christ in the historical Confessions, his “audacity here at the climax of his narrative turns Christ into a type,” according to William Andrews, “a historical prefiguration of himself, the ultimate bearer of the responsibility for the eschaton in which whites will be judged and blacks redeemed.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Further, this “language of prophecy was the medium in which Turner worked,” writes Sundquist in To Wake the Nations, because it was one of the “principal semiotic systems in which the African slave found himself placed,” and through creative reading it could be made to serve his own radical purpose.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, in spite of Gray's presence in the text, The Confessions of Nat Turner becomes another move in what Sundquist calls the preacher's “guerrilla assault,” even his “terror,” by rendering him the “black Christ of the South.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This jail cell self-identification with Christ – an act which Gray himself cannot contain as the white editor of The Confessions – has been called by Andrews “the most audacious tropological reading of Scripture in nineteenth-century black autobiography.”Footnote ⁶⁰ It perhaps best exemplifies “the tropological turn” that Andrews identifies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American letters, in which the spirituals and some black autobiographies “invited a reading of biblical precedent in terms specific to the secular aspirations of American slaves” or “projected their lives as secular figurations of scriptural mythoi.”Footnote ⁶¹

This moment of Christological troping is climactic for the comic. Nat Turner actually prepares readers for this scene by meditating on the act of tropological reading. One of the key moments in “Education” immediately follows the escape of Nat Turner's father from the family's master. As the textual voice of Nat Turner relates how he learned to read, his pictorial, adolescent counterpart is depicted stealing a Bible and surreptitiously reading it behind a cabin.Footnote ⁶² Four panels appear concurrently with the textual description of Nat Turner's acquisition of literacy. In each panel, a foregrounded Nat Turner reads the Bible while the scenes that he reads are rendered in the background, specifically scenes of the Israelite captivity in Egypt and their Exodus led by Moses.Footnote ⁶³ The tropological value of the Exodus story is readily apparent to readers of African American literature. Israel's captivity frequently serves as a metaphor or type for black enslavement in the US, as can be recognized in spirituals such as “Go Down, Moses.” The young slave's early encounter with the biblical story here becomes a means by which to understand his own experience of enslavement and inspires the adult preacher's fiery sermons after the sale of his family later in the comic.Footnote ⁶⁴

Yet despite the significance of Biblical types to the comic, Nat Turner actually sidelines religion qua religion, unlike Foster's avowedly Christian novels. Baker's readers never glimpse Nat Turner's visions, for example. Instead Baker attempts to negotiate the tension between fully depicting this story that contains religious fervor at its core, on the one hand, and marginalizing “enthusiastic” readings of “Prophet Nat” on the other. Thus at what should be Nat Turner's moment of conversion, Baker seems to critique religious sentiment. Following Nat Turner's discovery of the Exodus story, the textual narrative draws from The Confessions as follows:

However, this passage reads against Baker's illustrations below it. Here, the young Nat Turner attends a prayer meeting at which worshippers shut their eyes and throw up their hands in praise during a sermon – but the boy is rendered apart, his hands down and eyes wide, possibly in shock or disbelief. The preacher, it turns out, contrasts sharply with his audience: he dresses ostentatiously, less like the poor slaves he sermonizes to than the Zip Coon character who later saves his master from Nat Turner's band;Footnote ⁶⁶ further, the preacher's finery is rendered black, standing out against the plain, white, presumably homespun clothes of the worshippers. He cuts a ridiculous figure against Nat Turner's professed “austerity,” while the reference to Nat Turner's “superior judgment” reads the worshippers critically. They have been taken in by a charlatan, the juxtaposition implies.

Whether or not such scenes indict religion generally, they do mitigate the role of religious feeling even as the text utilizes religious tropes as a representational strategy against post-9/11 readings of “enthusiasm.” Before the reader's very eyes, Kyle Baker's Nat Turner learns to read his own life tropologically, engaging in a reading strategy that had by the antebellum period come to define African American literature. But the reader learns to read tropologically along with the comic's protagonist too. This sequence prepares the audience for the Christological imagery that ends the comic. By the final page of the text, Nat Turner's appropriation of Christ's role as suffering redeemer (and judge) appears as not religious fanaticism so much as a valid strategy for making sense of life lived under oppression.

Significantly, Nat Turner's Christ-troping in his cell ends the textual narrative of Nat Turner. Once Gray breaks his pen nib, the comic continues wordlessly until its end in a kind of triumph over the white archive. The jailhouse shifts to a two-panel page depicting a family picnicking and children playing. Baker renders their faces in rounded, almost cartoonish fashion. However, the introduction of Nat Turner on the following pages disrupts the sense of ease that their facial features create.Footnote ⁶⁷ As throughout the rest of the comic, Baker draws the adult Nat Turner with a long, lean face and sharp, angular features that bespeak gravity. The higher degree of realism here objectifies Nat Turner for readers, making him more “real” as per McCloud. In objectifying him rather than inviting reader identification, Baker also distances readers from the rebel slave in a way that creates a sense of inscrutable holiness. In this respect, his introduction into this sequence proves especially marked and, indeed, reverential. A two-panel page further juxtaposes his serene, upturned face against the white mob jeering and throwing food, followed by the sun shining through storm clouds.Footnote ⁶⁸

The subsequent full-page panel acts as a key iconographic moment: portraying Nat Turner in close-up, eyes closed and at peace as the noose is tightened around his neck, creates a beatific effect.Footnote ⁶⁹ Baker all but draws a halo around his head. From here, the panels proceed showing first the expectant, enthusiastic faces of the crowd, then those same faces wide-eyed, perhaps stunned or disappointed.Footnote ⁷⁰ Their eyes direct the reader to the adjacent page and its single panel. Nat Turner's limp, motionless body hangs from a tree by a rope. The tropological education that readers have received alongside Nat Turner prepares them for Baker's visual cues. The frontal view of Nat Turner's body, the sharp outline of his form that emphasizes its limpness, and his head turned delicately to the side all visually allude to commonplace depictions of Christ's crucifixion (Figure 5). Further, the treeline frames his body in what first appears to be a white cloud; the result is an aura effect that imbues the scene with a sense of awe, even holiness.Footnote ⁷¹ Baker further emphasizes the miraculous stillness of Nat Turner's death, glossing the page with a note explaining that “Nat Turner did not die kicking and suffering as hanged men usually do. He simply rose into the air, breathing his last, peacefully without twitching a muscle.”Footnote ⁷² That Nat Turner “rose into the air” as if of his own accord recalls Christ's ascension into heaven, and the remaining pages of the text suggest that he wields in death a profound spiritual power as a symbol to other slaves. The execution scene eventually shifts to show a white man laying a book on a table, which is quickly absconded with by a household slave who reads the book in secret.Footnote ⁷³ The sequence of the slave stealing literacy, itself a common trope in slave narratives, ends Nat Turner, though not before Baker reveals that the cover of the stolen book is actually the title page to The Confessions of Nat Turner, which appeared in facsimile on his comic's first page.Footnote ⁷⁴ From Nat Turner's “crucifixion,” readers have now progressed to his discursive “resurrection.”

Figure 5.

Nat Turner, written and illustrated by Kyle Baker, 197. Copyright © 2008, used by permission of Abrams Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

Like the Middle Passage in “Home” or the slaughter of black insurrectionists in “Freedom,” the Christ-like execution of Nat Turner in “Triumph” simultaneously “fills the gaps” of official history, as per Francis, even as it signifies upon the historical record. Baker locates historical critique and supplement within the graphic narrative in a canny manipulation of the most basic formal properties of the medium of comics, but Baker also poses that critique and supplement by using aesthetic form to make a visual argument. In the final book, “Triumph,” Baker assembles pictorial cues that reference other depictions of Christ or that otherwise connect Nat Turner to the divine in order to create what I have called an iconographic style. When contrasted with “THE RECORD OF THOMAS R. GRAY,” this style transforms into an argument for tropologically reading Nat Turner as Christ. He becomes the messiah so central to the nineteenth century's white Protestant culture and not, as Gray would have it, a bloodthirsty demon “excited by enthusiasm.” According to the visual–verbal logic of the comic, the reader ultimately witnesses to a Nat Turner who is Christ himself.Footnote ⁷⁵

As writers represent Nat Turner by marshaling Christian crusaders and resurrecting Christ, we would do well to question what role iconography as a rhetorical strategy plays in attempting to fix and define blackness in the US against other targets of white supremacy when their racial signifiers begin to blur. The discomfiting echo between acts of religio-political violence in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries certainly bears consideration, as other scholars have already suggested. But the more urgent significance of Nat Turner's contemporary afterlife rests in what it can tell us about the continual remaking of race, particularly after 9/11. I want to conclude, then, with a final example from Nat Turner's post-9/11 afterlife that, like the Foster and Baker texts, iconographically celebrates blackness at a time of acute threat. But unlike the texts above, this cultural moment attempts to dislocate anti-blackness from Islamophobia without reference to Christian symbolism. In February 2013, former police officer Christopher Dorner began a campaign of what he called “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” against the LAPD.Footnote ⁷⁶ Dorner had been fired from the department in 2009 for alleging that his partner brutalized a man suffering from schizophrenia while on patrol. According to Dorner, who was black, his subsequent firing was only another instance of the LAPD's long history of entrenched racism and corruption, including the Rampart scandal and the Rodney King beating. In retaliation in 2013, Dorner killed two police officers, another officer's daughter, and that woman's fiancé, prompting a massive and highly publicized manhunt that resulted in Dorner's death.Footnote ⁷⁷ Dorner himself proved difficult to defend due to his use of violence, particularly against civilians and people of color.Footnote ⁷⁸ But many people did defend him – as Nat Turner come again.

Maybe it was in order to make sense of Dorner's difficult violence that many came to read him as a black folk hero “rebelling” against the “slavery” of the LAPD. On Facebook, groups appeared such as “We Stand with Chris Dorner,” “We Are All Chris Dorner,” and “Chris Dorner and the Revolution,” with these three alone having a combined 33,881 followers in April 2013.Footnote ⁷⁹ The latter group, in particular, describes Dorner's actions as “his revolt.” Others went so far as to draw comparisons between Dorner and Nat Turner himself. One Twitter user writes, “Chris dorner considered armed and dangerous and extremely black … this is the nat turner of our time” (sic). Another writes that “Chris Dorner went Nat Turner,” and another that “Chris Dorner is officially the Nat Turner re-incarnate of 2013. Way to kick off [Black History Month] by righting the wrongs of the system.” Still another writes that “Chris dorner our modern age Nat turner. Masta gonna be scare now you hear?” (sic).Footnote ⁸⁰ Of course, Chris Dorner was never an actual slave, and his retaliation against the LAPD and its loose associates was by no means a slave revolt, just as the militant white supremacy of the LAPD could never constitute actual slavery. Yet as one of the most recent cultural recollections of the rebel slave, the popular discourse surrounding Chris Dorner belongs in the living archive on Nat Turner.

Read alongside Foster's “Knights Templar” and Kyle Baker's Christological iconography, Chris-Dorner-as-Nat-Turner casts into focus anxieties about the blurring of antiblack racism with Islamophobia, this time using Nat Turner as a revolutionary black icon instead of a Christian one in order to distinguish blackness from the image of “the terrorist.” While cultural critics like Cornel WestFootnote ⁸¹ and Janani BalasubramanianFootnote ⁸² have noted the ways in which antiblackness has informed the state's conduct of its War on Terror as a global form of policing brown people, the Dorner case exemplifies the process reversed: the imperial War on Terror come home as a way to domestically surveil and police blacks within the US.

During the Dorner manhunt, police were alleged to have used unmanned aerial vehicles – the deadly drones that have become the centerpiece of Barack Obama's foreign policy. Reports conflicted as to the veracity of claims that the LAPD deployed the military technology in order to spy out Dorner. Whether drones were deployed or not, the insertion of their sign into the discourse on Chris Dorner, like Obama's rendering as a “terrorist,” reveals the slippage between two racial formations in the white imaginary. To be sure, whites have long policed black bodies, from slave patrols to lynch mobs to the parole boards of the New Jim Crow. What has changed since 9/11, though, is the justification for the state's antiblack violence. Once the tools of US white supremacy have been exported abroad for the purpose of “fighting terrorists,” the rhetoric of antiterrorism becomes a new pretense for further escalating and militarizing control of black and brown people within the US. Conflating domestic and global regimes of racial oppression actually enables, enforces, and reinforces both. As other Nat Turner texts of recent years attempt to do, this popular response to Chris Dorner disaggregates antiblackness and Islamophobia through an iconographic strategy, using privileged cultural signs to elevate the given subject above criticism. Dorner cannot be our much-feared “terrorist” because he is the black freedom fighter Nat Turner, just as Nat Turner cannot be a “terrorist” because he is a Christian crusader – or Christ incarnate.

Ever since news about the 1831 uprising first spread, Nat Turner has meant more than his historical person. As he has done at other critical moments in the past, Nat Turner after 9/11 makes and remakes, defines and elides, race in the US. Recent iterations of the rebel slave's afterlife, like Foster's novels, Baker's comic, and Chris Dorner's folk life, attempt to redefine blackness and brownness against each other under a white gaze that increasingly regards both as the same and therefore interchangeable – as an a priori “criminal,” “terroristic,” other. Yet in remembering Nat Turner against post-9/11 racial (re-)formations, these recent entries in the archive on Nat Turner also reveal the vicissitudes of memory's ongoing political work. To be sure, critics can locate Baker's comic along with Foster's novels and Dorner's folk life within a familiar tradition of liberatory remembrances of slavery. Baker himself avows as much when he describes writing and drawing Nat Turner into dominant history's lacunae.Footnote ⁸³ Nat Turner's afterlife here performs the resistant political-historical project that George Lipsitz has termed “counter-memory.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Yet cultural memories are neither stable nor certain. Slavery's afterlives operate within the complete context of the social present, and they might well make meaning in unexpected ways and with unintended consequences. What radical possibilities have been passed over by Foster's anti-Muslim “Knights Templar,” for example? What other stories about Nat Turner might be told instead of Baker's too familiar Messiah? For all of the liberatory potential of Nat Turner's afterlife, his post-9/11 depictions speak as much to fears of racial conflation as to hopes for cross-racial alliance. In creating counterrepresentations of culture heroes like Nat Turner in the face of white supremacy, memorializing strategies risk reifying racial meaning at the expense of dynamic, if dangerous, new definitions of race. Critics must attend, then, to the multiple meanings of memory, to the ways in which it stagnates as well as liberates. There is nothing of pessimism here, however, only possibilities – a meditation on racial meaning in its fullest complexity. Indeed, the life and afterlife of Nat Turner point to nothing less than the uncertain, open-ended potential of the past.