In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the origins of the modern world are rooted in racial slavery. Du Bois's straightforward and profound argument lies at the heart of Jared Hickman's important new book. Black Prometheus provides a thorough reevaluation of “modernity” in which racial slavery is front and center. As Hickman shows, the Prometheus myth manifested in myriad ways over time and served specific purposes of either affirming or critiquing the cosmic status quo. For example, the Platonic version in Protagoras downplayed the hostility between Prometheus and Zeus where the latter absorbed the former's convictions and thereby reinforced his political power. In essence, the rebelliousness of Prometheus was elided in favor of affirming Zeus's position. This sanitized version, stripped of Promethean resistance, functioned as a “Platonic-cum-Christian political theology of the Absolute” (9, 4). Hickman is most interested in this conceptualization of the Promethean myth and how black intellectuals challenged it.
For Hickman the year 1492 is essential, as the world fundamentally changed and with it the application of the myth. Euro-Christians justified colonialism in the Americas with what Hickman calls “anthropological Absolutism” (12), which was the notion that they were ordained by God to serve His will and “save” non-Europeans. In other words, if indigenous people and enslaved Africans suffered in the process that was simply part of God's plan. From this historical context coupled with the advent of racial slavery, Hickman argues, emerged dual Prometheuses, one of which revitalized the rebellion narrative during the Age of Revolutions. Black resistance to racial slavery in the Americas fundamentally altered the Euro-Christian absolutist Prometheus myth and turned it on its head. Thus a new political theology of the myth emerged through the writings of Olaudah Equiano and subsequent slave narratives which valorized slave rebellion, centered Africa in global history, and categorically rejected Euro-Christian absolutism. The term “black Prometheus” refers to this reconceptualization of the ancient myth that emphasized black agency and rebellion. Hickman's main argument is “that the full possibilities and implications of Prometheus's act of political–theological rebellion only become legible through a high-stakes racial coding in global modernity” (16). Competing articulations of the myth – the perpetuation of the Euro-Christian Absolute in dialectical opposition to the racialized “other” or “African” and enslaved Africans and their descendants’ rebellion against the status quo in favor of a “black revolutionary immanence” – form the crux of Hickman's critical analysis which is rich in breadth and depth (15, 16). The heart of the book is devoted to two sections – “Prometheus of Africa” and “Prometheus of Caucasus.” Each has two chapters in which Hickman delineates the myths, its historical functions, and the centrality of race. The final section examines the literary history of slave rebellions.
Chapter 3 is one of Hickman's strongest, where he uses Frederick Douglass's second autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) as a historical example of black Prometheanism. He carefully dissects G. W. F. Hegel's racist othering of Africa and Karl Marx's universal emancipation argument via the white proletariat, both of which are encumbered with the dialectic of the Absolute. Using Douglass's remarkable life story and escape from bondage, Hickman demonstrates that even when Douglass reached the free states, he was not really free as that very notion was defined in relation to black unfreedom, whether it was through enslavement in the South or the nominal freedom of African Americans in northern states. The dialectic of the Absolute, represented in Hegel and Marx, and exemplified in the definition of American freedom, is what Hickman argues Douglass was up against in his search for meaningful liberation. Only through a repudiation of the Absolute, Hickman maintains, could Douglass's unbinding as a black Prometheus give meaning to universal freedom. And central for Hickman is Douglass's critical engagement with, contra Marx, the Euro-American religious underpinnings of antebellum race relations. It is Douglass's anti-theism, Hickman ultimately argues, that places him on the same philosophical plane as Marx when it comes to a universalist history of global modernity and radicalism. Indeed, the Douglass example underscores Hickman's broader critique of secularization that is woven through the analysis.
A question left to future scholars is how Hickman's arguments apply to slave societies in Latin America, where racial slavery in the Americas first took root. A more direct engagement with black Christianity throughout the Americas – such as enslaved Africans’ utilization of Christian practices to ameliorate their conditions and gain legal freedom in places across Spanish America, such as New Spain – would have enriched the analysis. If black people interpreted Byron's words as a call for slave rebellion, the same logic need apply to their use of Christianity (cf. 108, 426 n. 143). It is difficult, however, to ask more of a book that already does so much. Hickman has produced a superb work that will give critical theorists and scholars of black studies much to debate and discuss.
