Weekly Roundup on Nat Turner (February 15-17)

If you’re in group 1, you’re responsible for this week’s weekly roundup. Each student in the group will highlight one key moment from the previous week’s online and in-class discussions. To recall the syllabus:

Follow this formula for the highlights: describe the moment (provide the context and the facts about what you saw, read, or heard), interpret the meaning of the moment (what does it mean?), and evaluate its significance (in other words, why was the moment important?).

You can post your highlight in the comments below.

Published by

Professor Sample

Mark Sample is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at George Mason University, where he researches and teaches contemporary and experimental literature, electronic literature, graphic novels, and videogames.

2 thoughts on “Weekly Roundup on Nat Turner (February 15-17)”

  1. One thing from this past week’s discussions that stood out to me was our discussion of Kyle Baker’s use of photo-realistic images in Nat Turner. We divided up into groups to talk about how these images contributed to the narrative. The class was very good at bringing up how the photos of the plantations serve to remind the reader that the events in the book actually happened, which can be easy to forget while reading the narrative in the context of heroes and villains. The group that I discussed the images with, however, was interested in the images as lithographs, which was a sort of precursor to the actual photo. It was interesting to us that Baker would use lithographs and use them almost exclusively to represent white institutions – houses, ships, horses and guns. It seemed that Baker was making a statement on the actuality of the image versus the actuality of the narrative – because up until Nat Turner, the story of the rebellion was told by the white slave-owners who were the victims of the attacks. While Thomas Gray could pass his interview with Turner off as the official unmitigated truth, it didn’t necessarily meant it was what really happened. It seemed that with the use of lithographic images, Baker was pointing out that all narratives are unreliable, and that the value of the narrative isn’t in it’s reliability anyway, but rather in the way it is told.

    1. The point that nearly all of the photos or lithographs incorporated into Nat Turner represent institutions of (white) power is a very important one. I really like this distinction you’re making between the reliability of images versus the reliability of the narrative. It’s worth exploring more—and also worth keeping it in mind as we read some of the other works this semester.

Comments are closed.