Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

The answer Black Prometheus gives is that certain features of the myth--its geographical associations, iconography of bodily suffering, & function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology--made it ripe for revival & reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized, in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution & Atlantic slavery.

Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus--whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel, Frankenstein, Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels, or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus-- is
a profound debate about the means & ends of liberation in our globalized world. 

Tracing the titan's rehabilitation & unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries across a range of genres & geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race, religion, & modernity & to interrogate the Eurocentric & secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique.