The slumbering volcano
Subtitle: American slave ship revolts and the production of rebellious masculinity
By: Maggie Montesinos Sale.
Series: New Americanists
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Durham, N.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
Subjects: Slave insurrections -- United States -- History -- Sources.; National characteristics, American -- History -- 19th century -- Sources.; Masculinity -- United States -- History -- 19th century -- Sources.; White supremacy movements -- United States -- History -- 19th century -- Sources.; Slavery in literature.
Description: In The Slumbering Volcano, Maggie Montesinos Sale investigates depictions of nineteenth-century slave ship revolts to explore the notion of rebellion in formulations of United States national identity.

Analyzing how such revolts inspired citizens to debate whether political theory directed at free men could be extended toward blacks, Sale compares the reception of fictionalized versions of ship revolts published in the 1850s - Benito Cereno by Herman Melville and The Heroic Slave by Frederick Douglass - with the previous decade's public accounts of actual rebellions by enslaved people on the ships Amistad and Creole.

This comparison of narrative response with written public reaction to the actual revolts allows Sale to investigate the precise manner in which public opinion regarding definitions of liberty evolved over this crucial period of time between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Mapping the ways in which unequally empowered groups claimed and transformed statements associated with the discourse of national identity, Sale succeeds in recovering a historically informed sense of the discursive and activist options available to people of another era.

In its demonstration of how the United States has been uniquely shaped by its dual status as both an imperial and a postcolonial power, this study on the discourse of natural rights and national identity in the pre-Civil War United States will interest students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, gender studies, and American history and literature.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [217]-256) and index.
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgments
pagenum: ix; title: Introduction: Rebellion and the Legacy of the Revolution
pagenum: 1; label: 1
title: 1839: Rhetorics of Nation, Race, and Masculinity
pagenum: 29; label: 2
title: "The Amistad Affair" (1839)
pagenum: 58; label: 3
title: "The Case of the Creole" (1841)
pagenum: 120; label: 4
title: Benito Cereno (1855) and "The Slumbering Volcano"
pagenum: 146; label: 5
title: The Heroic Slave (1853)
pagenum: 173; title: Afterword
pagenum: 198; title: Notes
pagenum: 217; title: Selected Bibliography
pagenum: 245; title: Index
pagenum: 257