Warm-Up #1: Nat Turner

In his preface to Nat Turner, the artist Kyle Baker recalls that it was in “Malcolm X’s autobiography where I first read a longer narrative” of Nat Turner’s rebellion (6). It’s worth reading that same passage from Malcolm X’s autobiography:

I read descriptions of atrocities, saw those illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged off, never to be seen by their mothers again; of dogs after slaves, and of the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men with whips and clubs and chains and guns. I read about the slave preacher Nat Turner, who put the fear of God into the white slavemaster. Nat Turner wasn’t going around preaching pie-in-the-sky and “non-violent” freedom for the black man. There in Virginia one night in 1831, Nat and seven other slaves started out at his master’s home and through the night they went from one plantation “big house” to the next, killing, until by the next morning 57 white people were dead and Nat had about 70 slaves following him. White people, terrified for their lives, fled from their homes, locked themselves up in public buildings, hid in the woods, and some even left the state. A small army of soldiers took two months to catch and hang Nat Turner. Somewhere I read where Nat Turner’s example is said to have inspired John Brown to invade Virginia and attack Harper’s Ferry nearly thirty years later, with thirteen white men and five Negroes. (179)

There’s an interesting dynamic at work here between history and its telling. Malcolm X read about Nat Turner. Kyle Baker encountered Nat Turner through Malcolm X. And we’re seeing Nat Turner through Kyle Baker’s perspective. A fundamental question arises: what is the relationship between sources and their representation? This question is critical with Nat Turner, which can be read as a meditation on mediating history.

This warm-up exercise asks you to think about the relationship between historical documents and narrative. There are four “moves” you’ll make:

  1. Browse through the University of Virginia’s library’s Guide to a Speech and Photographs Relating to Nat Turner’s Insurrection. Find an image that you can overlay onto a page of Nat Turner. The pairing should “fit”—the image should be appropriate somehow to the page. You can do this digitally by scanning a page from Nat Turner and photoshopping the historical image onto the page. I’m using “photoshopping” here as a generic term; there are free online tools you can use, like Pixlr or the Pic Collage app, to accomplish the same effect. Or you can do it old-school, by printing out the image and literally pasting it onto a page of Nat Turner. If you do this, you’ll still need to scan the final product in order to post this to your Writing 101 site.
  2. Find another historical image from the 19th century; you can use the UVA site again, or you can branch out to the Library of Congress’s digital collections, the Digital Public Library of America’s digital collections, the National Archives, or any other legitimate photo collection. But this time, instead of finding a photo that matches a page from Nat Turner, the photo ought to be ironic. That is, there should be some ironic dissonance between the image and the comic.
  3. Now we’ll switch from images to text. Skim through The Confessions of Nat Turner—try this version at the University of Nebraska or this version at Documenting the American South. Find a sentence to use as a caption for a panel from Nat Turner that is otherwise uncaptioned. The text should “fit” the image.
  4. Finally, find another sentence or phrase from The Confessions of Nat Turner. Pair it with an image from Nat Turner ironically.

No matter how you compose these four pairings, you’ll need to digitize them. It’s better to scan them than to take photos with a phone camera. Each one should be uploaded to your WRI 101 site, accompanied by the writing described below:

  1. After each pairing, write a few sentences about your motivations. Why choose that image or text and combine it with that particular panel from Nat Turner?
  2. Finally, synthesize your thoughts and make some generalizations about your findings. Consider some of these questions: How does a historical photograph influence the meaning of the page (and by extension, Nat Turner)? Even if the comic and your addition match, how does one element influence how we read or see the other element? How does a caption frame and contain the page? How does a caption direct our attention, highlighting some things on the page and obscuring others? What happens when The Confessions of Nat Turner is quoted “out of context”? Refer to specific examples from your assignment in order to answer these questions. Aim for about 500 words in the synthesis.

This warm-up assignment is due by class on Thursday, January 21. Post it to your own WordPress site. Make sure you title the post descriptively. The assignment will not be considered complete unless you submit four pages from Nat Turner (two with images overlayed and two with captions from The Confessions of Nat Turner), an explanation of each pairing, and your synthesis. Of course, in addition to being thoughtful and creative, the assignment must be well-written, spell-checked, and grammatically correct.