Episodes of slave rebellions such as Nat Turner’s are central to speculations on the trajectory of black history and the goal of black spiritual struggles. Using fiction, history, and oral poetry drawn from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa, this book analyzes how writers reinterpret episodes of historical slave rebellion to conceptualize their understanding of an ideal “master-less” future. The texts range from Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave and Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World to Yoruba praise poetry and novels by Nigerian writers Adebayo Faleti and Akinwumi Isola. Each text reflects different “national” attitudes toward the historicity of slave rebellions that shape the ways the texts are read. This is an absorbing book about the grip of slavery and rebellion on modern black thought.Adélékè Adéko is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His articles on African and African American literatures have appeared in many journals, including Research in African Literatures, Critique, Nineteenth Century Contexts, and Dialectical Anthropology. He is the author of Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998). Adeeko attended Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife in Nigeria and the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is co-editor of West Africa Review.