Fire on the Water

Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886

Lenora Warren

2019
182 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684480173
Transits

Lenora Warren tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction: Olaudah Equiano, Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinqué, Madison Washington, and Washington Goode. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. Pairing well-known texts with lesser-known figures (Billy Budd and Washington Goode) and well-known figures with lesser-known texts (Denmark Vesey and the work of John Howison), this book reveals the richness of literary engagement with the politics of slave violence.

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Reviews

"This work can help scholars have more complicated conversations about abolitionist rhetoric's role in silencing enslaved people and what impact that silencing continues to have on our understanding of Black experiences."
- Early American Literature, 2021

"Fire on the Water offers a necessary reckoning with the persistent failure of the abolitionist imagination to conceive of slave insurrection as an expression of political agency and not simply as a reaction to the brutalities of the slave trade and of slave society. . . . Readers will find Fire on the Water an important contribution to the study of slavery and abolitionism. . . . Moreover, this book also makes major contributions to Black Atlantic studies and to maritime and oceanic studies at large. . . . Scholars working in these fields will find Warren's book essential reading. They will also find the book's clarity and concision impressive."
- American Literary History

"In making her argument the author marries familiar texts - such as Oloudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), Frederick Douglass's novella 'The Heroic Slave' (1852), and Herman Melville's Billy Budd (begun in the 1880s; first published posthumously in 1924) - and some not so familiar (e.g., John Howison's popular and much-reprinted story 'The Florida Pirates,' published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1821) and their historical context, subjecting the narratives to subtle and extensive analysis....Recommended."
- CHOICE, February 2020

"This book shows Lenora Warren working fluidly across US literary studies, African American studies and the literature of the African diaspora, Atlantic history, oceanic studies, and colonial and Early Republic literature. The book's topic is superb: the role of black sailors, particularly enslaved or emancipated black sailors, has been woefully understudied (other than the historiographic work of Jeffrey Bolster in Black Jacks or the articles of Charles Foy). In locating both revolutionary potential and abolitionist inspiration in the insurrectionary activity of black sailors, Warren provides a fresh, exciting new unit of analysis for scholars and students of American literary history. I cannot stress enough how vital and necessary the topic is, and how overlooked it has been."
- Hester Blum, Pennsylvania State University and President of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

"An enjoyable, thought-provoking, and very rich book, which succeeds in the remarkable feat of adding an original voice to the study of several already well-rehearsed topics. Aimed primarily at literary scholars, it can also be of value for cultural and intellectual historians."
- H-Net/H-War, June 2020

About the author:

Lenora Warren is an assistant professor of English at Colgate University in Madison County, New York.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $99.95, 978-1-6844-8018-0; EPUB: $34.95, 978-1-6844-8019-7