Black Prometheus

Black Prometheus has two aims, one more modest and the other more Promethean in ambition. The more modest aim is to track the racialization of the Prometheus figure across a host of genres over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although several valuable surveys of modern Prometheanism exist, none fully grasps in historical terms the myth's extraordinary potential as an ideological labor-saving device. By racializing Prometheus, the mythological founder of civilization and modern avatar of revolution, one could in a single gesture make a sweeping, polemical claim about where humanity came from and where it was headed. The more Promethean aim of the project is to forge a multicultural history of Atlantic radicalism centering on the figure of Black Prometheus. Such an account highlights religious and racial dimensions of that history often obscured in Marxian narratives that presume, or prescribe, the extinction of the religious as such, and that subordinate race to class. Seizing Prometheus as an anti-theistic rather than the atheistic figure Marx takes him to be, Black Prometheus defines Atlantic radicalism by the effort to articulate a nonabsolutist conception of the divine rather than by the absolute banishment of the divine. In response to the existential and theological quandaries posed by Atlantic slavery, some writers developed a notion of finite God(s) engaged in reciprocal relations with humanity. This democratization of the cosmos, achieved through Promethean protest, is the telos of my account of Atlantic radicalism.