I admire this book a great deal. Black Prometheus is a long, impressively researched, and astonishingly ambitious study of anti-slavery in the Atlantic world. Anchored in the first half of the nineteenth century but ranging well beyond it, the book participates in the now widespread trend in American studies to think beyond the borders of the nation. It extends that work insofar as Hickman insists that we have to learn to think “cosmically” (both about the cosmos and from the perspective of the cosmos—in other words, taking in the whole planet) in order to grasp both the internal nuances and the outward spread of anti-slavery discourse. And this is for a very simple and elegant reason: that the main players in this discourse were themselves thinking cosmically, in that they consistently routed their imaginations of anti-slavery resistance through the contours of the Prometheus myth. In Hickman’s recasting of the nineteenth century, Prometheus shows up practically everywhere, and once you have read a bit of the book, it is hard to disagree. Prometheanism appears to have been hiding in plain sight all along.

If “race” and “radicalism” are two corners of Hickman’s analysis, the third is “religion,” or, as the case may be, the so-called “post-secular turn” within the theoretical humanities. I think Hickman is right to insist that the question of modernity is one of immanentization rather than secularization. This is already implicit in the language of “cosmos” and “globe” that Hickman substitutes for the more familiar “natural” and “supernatural.” What happens, he wants to know, when the gods come down to earth—and, conversely, when humans become like gods (specifically, like Prometheus)? Hickman is persuasive when he insists that we need to rethink our sense of what radicalism is—especially in the case of anti-slavery and anti-racist movements. The prevailing materialist bias, manifested in the Marxist or quasi-Marxist presuppositions of American studies and indeed, literary studies more generally, simply cannot account, conceptually, for the idealism of anti-slavery movements themselves, an idealism often couched in religious (though not necessarily Christian) terms. This is a historical point (religion hasn’t gone away) but it is also a methodological one: we have yet to grapple with the demise of the secularization thesis.

At the heart of the book is this question: given the redemptive overtones of almost all nineteenth-century abolitionist discourse, how does anti-slavery writing and agitation access the power of the theological/mythic without falling prey either to its own self-aggrandizement or to the fact that official theology is beholden to a Euro-American concept of the Absolute that inevitably reinscribes, sometimes against its own best intentions, white supremacy? Hegel’s dialectic is in some ways the ground zero of this problem, and Hickman’s reading in chapter 3 of Marx and (especially) Douglass as working within and then out of the shadow of Hegel is eye-opening. But the basic answer to Hickman’s question is: “invent a Black Prometheus.” In other words, if the white Prometheus is a freedom-fighter who must eventually learn to submit to some higher authority, thus becoming a figure for the patient slave awaiting liberation from above, the black Prometheus becomes (or might become) a figure for revolutionary and/or heretical action predicated on a denial of the (officially Christian) discourse of Absolute, channeling a liberation from below.

Here I want to pause in order to flag two points for further consideration. First, it is central to Hickman’s point that these figures are not reconcilable, no matter how sophisticated the dialectic. Second, and related, is the methodological determinism in this argument. The two points are related. Converting to the master’s discourse is never going to be anything other than counterrevolutionary for Hickman. But this not only belies the testimonies of various converts through the years; it also misreads the messiness and syncretism inherent in any act of conversion (including conversions away from religion itself). It winds up treating “religion” monolithically, even structurally, rather than as the internally divided, contestable, worldly thing that it is. In this, Hickman’s approach mirrors the kind of resolutely “secular” method that one encounters for example in Edward Said’s canonical essay “Secular Criticism.” On this score, I think, Hickman is more secular than post-secular.

I suppose Hickman might reply that the hesitation I’ve just registered is evidence of exactly the kind of nervousness surrounding the figure of the black Prometheus that he’s trying to diagnose. And it’s a fair point. What I appreciate most about this book, after all, is Hickman’s insistence that Prometheus haunts us all, a sign of the structural inequalities of modernity itself. His modernity starts in 1492, when the globe opens up in a new way and the vertical relation human-God is replaced by the horizontal one human-human, with all the racial distinctions and awareness such contact entails and all the corresponding attempts to reinscribe that immanence back into the discourse of a theological Absolute. We humans have, Hickman seems to imply, a reflex tendency to theologize; in the post-contact world, that means we tend to theologize things like race, culture, democracy, and nation; this leads almost always to baneful effects. This is also what makes the articulation of a black Prometheus possible, and necessary. But I think that I can agree with all of this and still hold out for a more nuanced description of how people actually interact with their religious and spiritual traditions: taking the things that work, discarding those that don’t, modifying others to fit new circumstances and contexts—and finding inspiration, sometimes, in the most unlikely places. Black liberation theology would be one obvious example.

Immanentization, then, may not be a post-secular move so much as recovering an older, pre-modern form of Christianity which at least in certain manifestations was comfortable both with Christ’s humanity and with human (potential) divinity. One way to read the harrowing of hell episode in the Gospels is that hell is now empty: that Christ’s embrace of humanity and subsequent death means that we are all, now, saved—that is to say, made divine, “made like unto a son of god,” as the writer of Hebrews says in a rather strange passage. One could turn to certain church fathers—Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa—and find there a celebration of abundant human life and of something like a universalist “becoming divine” that may be surprising from a dominant Augustinian perspective. That this became a minority tradition is precisely my point: various radical and surprising possibilities opened up here tend to get shut down by a church concerned with order and hierarchy and self-preservation. But they remain, nevertheless, vibrant parts of a tradition and of its texts; in other words, within a more orthodox tradition than Hickman seems to realize, we can find a thinking-through of the very issues of immanentization and divination that so concern him. We don’t have to go to a heretical tradition like Gnosticism in order to find such discussions. Indeed, in my view, Hickman has a somewhat too sanguine view of heresy as always and everywhere revolutionary.

I’d like to turn now to Hickman’s account of Percy and Mary Shelley in chapter 5. Black Prometheus makes possible a new reading of major texts by both authors (Mary’s Frankenstein [1818] and Percy’s Prometheus Unbound [1820]) that shifts their interpretation out of the European, French Revolutionary context where it has lain largely undisturbed for the past forty years. Both works suddenly emerge as global texts in Hickman’s sense, their utopian aspirations now conditioned not merely by events in France but by those in Haiti and elsewhere. This is marvelous.

William Blake claims that “opposition is true friendship,” however, and in the spirit of such friendship, I note again my sense that Hickman moves too quickly to equate his favored position with a kind of anti-Christian radicalism, missing the dialectical point that it is the very attempt to leave Christianity too quickly, manifested in the leveling of creator and created in the name of immanence, that secures the very kind of stubborn and static oppositionalism that both of the Shelleys are diagnosing in their texts. Another way to put this would be to say that Hickman endorses Prometheus’s belief at the beginning of Prometheus Unbound that reconciliation is by definition capitulation; this means that his readings of the Shelleys tends to fetishize structural opposition. In the case of Frankenstein, this commits him to the unlikely claim that Victor and his Creature are somehow, through it all, meant to be understood as equally at fault: “This equivalence, I am arguing . . . obscures the positional difference and, indeed, the structural inequality of Victor and the creature and thereby undermines any moral rational for just rebellion against the status quo” (241). It is difficult for me to grasp how an attentive reading of a novel so insistent on confronting its readers both with Victor’s narcissism and with his casual assumption of privilege can reach such a conclusion, but perhaps we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this point. (Hickman admits [245] that this may all be a readerly trap—something he’s willing to grant to Melville but not, it seems, to Shelley.)

The case of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is more complicated. So much of what Hickman does with this text is stunning, not least the firm situating of its action in the Caucuses, and thus within the history of racial thinking that location entails. Once again, though, the conclusion is uncompromising: because the poem ultimately endorses “a Christian ethics of passivity” (one wonders, by the by, about that phrase, as opposed to the more familiar “passive resistance,” which of course has a somewhat different resonance, was explicitly theorized by Shelley in “The Mask of Anarchy,” and, from there, passed down to Gandhi and to MLK), it “defuses the threat” of the black Prometheus and “theoretically speaking, precludes Afro-Atlantic slave rebellion, particularly violent rebellion, as a world-historical force” (222).

Blake’s poem America (1793), which Hickman discusses briefly (105), opens with the obviously Prometheus-like Orc chained to a rock. This Prometheus frees himself, but only in order to immediately join his revolutionary energy to that of a nameless young woman who in Blake’s allegory represents Native America. She says to him: “I know thee, and have found thee, & will not let thee go: / Thou art the image of God who dwells in the darkness of Africa” (Plate 2). Blake’s point is clear: slave rebellion is bound together not just with the American Revolution (his putative topic in this poem) but also with anti-colonial rebellions throughout the Atlantic world: “I see a Serpent in Canada . . .  / In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru,” the woman says (Plate 2). The companion poem Europe, published the following year, makes it quite clear that slave rebellion is indeed a “world-historical force”: “Albions Angel smitten with his own plagues fled with his bands / The cloud bears hard on Albions shore” (Plate 9a). But Blake is also clear that the cycles of rebellion that he came to call the “Orc cycle” were also self-defeating; Orc becomes Urizen, in his myth, because pure rebellion brings no new form into the world—just as the Revolution reproduced the violence it abhorred.

Thus, for someone trained, as I was, to think about British Romanticism as an extended creative wrestling with the legacies of the French Revolution, Hickman’s argument can have a somewhat disorienting effect. Many of the strongest productions of romanticism (among which I would count Blake’s prophesies, as well as Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound) take upon themselves the task of coming to terms with a revolution that had begun with such promise and degenerated into such bloody chaos and then, war and imperialism. Their general diagnosis is that the spirit of revolution itself becomes structural, a mutually-supporting oppositionalism whose effects are visited less on the Promethean combatants than on the ordinary people trying to make their way in the world; heroic battles, in other words, cause a lot of collateral damage. That is why Percy Shelley depicts the world of Prometheus Unbound as frozen, why Mary Shelley ends Frankenstein in the polar regions, and why Blake turns from the revolutionary dualism of the Orc cycle to the more complicated three-part dynamic of Milton (1804), where Satan appears not as a Promethean fighter but as what Blake calls the “reasoning negative” or what Hickman would call the “bad dialectic” that resolves all things in favor of the master. (Satan is associated with a self-justifying “pity” that we can read as the equivalent of abolitionist sentiment.) Satan must be destroyed, Blake writes, so that the “True Contraries” can be redeemed, their antagonistic relation allowed to flourish and develop. For—and here is the point—these contraries inhabit, finally, the same world, and they must find a way to live together, even in friction and disagreement.

I am laying out these points as strongly as I can in part because the stakes seem to me quite high. If Hickman is right, then what I have long regarded as the great political and ethical insight of British romantic literature—the recognition, variously articulated, that in order to prevent its hardening into rigid oppositionalism, revolution must be dialectical, must propose a way forward that is at the end of the day inclusive—this very notion, with its redemptive overtones, delegitimizes the necessary violence of slave rebellion and blocks our theoretical access to the other revolutions that are happening in this period, making them into “unthinkable revolutions,” to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s description of the Haitian Revolution. Here is where I wish Hickman had worked with Blake more systematically, since of all the major British writers of the period he is probably most attuned to the varied discourses of revolution and violence that are afoot during this time. But I also think that texts like Prometheus Unbound, especially in its use of Asia in book 2 as the female figure who breaks open the sweaty masculine battle of Jupiter and Prometheus, might have pushed Hickman toward a slightly different and, perhaps, less binary construal of the political terrain.

The light of his own life seemed suddenly eclipsed with the passing of the lovely vision of Venus.

–Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–3)[/EPI]

In Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery, Jared Hickman puts himself up to a task that I can only think to describe as Herculean: taking on nothing less than the secularization of/as modernity thesis, Hickman turns to modern iterations of the Prometheus myth to show how forms of theological thinking persist and take on new meaning within a “new cosmic framework of global immanence” (12) produced by the geopolitical and philosophical rupture of European imperialism and racial enslavement in the Americas. Refusing and perhaps also fearing what it would mean to accept the brutal disenchantment of the world that secularist scholarship portends and on occasion, embraces, Hickman insists “global modernity demands mythic imagination” (17). In this way, the book tracks the usually Romantic and always racialized Prometheus myth across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also explicitly participates in the myth-thinking that Hickman says has been central to intellectual and literary history’s reckoning with the “difference” that clashed into the world in 1492. Hickman calls this form of thought metacosmography: “the mapping and shaping of what has become our specific terrain of the universal, the planet we all inhabit, with its ever-densifying history” (18). Despite Hickman’s commitments to present-day concerns (one gets the sense that for the author, thinking with divinized humans and humanized divines may be the only way to get out of the multiplying horrors of the Anthropocene), there is still something that feels distinctly non-modern, even Scholastic, about this book: it is an impressively large tome in scope and size, it is refreshingly earnest, extremely learned, and it often makes dazzling intellectual leaps in order to tell a big story across disparate periods and places. These qualities contribute to the great success of the book, but also to one weakness: it is itself epic, it aims to “contain multitudes,” it uses the modern Promethean myth to capture an entire field of “metacosmography” that defines the (meta)critical theory of globality. But in taking on such a large task, it sometimes obscures alternative gods, myths, and theisms even when they fall within the purview of Prometheanism. Black Prometheus reaches for the stars, and in taking that risk, it can’t be blamed for occasionally running aground. In fact, I love these moments in Hickman’s study: when readers get glimpses not of the titan romanticized in the ethereal terrain of the heavens or atop the mountaintop of Caucasus, but of New World subjects who were theorizing myths and theologies from the ground itself, those looking up at the stars “down on the muck” (Zora Neale Hurston) or from the hold of the slave ship (Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe). Black Prometheus is an exhilaratingly generative book, and in what follows, I want to take up the author’s invitation to think with and alongside modern Prometheanism. While reading, I found that my own “theological thinking”—to borrow Corey D. B. Walker’s phrase cited by Hickman—kept turning me away from Prometheus and toward Venus, another mythic figure who is absolutely central for any consideration of the re-sacralization of the gods—and goddesses—in “our” racialized, global modernity.

Central for Hickman’s argument is the idea that 1492 represents a seismic shift in both world history and in the intellectual history of that world. For Hickman, 1492, the year of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, “constitutes a genuine rupture of space-time” and “we are still fundamentally living in the world initially brought into being by that encounter of radically unforeseen peoples and places” (33). In this account, New World encounter produces a “radical heterogeneity that should be understood as nothing less than a clash of cosmos previously closed to each other” (39). By the 1600s, Hickman argues that both “metaphysical totality” and “geocultural entirety” are thoroughly mediated by theories of race. He thus wants to make racial slavery and racialization itself central for how we understand the political-theological landscape of global modernity. In so doing, he trades “secularity for globality as the background condition of modern life” (34).

From the perspective of the history of ideas, colonialism and enslavement may have represented a single rupture of earth-shattering proportions that reshaped an idea of the earth into an immanent and unitary planet for the first time in (European) history, but that history was experienced unevenly and more brutally for enslaved and colonized peoples. Walter Johnson has written about the “First Passage” of African captives from various locations within the continent to the slave coast, a journey of horror and disorientation that had already occurred before the terrors of the Middle Passage. Further complicating a unitary “space-time” in racial modernity, in Saltwater Slavery Stephanie Smallwood writes about the perceived and existential non-directionality of the Middle Passage for people packed into the hold with no idea where they were headed, or if they would survive. She writes about the traumatic imprint of the slave ship for captives in the Caribbean who would see the slave ships return to the shore every spring and summer. Each arriving ship—and its captive subjects—renewed the memory and the trauma of the forced journey to the Americas. Finally, it is worth remembering that the first “rupture” of the slave trade had to be reproduced in each generation: through the humiliations of punishment and torture, the erasure of names, the forced separation of biological and chosen kin through the domestic slave trade.

Christina Sharpe’s recent In the Wake: On Blackness and Being argues that contemporary black life continues to be lived “in the wake” of the world that slavery made. The point here is that for peoples of African descent, as for American Indigenous people, 1492 comes crashing to shore, again and again. It might be argued that Hickman’s interest is in the broader political-theological and ontological ramifications of colonial conquest, not in the empirical experiences of a post-1492 world. But enslaved and colonized people have long thought and theorized in the midst of and from the position of their subjugation. And that position offers a different (escape) route into thought and theory.

What if 1492 was a fold rather than a rupture? To attempt to return to the beginning of modernity is to find not a complete rupture or a break, but difference itself (a difference at the origin that may be, as I suggest below, the difference introduced by sexual difference itself): “What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity” (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 79). Black Prometheus foregrounds the centrality of racial enslavement to the entire terrain of the modern political-theological, but what of the transformation of sex and gender that accompanied modern forms of racialization? Hortense Spiller’s analysis of the “degendering” produced by and through the Middle Passage suggests that the slave trade also produced a new sex/gender system. I will leave the theological implications of this to others, but it seems key here to emphasize that sexual difference cannot be detached from racial difference or from the “absolutism of the subject” (Hickman, 3) in modernity. I am reminded of Luce Irigaray’s argument that sexual difference cuts the absolute itself: “the absolute is never singular or indeed complete because it is two” (Alison Martin, Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine, 130).

This mutually gendered and racialized system has been obscured by philosophers, ethnologists, and other thinkers of global modernity who absent the feminine from the scene of race’s reproduction, just as Promethean narratives reproduce and redouble myths about a world in which men reproduce—and resist—without women and femmes. While reading Hickman’s book, I kept returning to the (absented) mother in mythic and meta-mythic thought. I thought about Frederick Douglass’s mother, from whom Douglass was separated as a child and about whom he retained only fleeting and fragmented memories. In My Bondage and My Freedom, a text from which Hickman beautifully excavates Douglass’s self-stylization as a Promethean figure, Douglass notes that “there is, in ‘Prichard’s Natural History of Man,’ the head of a figure—on page 157—the features of which so resemble those of my mother, that I often recur to it with something of the feeling which I suppose others experience when looking upon the pictures of dear departed ones.” Somewhat bafflingly, the image that reminds Douglass of his mother—and upon which Douglass looks lovingly—is an illustration of a statue of Ramses II, the great king of ancient Egypt. In his introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom, James McCune Smith interprets this moment as one in which Douglass challenges polygenesis’s attempt to prove the European, and non-miscegenated, ancestry of the ancient Egyptians. The resemblance of Ramses to Douglass’s mother thus gestures toward the king’s African ancestry. But Douglass’s sentimental identification of his mother with an illustration of a masculine bust in white marble found in the pages of a natural history text further points to the subsuming of the mother, and the feminine more generally, under modern theories of racialization that play out in Promethean myths and natural philosophy alike.

In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Prometheus’s mother is Themis and associated with Gaia, and I wonder if this maternal inheritance, from “Mother Earth,” might ultimately offer us a different way into immanent critique. Following Hurston’s articulation of a form of thought and a form of life produced “down in the Everglades there, down on the muck” (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 10), I am thinking about a kind of critique that values more tentative and even fragmented knowledges, forms of thinking that figure things out along the way, rather than from the hindsight of postmodernity or from the lofty perspective of intellectual history, which can only make sense of things from a safe position in the future, after the storm has passed. Hickman finds “science” limiting as a tool for both thinking and social transformation, but science should not be conflated with a crude and disenchanted empiricism, or with a non-robust form of imagination. For example, Hickman critiques Sylvia Wynter for championing science’s emancipatory potential and for buying into the “secularization” of modernity thesis that “implies religion’s displacement by science” (37). These are basically the same grounds upon which he critiques my own thinking in Fugitive Science. He argues that fugitive science reasserts a “religious-secular binary” that texts like Blake avoid through a “heretical cosmography.” In many ways, I am interested in doing with science what Hickman wants to do with political theology, though he replaces my “fugitive science” with a “metacosmography” that can “resonate both as a scientific and religiocultural enterprise.” For what it’s worth, this is exactly how I understand Wynter’s own use of science, from Darwinian evolution to cognitive science and cybernetics: as a thinking alongside the “new science” of different periods to narrate a bold mythos for humankind. For Wynter, science affords an opportunity to reflect broadly and even theologically on the human, not to naively embrace “science” or “biodicy” as the savior of humanity. This is to say that science can be—and has been—a rich site of myth-making too.

Finally, I wonder if black Prometheus’s mother might be the sable Venus herself, the devalued but always crucial and animating black feminine, the flesh and “zero degree of social conceptualization” (Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67) upon which the modern world is built. From John Gabriel Stedman’s account of “his” beloved Joanna in eighteenth-century colonial Surinam to the many visual and textual representations of Sarah Baartman herself, the sable Venus has been mythologized in the colonial archive to justify her exploitation and debasement. But she has also been reclaimed, revalued and re-sacralized across a long history of black feminist art, literature, and theory, from Pauline Hopkins’s serial novel, Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–3), through to a rich genealogy of more contemporary works (Elizabeth Alexander, Suzan-Lori Parks, Renee Cox, Saidiya Hartman, Robin Lewis Coste, and on and on). The sable Venus is at least as important as the black Prometheus, and from the perspective of contemporary black art and theory, she may be even more so. Just as Venus haunts Reuel Briggs in his study at the beginning of Hopkins’s Of One Blood, she may shadow the figure of Prometheus in ways that are instructive for understanding adjacent and alternative models of cosmic thought and rebellion in the modern world. Early on, Hickman cites Lewis Gordon’s argument that black critical theory is “theory split from itself. It is the dark side of theory, which, in the end, is none other than theory itself, understood as self-reflective, outside itself” (quoted in Hickman, 16). But, following Moten, blackness is already “cut” by the feminine, by the sound and materiality of Aunt Hester’s scream that inaugurates Douglass’s Promethean self-narrativization. In this way, critical theory is always split by the black feminine itself.

One of the many impressive qualities of Jared Hickman’s Black Prometheus is the variability of its focal length: Hickman ranges from arguments of Blumenbergian scope to close readings of literary texts. My question puts a wide-angle shot alongside a close-up: I’d like to understand how Hickman’s account of modernity, which places the religious component of colonial contact at the center, relates to the reading of US chattel slavery and its “demigod” masters that he offers through Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). To put it another way, how does a theory of modernity that has its roots in the moment of contact handle the later period?

Hickman’s introduction and first chapter give us a striking account of secularization interruptus. As Hickman puts it, “The process of secularization that [Hans] Blumenberg describes was headed off and set on a different course by an eschatological event: the ‘discovery of the Indies’” (11). The key consequence of this event is “a new awareness of the relativity of all mythic narratives prompted by the enclosure of radically unforeseen human diversity in the finite space of the globe—myth now operates in an echo chamber of the human without a transcendent ‘outside’ that can be taken for granted” (12). The term Hickman uses for this new awareness is “universal euhemerization”: for all involved in the moment of colonial contact, the gods take shape as “the relics of a historical process of the divinization of culture heroes or momentous events” (24), and not as transcendent beings. This is most true for other people’s gods, and least true for one’s own. As Hickman notes (45–46), the fourth-century BCE philosopher Euhemerus, from whose name the term is derived, used the contingency of other people’s gods to highlight the eternal validity of his divinities. Hickman himself sees a “dialectic” between these two impulses: one, relativizing all gods as immanent; the other, relativizing others’ gods in order to “sacralize” one’s own (46). Modernity, then, is characterized not by the struggle between transcendent gods and immanent humans, but by the struggle of immanent god/human groups, with each ethnos pitted against every other; the prize of the “victors” (47) is that they can elevate their own gods back into eternity.

This account works most seamlessly when two cultures, complete with their institutions, encounter each other: at the moment of first contact, that is, or at least not so long after that one cultural system has been destroyed. Hickman describes, for example, how resistance to Spanish invasion could take the form of rendering the Spaniards’ gods mortal: Bartolomé de las Casas tells the story of Hatuey, who, inferring that the Spaniards’ god was gold, collected as much of it as he could in a basket and drowned the “god” in a river (65).

What about later in the epoch of Atlantic modernity: by the time that Douglass publishes My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855, to what degree are the conditions of the 1492 euhemerization still in place? Encounter between two equally well-institutionalized gods or sets of gods? No. Born into slavery, Douglass does not have the kind of access to an Indigenous tradition that Hatuey did. Ironization—the rendering contingent—of others’ religions for rhetorical purposes, as performed by Hatuey? Yes, and emphatically so.

What comes out clearly in the context of established Atlantic slavery is that even in a situation where the shock of two religious systems encountering one another is not particularly resounding, it may be useful to affect that shock in rhetorical battle, as when slavery apologists amp up the superstition of the enslaved in order to justify keeping them in bondage. Douglass, too, offers an ironized encounter, rather than a shocking one, between human and divine. Hickman quotes Douglass’s account of being made to feel, as a child, that his master was a god: Douglass had “a sense of my entire dependence on the will of somebody I had never seen . . . I was soon to be selected as a meet offering to the fearful and inexorable demigod” (quoted in Hickman, 148). Douglass ironizes his “own” childhood religion as a textbook case of primitive idolatry, complete with human sacrifice, devotion to the clay-footed master, and a cringing, unmanly mode of worship. His god was contingent, historical, earthly. Yet the point is of course that he was educated in his worship by the slave system. Douglass’s error is its shame. “His” god is actually the one invented, in a cynical incitement to idolatrous worship, by the enslavers.

Hickman’s chosen passage from Douglass emphasizes an important facet in the concept of euhemerization that he offers us: its status not just as an event, but as a field of rhetorical moves. Hatuey, too, is a master rhetorician; the Douglass example simply brings out the fact that the conditions of contact are not necessary for the rhetoric of making others’ gods contingent to come into play. In fact, enthusiastic as I am about the idea of euhemerization as a rhetorical strategy, I confess to some skepticism about euhemerization as an event, at least if we are meant to understand that the existence of competing cosmic frames came as a shock to Europeans. Is it really the case that “the mythic sense of cosmic multiplicity and contingency . . . had long been suppressed by Hellenic philosophy and Christian dogma” (12), only to resurge in 1492?

Hickman contends that the cultures of the new world were better prepared than European Christians were to see gods in “immanent” terms, “as linked with and even understood to have arisen as/in particular people or places” (64). But Hickman’s account of the new world’s approach to religion sounds a lot like Dale Martin’s account of the Roman empire’s approach to the same, in Inventing Superstition (2004). Martin argues that the Roman concept of superstitio indexed, inseparably, religious difference and political threat: a different set of gods translated to a different people, and thus a political rivalry with the Romans themselves (Martin, Inventing Superstition, 130–39; see also his discussion of the common-sensical linking of religion and ethnos in the ancient world, 216). You could say that by the fifteenth century Christianity had changed all this, and that the earlier moment of relativization had been forgotten. But you’d still have to consider the argument that Europe was not yet Christianized at the time of the Reformation, in the minds of church reformers both Catholic and Protestant. Such reformers were busy discovering—and rooting out—the popular worship of false gods in Europe both before and after they confronted the primitive worship of false gods in the Americas (Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons [1997]; Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe [2000]; Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire [1977]).

I’m suggesting that the ironic framing of others’ gods, as practiced by Hatuey and Douglass, was a familiar exercise for Euro-Christians, too, one that they continued across the moment of contact. Thus, the difficulty may be the opposite of what it at first appeared to me to be: it is not extending euhemerization past the moment of contact that poses a problem; the problem is instead with connecting euhemerization too strictly to the shock of contact. If there is an amendment here, it’s a friendly amendment, meant to emphasize the wide applicability of what Hickman brings to our attention. Euhemerization as rhetorical strategy doesn’t require the actual shock of the new, but only the strategic decision to deploy arguments about the contingency of others’ gods in service of some end. Hickman shows us a modernity that weaponizes religious controversy (something the pre-modern period did, too). This weaponization is possible, I think, not because the very existence of competing cosmic views was new to Euro-Christians, but because it was familiar to them and to their interlocutors both. Others’ gods, already a familiar administrative problem in Europe, could readily become the battlefield in the Americas, too.

Jared Hickman has written a transformative, magisterial study of religion, race, and the colonial world order. He grounds his work by accounting for modernity, whose structures began to emerge with European empires of the fifteenth century. He then poses an underlying question that might be summarized as follows: Given that modernity was a racial formation of secular and theological structures asserting Europeans as the apotheosized, outer-limit of the free subject (as the racial iteration of the Hegelian Absolute), how does one assess the complex histories of Black freedom that continually interrupted White domination? The answer, Hickman demonstrates, lies with understanding how Black rebellion—the anticolonial resistance of Black men and women who were enslaved, preeminently—became a heresy within the frame of Euro-Christian imperialism.

Hickman elucidates this theological, heretical understanding of Black freedom in the age of Atlantic slavery by interpreting the genealogical history of the myth of Prometheus in two dimensions. First, he renders its architecture of themes and rationality—as mytheme—that adumbrates classic tensions of human finitude and aspirations as these have become sedimented among the social conflicts of various populations since ancient times. Second, he focuses on the specific modern Atlantic history of numerous authors deploying the Prometheus myth as an elaborate grammar for rendering White and Black racial subjectivities. Hickman’s treatment of this Promethean theme, moreover, is itself a work of accretions—voluminous by any measure (exceeding 500 pages) and effecting a complex meditation on at least two governing problems: (1) how should scholars account for modernity and (2) what was the racial nature of freedom during the age of racial slavery? As he carefully weaves a rejoinder to these two, Hickman also addresses an array of subordinate but nonetheless substantial theoretical quandaries that have congress under the heuristic aegis of an overarching effort: to render visible the racial and colonial systems of what Western scholars have long called modernity. Among these other quandaries are interpretations of major figures of Black freedom such and Frederick Douglass and European philosophers of race and history such as Georg Hegel. Hickman characterizes modernity as a veritable rupture and decisive departure from the previous historical period (42 et passim). As Hickman demonstrates, many authors have regarded modernity as essentially characterized by intellection (the Enlightenment) or the ascent of popular sovereignty (political liberalism) or even vanquishing religion to the social hinterlands of the private sphere (the now-discredited secularization thesis). It is race and colonialism, however, that constitute modernity.

His larger argument about heretical Black freedom is especially compelling when he juxtaposes the Haitian and US American declarations of independence and, by extension, their rationalities of rebellion. He notes that Thomas Jefferson’s drafts of the White settler declaration moved from lamenting the failure of the British empire to serve as good stewards of the colonies (so the Anglo-American rebellion is a sort of tragic outcome of a yet greater tragedy) to embracing rebellion as an autonomous expression worthy in its own right yet still under the authority of an absolute “Creator” who has endowed natural rights. Jeffersonian freedom operates thus not so much under the sign of autonomy as under that of heteronomy—“the laws of nature and of nature’s God” as he quotes Jefferson. Hickman finds that the Haitian declaration, by contrast, is “openly, joyously heretical” as it articulates independence by gesturing to what Hickman admiringly calls the “heathenish ancestor-worship” signaled by the spirits of deceased Haitians who demand appeasement through war against White gods and White slavery.

Hickman’s volume devotes far greater attention over multiple chapters to the literary output of writers such as Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville. Yet, his reading of Haitian politics is arguably the most forceful and crystallized demonstration that heretical cosmography is the governing element of Black racial subjectivity. As the “heathen” spirits invoked by the Haitian declaration of independence indicate, the “Absolute” that Hegel idealized neither contains nor governs the grammar and imaginary of Blacks in the Atlantic world who defied White supremacism. Although numerous Black rebels invested considerably in the logic of White Christian apotheosis—e.g., the White god permits Africans to be enslaved so they can encounter Christian salvation—many other Black rebels certainly refused to limit themselves to worshipping the White god insofar as they rejected its grand theodicy of Black patience and longsuffering in the face of Euro-Christian terror. This, Hickman tells us, means that we must understand such formations of Black rebellion constitute a different genealogy, one of “heretical antislavery” (256). Hickman thus challenges readers to consider that “the Haitian revolution represents Africa’s definitionally immanent revolt against the Euro-Christian Absolute and so opens the history of human autonomy in global modernity” (258).

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of Hickman’s intervention as he argues that Black freedom is a racial and theological heresy. Indeed, the very means by which he demonstrates Black rebellion as a theological formation is a complex and astounding insight—this is no facile interpretation of theology. Scholars are accustomed to locating theology within the bounds of churches, missionary tracts, sermons, and the like. But as the book unfolds, readers begin to appreciate that European modernity emerged as Whites encountered and subsequently divided the world’s human populations into various inferior races. This was enabled through the apotheosis of the White race as the embodiment of a cosmic, racial Absolute. As a consequence, the Black Prometheus (or Black rebellion against White slavery, alternatively), emerged as unthinkable, as an inherent contradiction.

If there is any doubt about the explicative significance of this intervention, consider what rationalities and racial practices have rendered armed Black militancy against White people as illegitimate (the Mau Mau rebellion) within the context of Western politics, whereas violent White men continue to enjoy public valorization when they take up arms to fight for their freedom. This includes those such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who pillaged, sexually assaulted, and brutalized Black women, men, and children. Why are these men so honored in the West? And why does the West not honor Nat Turner, Queen Nanny, or Huey Newton? Anyone who imagines that the answer to this question is not rooted in apotheosis (divinizing Whiteness), demonization (rendering Black rebellion and Black people themselves as evil and reprehensible), ritual (killing Black bodies with impunity), and theological structures should hasten and read Hickman.

This demonstration accomplishes something else as an inevitable consequence. Hickman has produced a stunning and probing assessment of secularism that forcefully displays its racial constitution by foregrounding colonialism and slavery. By peeling away the layers of empire, slavery, rebellion, and apotheosis that inhere to secular formations of the Atlantic world, Hickman has blazed a clear trail for others who might wish to engage with modernity’s constitution.

As one reads Hickman’s volume, one is easily amazed by both the breadth of his learning (his scholarship is truly unrestrained by disciplinary boundaries) and the interlocutionary generosity of his prose—his pages are profusely populated with the names of scholars whose work has enabled his own. Given a work of such unassailable brilliance, it is fair to say that those who might desire most to disagree with his conclusions, should they wish to be seriously regarded, will have their work cut out for them. This is not to say that all his claims and methodological choices are beyond the terrain of legitimate debate. In fact, most of his argumentation presumes the legitimacy of investing in the exceptionalism of the historical period that he and most scholars have termed “modernity.” This is something that raises deep problems. Authors such as Kathleen Biddick, Charles Long, and Geraldine Heng, for instance, have written compelling critiques of the near-ubiquitous tendency of Western scholars to assert a fundamental, temporal divide of historical time into modern and pre-modern periods. Biddick explains how European Christians developed an ideology of White racial modernity by stereotyping Jews as people whose racial nature prevented them from inhabiting the Christian present; they supposedly belonged to a past era. This Christian ideology, not coincidentally, easily aligned with anti-Jewish pogroms and fantasies of extermination. Biddick thus terms this “identitarian time,” as it structures a Christian identity into an ideology of temporality—modernity is the time that belongs to Western Christians. In a related but more race-critical fashion, Heng has noted that asserting the uniqueness of modernity requires one to simply ignore state practices of racialization that occur at least as early as the 1200s within the context of the Crusades. Whereas Biddick ignores Muslim-Christian relations, Heng is more encompassing and recognizes how both Muslims and Jews became targets for Christians who claimed that Christian princes could brook no confidence in the Muslims and Jews they governed, as these non-Christians were treated as secret enemies who were simply plotting to commit treason to Christian rulers.1

On this score, one can begin to consider how Hickman’s reference to 1492 is forced to bear what might be an inordinate and imprecise burden as the singular point for dividing the historical time of human existence into something so fundamental as pre-modern and modern. This is true despite the fact that Hickman clearly employs 1492 as a shorthand for the rise of Europe’s trans-oceanic empires. Consider that the Mongol empire, which peaked in the 1300s, was the largest land-based empire in human history—larger than any of Europe’s. Is it not at least debatable that those who experienced Mongolian conquest and the changes it wrought felt that they were experiencing cataclysmic events unprecedented and discontinuous with previous ones? Were not the most pressing political conflicts of Mongolian colonialism concerned with metacosmographic issues—how to handle outsiders (“new” peoples) and their foreign religions and practices? Even a cursory reading of the travel writings by Muhammad Ibn Battuta (1304–1368), moreover, should disrupt doubts over the cataclysmic impact of polycultural encounters among peoples predating those of the Spanish, Portuguese, and British empires. We should keep in mind, by the way, that Christopher Columbus believed he had traveled to India and not to what we think of today as the Americas. As far as he and his co-mercenaries were concerned, they had found an all-sea route to South Asia, thereby skirting Muslim control of the Mediterranean Sea routes. Thus, all the talk of the “Indies” in the Atlantic realms. There is a reason, furthermore, that eyewitness accounts of monstrous races is always empire-talk—it goes back at least as far as ancient Greek imperialism; those who lived unconquered beyond the boundaries of Greece’s empire were dehumanized as monsters and cannibals.

Beyond this, and perhaps related to it, is the ease and completeness with which deploying a temporality of modernity seems to require scholars to elide seemingly modern practices of world-making that emerged among Muslims and their Islamicate polities before the so-called modern period and by which Muslims eventually influenced the Christian peoples they subjugated throughout the European cape of Asia (as well as in South Asia and North Africa). As Charles Long has argued, Europeans developed an ideology of modernity as a racial narrative about themselves, structuring White Europeans as racial subjects who uniquely delivered newness (modernity) to all other peoples throughout the world.2 Although not a settled issue, it is at least imperative to consider the relationship between Europeans inventing the notion of modernity and the White racial project of sanitizing European history of its Islamic genealogies. Consider, as just one example, that European philosophy emerged through Muslim philosophy (it literally began as Western European Christians read and emulated Muslim philosophy). Despite this historical fact, contemporary Western philosophers now claim their intellectual heritage derives directly from the Greeks (read as White Europeans), and they permit nary a whisper of Muslims, except perhaps to say Muslims reminded them of their Greek philosophical heritage.

To his great credit, however, Hickman devotes an entire chapter to Muslim struggles for freedom in the Caucasus region—he focuses on Imam Shamil’s resistance to Russian imperialism in the Caucasus region. His analysis demonstrates how Islamic practices of freedom paralleled those envisioned by Europeans as emblematic of Promethean virtue against tyranny. Shamil was lauded by European authors as a type of Caucasian Prometheus. As the author explains, the result was a complicated strain of assertions about Islam and Western European prowess that at times lauded Shamil and at other times desperately fashioned a semblance of difference between Christianity and Islam. This even inspired a perpetual angst that Islam was Christianity’s fierce other, a sort of doppelgänger that haunted the imagination of White racial supremacy.

None of these complications of modernity, however, upset the accomplishment of Hickman’s Black Prometheus. Rather hopefully, they should point to the further generative work that might emerge as scholars of secularism, religion, and race begin to grapple with this watershed text. Hickman has gone further than any other scholar to blaze a trail for scholarship on the racial and colonial structures of modernity by examining the colonial genealogy of freedom. This book will command the attention of scholars for many years to come and will easily inspire subsequent scholarship that may continue the important work of excavating the colonial wreckage of racial freedom, theology, and empire.