Black Prometheus

<p>How did an ancient mythological figure who stole fire from the gods become a face of the modern lending his name to trailblazing spaceships and radical publishing outfits alike? How did Prometheus come to represent a notion of civilizational progress through revolution--scientific political and spiritual--and thereby to center nothing less than a myth of modernity itself ? The answer <em>Black Prometheus </em>gives is that certain features of the myth--its geographical associations iconography of bodily suffering and function as a limit case in a long tradition of absolutist political theology--made it ripe for revival and reinvention in a historical moment in which freedom itself was racialized in what was the Age both of Atlantic revolution and Atlantic slavery. Contained in the various incarnations of the modern Prometheus--whether in Mary Shelley's esoteric novel <em>Frankenstein</em> Denmark Vesey's real-world recruitment of slave rebels or popular travelogues representing Muslim jihadists against the Russian empire in the Caucasus-- is<br />a profound debate about the means and ends of liberation in our globalized world. Tracing the titan's rehabilitation and unprecedented exaltation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across a range of genres and geographies turns out to provide a way to rethink the relationship between race religion and modernity and to interrogate the Eurocentric and secularist assumptions of our deepest intellectual traditions of critique.</p>