Tomlins’ In the Matter of Nat Turner is a provocative and important contribution to the growing scholarship about Turner’s revolt. In a prologue about William Styron, Tomlins lays out the theoretical foundation for the project, which is to enliven Turner by paying careful attention to the sources that both describe Turner and resonate with the present day. Inspired by the eclectic style of Walter Benjamin, Tomlins takes six different approaches to Turner, trying to illuminate the enigmatic leader of the United States’ most deadly slave insurrection.1
Tomlins’ first chapter focuses on the most important source on the revolt, Thomas R. Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (Richmond, 1832). Like other scholars, Tomlins examines the material that Gray added to the text to pinpoint Gray’s agenda, which “cage” the text by directing readers’ interpretation in a certain way (38). This observation is not new, but Tomlins follows it with one...