“All Things Shall Be Added Unto Him”: Gothic Accretion in <i>The Confessions of Nat Turner</i>

Abstract In 1831 Nat Turner led an uprising of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, known as Nat Turner’s Rebellion. This article argues that a pamphlet published after the event, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), based on a white lawyer’s jailhouse interviews with him post-capture, is usefully understood within the context of recent critical scholarship theorizing Gothic entanglements with plantation slavery and capitalist world systems that depend on brutal somatic and material resource extraction. It contends that the Confessions ought not be solely interpreted within the nonfiction genres of criminal confession and trial report that no doubt informed its production. A focus only on the determinative power of those contexts glosses over the Turner character who emerges there: a not-only-human figure coextensive with vast earthly, meteorological, and cosmic forces. By attending to the text’s rhetorical excesses—an effect the author terms “Gothic accretion”—she situates it within Gothic iterations of contemporary posthuman and plantationocene criticism. Read this way, the fundamental strangeness of the Turner figure that emerges is a not-only-human Black subjectivity that foments white racial terror in perpetuity. The article concludes that this accretive Gothic Turner offers compelling politico-aesthetic options for thinking about what Nat Turner’s Rebellion meant and means.