Rape, Race, and Revolution in the Black Gallows Narrative

Abstract This essay offers a reading of the famous 1790 picaresque gallows narrative Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain that documents the life of the titular Joseph Mountain, a Black highwayman and convicted rapist of considerable notoriety. Written by a white amanuensis, Mountain's narrative is heavily ventriloquized, and its richness lies precisely in the impossibility of fully retrieving the Black narrative voice it constructs. The essay attends to how the Black narrator's revolutionary actions and his alleged sexual crimes are conflated, signalling intersections between the reactionary fear of revolution and the racialized fear of Black sexuality.