The Book of Mormonas Amerindian Apocalypse

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3301797
AutoresJared Hickman (Johns Hopkins University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen86
Número3
Páginas429-461
Fecha de publicación2014-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Literature (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00029831-2717371
OpenAlexW2062410109
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas28

The Book of Mormon is perhaps best known in Americanist circles as a version of the Indians-as-Israelites theory. It features the racialized division of the progeny of the text's founding diasporic Jewish figure, Lehi, into wicked "Lamanites," who are cursed with "a skin of blackness" and were understood by the earliest readers to be the ancestors of Amerindian peoples, and the righteous "Nephites," the fair-skinned narrators of The Book of Mormon. This essay shows how The Book of Mormon's foundational raci(al)ist orthodoxy autodeconstructs, and in so doing not only offers a vision of racial apocalypse diametrically opposed to what would come to be known as Manifest Destiny-one resonant with contemporaneous Amerindian prophetic movements-but also challenges the literalist hermeneutics that found warrant for Euro-Christian colonization in the transcendental authority of "the Bible alone

Apocalypticism · Art · Destiny (ISS module) · Epistemology · Genealogy · Hermeneutics · Israelites · Judaism · Literature · Orthodoxy · Theology · Transcendental number · Warrant · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices