The Mayflower and the Slave Ship
Pilgrim-Puritan Origins in the Antebellum Black Imagination
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272192 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kenyon Gradert (Auburn University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 63-90 |
| Publication date | 2019-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlz025 |
| OpenAlex | W2971995455 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 28 |
This essay argues that antebellum black writers claimed America in part by reimagining a national rhetoric of Pilgrim-Puritan origins. Various connections have been drawn between the Puritans and early black writers, including a revised tradition of typological identification with Israel, captivity narratives, and, most frequently, the “black jeremiad.” In addition to these scholarly genealogies, black writers struggled more directly with their spiritual genealogies in an effort to reconcile a growing investment in American and Protestant identity with an emergent sense of black roots. Since Paul Gilroy, a growing number of scholars have examined the importance of origins for antebellum black writers in conversation with dominant Euro-American traditions, yet American Protestantism remains a minor presence in these studies. If early black studies of antiquity, biblical history, and European historiography, for example, were crucial to an emergent sense of black roots, they intertwined in complex ways with black writers’ investment in American Protestantism and its vision of history. Ultimately, black writers further radicalized abolitionists’ revolutionary Puritan genealogy as they made it their own, expanding this spiritual lineage to sanction fugitive slaves, black revolutionaries, and eventually the black troops of the American Civil War, imagined as the culmination of a sacred destiny that was both black and American, traceable to the Mayflower and the slave ship alike
African american · Archaeology · Art · Black church · Destiny (ISS module) · Ethnology · Historiography · Literature · Pilgrim · Protestantism · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies
Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, Volume I to 1877 (Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience)
The black Atlantic
The Slave's Cause
Slave Culture
A Faithful Account of the Race
Swept into Puritanism
Courage and Conscience
Memory's Nation
Nathan Irvin Huggins, the Art of History, and the Irony of the American Dream
The Negro in the American Revolution
Slave Culture
Liberation Historiography
The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865
Memory's Nation
Home Fronts
Courage and Conscience
Sisters of the Spirit
Exodus
Henry Highland Garnet
The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va
The American Negro as Historical Outsider, 1836-1935
Exodus
Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms
The Rivalry Between Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet
The Negro in the American Revolution
Black Prophets of Justice
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |