Beyond Nation. Beyond Methodism

Abstract

Like Rob Nixon’s work, James Campbell’s Songs of Zion contributes to the new impulse in comparative history of uncovering the connections between societies under comparison. Campbell describes the conduit between two societies acting as a ‘looking glass in which Africans and African Americans examined one another, and, in the process, reexamined themselves’.2 Campbell’s focus is the connection between the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and the Ethiopian Church in South Africa. Aware that historians have ‘paid insufficient attention to Africa’s pervasiveness in African American intellectual and imaginative life’, he undertakes ‘a study of transplantation, showing how a creed devised by and for African Americans was appropriated and transformed in a variety of South African contexts’.