Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature by J. Laurence Cohen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature by J. Laurence Cohen Brian Britt J. Laurence Cohen, Excavating Exodus: Biblical Typology and Racial Solidarity in African American Literature (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2021) Excavating Exodus presents close readings of African American primary sources, including pamphlets, poetry, and fiction, as expressions of distinct positions on racial identity. With a focus on uses of Exodus and the Moses story from the nineteenth century to the present, Excavating Exodus represents a major contribution to scholarship on African American reception of the Bible. The study moves from a discussion of Mosaic subjectivity in David Walker's pamphlet, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), Martin R. Delaney's Blake: or; The Huts of America (1859–1862), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's writings to the twentieth-century works of Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and William Melvin Kelly's A Different Drummer (1962). Contemporary readings of Exodus include works by Beyoncé and Eve Ewing's poetic rendering of Exodus in terms of Chicago politics, featuring Mayor Richard J. Daley as Pharaoh (158–161). Cohen's study articulates a set of arguments about what these sources say and how they use Exodus and Moses to say it. In dialogue with Albert Raboteau, Eddie Glaude, Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Tommie Shelby, Sharon A. Stanley, and others, Cohen advocates a view of African American solidarity that is more pragmatic than essentialist, yet "affective and political" at the same time (25). In [End Page 103] building this account, Cohen displays an impressive range of engagements with the Exodus story, across many genres and perspectives, with particular emphasis on historical and political context. One of the most valuable contributions of Cohen's study is his use of "signifying" as a mode of intertextual engagement. Like biblical reception in general, signifying applies to a wide range of interpretive practices. For instance, Cohen argues that Martin R. Delany's Blake not only represents its main character as a Moses figure, but also signifies Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) (56). Cohen similarly suggests that Frances Harper responded to David Walker's 1829 use of Moses in her 1859 essay, "Our Greatest Want." This "unmotivated signification," a concept borrowed from Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey, produces intertextual dialogue and development across the authors and texts. Yet it is not always clear how to distinguish an author's act of signification from Cohen's comparison, such as when he suggests that the character Tom Anderson in Iola Leroy (1892) signifies Stowe and Frederick Douglass alike (75–77). Cohen's sources engage multiple forms of biblical reception, ranging from direct citation of Moses and Exodus to generally Mosaic figures who bear only distant allusions and echoes of the Bible. Cohen skillfully surveys these diverse interpretive approaches, suggesting the categories of "typological rigidity" and "typological plasticity" to account for different interpretive approaches to Exodus (48). Unlike the moralistic rigidity that simply contrasted good Mosaic abolitionists against evil Pharaonic slaveholders, Cohen finds more flexible interpretive possibilities within the abolitionism of Martin R. Delaney and others who imagine a new kind of religious reality beyond slavery (60–62). But the real story of Excavating Exodus is not the how but the what of biblical exegesis. Insofar as Cohen frames Exodus interpretations "as a microcosm of the debates at the heart of the Civil Rights movement," his study contributes more to civil rights history than biblical reception history, leading to this four-part classification: "pro-Exodus desegregationism (King), anti-Exodus democratic pluralism (Ellison), pro-Exodus racial separatism (Malcolm X), and anti-Exodus radical individualism (Kelley)" (149, 153). Excavating Exodus culminates in this useful taxonomy, and it would be interesting to see even more about how these political categories relate to the rhetorical and hermeneutical strategies that produced them. Excavating Exodus bears the traces of the doctoral dissertation from which it draws, but the book's clarity and originality make an important contribution to scholarship on African American racial identity and biblical reception. For the study of American religion more generally, the book is a reminder...