The Death of Christ

Abstract

Abstract This chapter continues the investigation of an emerging Afro‐Christian sensibility struggling with and against modernity by considering another text of American and African American letters, the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. If Hammon's Narrative occupies the moment of the birth of Christ, Douglass's occupies that of the death and resurrection of Christ. The two Narratives together position black existence in its entirety inside of the economy of Christ's life. In this way, Douglass's Narrative pushes further the theological gesture begun in Hammon's tale, namely, articulating a vision of the person and work of Christ (Christology) that entails a counternarrative of Christian identity, one grounded in the particularity of Christ's Jewish‐covenantal and therefore nonracial flesh for the weakening of modernity's racial imagination of whiteness and the Christian supersessionism that founds it.