The Literary Beginnings of Afro-Protestantism

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1 examines slave narratives as representative of a literary culture through which enslaved Africans both apprehended and inhabited the modern world. This chapter contends that the authors and communities that produced these narratives authorized a tradition of Protestantism that signified something as distinctively black as it was quintessentially American. Slave narratives set the parameters for a particular set of practices that defined a tradition of politically engaged Afro-Protestantism in the United States and provided a critical space for establishing a genealogy of ideas that eventually gave rise to the terms “The Black Church” and “black religion.” This chapter highlights the ways in which an Afro-Protestant orthodoxy was stitched into the fabric of black subjectivity and social life, and thus was made constitutive of the various forms of racial authenticity that developed in its wake. These spiritual autobiographies were emblematic of an entangled set of social practices that complicated the logics of binary racial classifications that developed under the terms of colonial contact and chattel slavery in the Atlantic World.