Through the Looking Glass

Abstract

Abstract After reading the first two chapters of this book, one might be forgiven for asking what was “African” about African Methodism. Notwithstanding its name, the AME Church was clearly the most respectable and “orthodox” of black American independent churches. While some recognizably African elements surfaced in services, AME leaders tended to disdain if not actively to suppress those beliefs and practices that scholars today celebrate as signs of Africa’s persistence in the New World. The whole point of “racial vindication” was to demonstrate blacks’ capacity to uphold “recognized standards” in their personal and collective lives and thereby to hasten abolition and full inclusion in American society. Surely people interested in connections between black America and Africa should look elsewhere than the AME Church. Better yet, they should rephrase the question. With a few notable exceptions, historians of black America have been so preoccupied with finding evidence of Africa in the realm of culture that they have overlooked the continent’s pervasiveness in black intellectual and imaginative life. In a nation ruled by the descendants of Europe, Africa is and has always been the touch stone of black distinctiveness, the literal and figurative point of departure for the construction of African American identity, whatever one conceives it to be. And nowhere was the question of African Americans’ relationship with Africa more explicitly confronted than in the AME Church.