Unfortunate Fall: Ethiopianism and Theodicy in Early Nineteenth-Century African American Thought

Abstract

Abstract Many scholars of African American and Africana religions have argued that Ethiopianism provided a fertile vocabulary for making sense of Black suffering. Linking Ethiopianism especially to the prophetic genre of theodicy, this article contends that it also provided a narrative framework within which nineteenth-century African Americans imagined and enacted novel forms of race-making and peoplehood. To this end, it offers readings of theodicy in the work of David Walker and Maria Stewart. In different ways, their uses of theodicy called into existence a global African community, whose boundaries exceeded the temporal and geographical parameters of the US and the Americas and whose agency was invested with God-given significance, such that, if exercised properly, Africans could work to redeem themselves from the horrors of the modern/colonial world.