The denigration of Africana religious acoustemologies, the prophetic pamphlet of Robert Alexander Young and its Afro-Jamaican religious influences, the anti-racist activism of Francis James Grimké, and Afro-Protestant teachings of Hebrew and about Jewishness comprise this set of scholars’ interdisciplinary interventions for new accounts of Africana religious histories from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. With sites of novel research that include New Orleans, Manhattan and the Afro-Caribbean, the Presbyterian church, and Howard University, the panelists reveal the importance of sound studies, linguistics, philosophy, and textual studies for pushing the historical study of Africana religions, Black religious leaders, and Black religious ways of being and knowing in the Americas forward.
In 1819, Anglo-American architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe stumbled upon a public market in New Orleans and observed an “Assembly of Negros” singing, dancing, and drumming. Despite the assembly's sacred and social meaning created via Africana religious acoustemologies, Latrobe described the event with terms such as “noise” and “brutally savage.” This description reflects a white racial logic that emerged in the interstices between sight and sound. Latrobe’s auditory skepticism provides insight into the ways in which power and discipline operate over and against Black religious ways of knowing. His conception of public space opens up possibilities for considering how formations of race and religion function through the sonic landscape. By examining “noise” as a constitutive force in the processes of racialization and construction of secular space, this paper sheds light on sound and argues for its racial and spatial significance in early 19th century New Orleans.
In February 1829, Robert Alexander Young self-published an incendiary pamphlet in Manhattan that prophesied the arrival of a Grenadian messiah who would lead Africans throughout the world in revolt against slavery. While widely celebrated, the pamphlet has long posed a historiographical problem for scholars of Black religious thought, owing largely to difficulties with Young’s life and vocabulary. This talk offers a new historical redescription and conjectural interpretation of Young’s pamphlet, focusing particularly upon his invocation of Psalm 68:31 and the Afro-Jamaican traditions of Obeah and Native Baptism. I argue that Young’s citation of the verse can be said to rely upon certain ritual and linguistic norms associated with these traditions, which inform his attempts to call into existence a worldwide African community. On my interpretation, Young’s textual performances of prophecy constitute an analysis of power relations routed through Africana traditions, by which another world may be imagined and enacted.
This paper is a study of a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cleric, Francis James Grimké, who championed civil rights and challenged racism and discrimination against African Americans. It specifically traces Grimké’s efforts to expose the role of the Presbyterian Church in its historical perpetuation of racism and to advocate for social justice as a means to achieve race elevation. Francis Grimké was known as the Black Puritan, a term that was meant to highlight the strict moral philosophy that guided him as he critiqued classical puritanism in American Christianity.
The study of Hebrew by African-American Christians has a long history that spans much of the Atlantic world. As W.A.S. Wright wrote in a 1906 article in Howard’s University Journal about a campaign to suppress the study of Hebrew on campus, “it is well known that there are students who are “crazy” over Hebrew yet woefully lacking in the other branches.” My paper focuses on three sources I’ve identified to organize and give meaning to this phenomenon in the early 20th century: 1) The annotated Hebrew Bible of Angelina Weld-Grimké, 2) The 1946 study of the Babylonian Talmud by Bishop Charles Lee Russell, and 3) the Hebrew pedagogical notebooks of the early Howard Theology faculty and students. By examining the figural Jew as it emerges in the work of early 20th century “Black Christian Hebraists,” we can better clarify the ubiquitous and ambiguous Jewish figure as it irrupts around the same time in the work of African-American artists and intellectuals. Hurston’s “De Jew” or Langston Hughes “Fine Clothes to the Jew” come to mind, as do figures such as Wentworth Arthur Matthew and “Fern” in Jean Toomer’s Cane.