American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (review)

In 1955, R.W.B. Lewis defined the literary archetype of the American Adam as "an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources" (quoted on p. 7). Many have observed that only white men could get anywhere near the experience of this fantasy of autonomy, but I saw these lines afresh after reading Joanna Brooks's study of early African American and Native American writing. After all, who in America was "bereft of ancestry" and "the usual inheritances"—who stood alone, thrown on their "own unique resources"—but African Americans and Native Americans displaced by colonial violence? Toni Morrison would have a field day with Lewis's language: it is a perfect example of the way American fantasies of (white) manhood manifest a submerged awareness of oppressed Others. Read as an inadvertent description of slavery, Lewis's passage unwittingly echoes nineteenth-century apologists who thought of slavery as emancipation from African paganism, and "Indian removal" as emancipation from primitive habits. Joanna Brooks does not note (or need to note) this irony, but she proposes that Lazarus, not Adam, is the biblical type best matched to the circumstances of nonwhite people in early America. "Lazarus," she writes, "embodied the imposed discontinuities, cruelties, and mortalities of black Atlantic life, as well as an elective orientation toward change. The figure of Lazarus also indicates the challenges of representing black experience by conventional narrative means; the improbability, or irrationality, of life as a series of near-death experiences defies modern assumptions about narrative, agency, and subjectivity. As an emergent figure within and a symbol of early African American culture, Lazarus represents the drive to claim life from death and meaning from chaos, to honor through stories shared experiences of loss, and to witness to the possibility of redemption" (101).

Brooks's argument in its general form is familiar: as survivors of multiple forms of physical and social violence, many slaves, ex-slaves, and dispossessed Native Americans turned not to self-reliance but to various forms of group action and theologies of collective struggle. They had no illusions of being "self-propelling," and some of them adopted a Calvinist God as a more empowering alternative to the slaveholders and landholders who controlled their earthly lives. Such claims are well supported by the evidence, though of course similar beliefs and covenant theologies also sustained the Puritans and other white religious groups. The important contribution here is in the focus on a small cluster of little-studied but rich late eighteenth-century published works: it is exciting to see Brooks's take on Samson Occom's Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations (1774); John Marrant's missionary Journal (1790) and sermon to the African Lodge (1789); Prince Hall's Charges to the African Lodges at Charles town (1792) and Menotomy (1797); and Absalom Jones and Richard Allen's Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the Year 1793; And a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon them in some late Publications (1794).

Brooks has largely stayed away from the autobiographical materials that attracted the first attention of scholars of early American minority literatures and addressed instead texts that embody or document a sense of public vocation. She embeds these texts convincingly in the facts, places, and intellectual networks of their production and initial reception, and she works gracefully with the Bible to undergird her accomplished textual readings. All these texts, Brooks claims, addressed and found a significant nonwhite readership. While this claim cannot be substantiated or refuted in all cases, it makes American Lazarus a refreshing change from the many studies of early...