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Although the Genesis story of Joseph’s enslavement and triumphant rise to power would seem to be directly applicable to African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars differ on the importance of the Joseph cycle to African American writers. Cain Hope Felder asserts in Troubling Biblical Waters that “the story of Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers (Gen. 37:1–36) and the great Exodus saga (Exodus, Deuteronomy) have become focal points in the Pentateuch for Blacks” (17); yet Felder only references a small portion of the entire narrative about Joseph, and he offers no example of a single black text that draws its inspiration from Genesis 37. More recently the debate has been framed by Phillip Richards and Allen Dwight Callahan, who differ sharply about the significance and interpretation of Joseph. Richards has called the books of Genesis and Exodus, especially the story of Joseph in Genesis 37–50, the “prototypes for Early Black Anglophone writing,” while Callahan argues that “African Americans rarely identified with Joseph” (112).1 It is important to note that Richards reads the text as fundamentally about “the displaced —by virtue of nationality, race, class or social provenance—hero within the domestic world of the upper-class or aristocratic household of another culture ” (223). Callahan, however, views Joseph as a story of upward mobility: “Joseph ’s boundless confidence and upward mobility, occasional reverses notwithstanding , was so unlike the collective experience of American slaves and their descendants that his story did not speak to their present condition” (112). The meaning of Joseph’s plight, then, appears to be in the eyes of the beholders. The story of Joseph enters the discourse of race and slavery, both through correspondence and negation, sameness and difference. In its earliest appropriation , the Puritan judge Samuel Sewall used the story for the purposes of arguing against the slave trade (The Selling of Joseph). In an early example of the “brotherhood of man” ideology, Sewall argued that whites selling Africans into slavery was analogous to Joseph’s brothers selling him to the Egyptian slave c h a p T e r ฀ f i v e “beyond mortal vision” i d e n T i f i c aT i o n ฀ a n d ฀ m i s c e g e n aT i o n ฀ i n ฀ T h e฀ ฀ j o s e p h ฀ c yc l e ฀ a n d ฀ h a r r i e T ฀ e . ฀ W i l s o n ’ s ฀ o u r ฀ n i g 8 0 ฀ c h a p T e r ฀ f i v e caravan. Calling enslaved Africans “the Sons of Adam” and (at least potentially) sons (and daughters?) of “the last adam” (i.e., Christ), Sewall concludes that “originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery.” Sewall’s pamphlet ranges over several ideological supports for slavery and the slave trade, including the curse of Ham exegesis and the doctrine of merciful enslavement. His quotation of Ephesians sums up his counter-hermeneutic: “since the partition Wall is broken down, inordinate Self love should likewise be demolished.”2 That his argument is primarily against the slave trade, and only secondarily about slavery in general, is clear from his quotation of the economic Latin phrase, “Caveat Emptor!” Sewall wrote the pamphlet, among other motives, as part of his defense in the ruling of Adam, a slave who sought freedom from his owner, Judge Saffin. In this “battle of the judges,” Saffin directly refutes Sewall’s exegesis of the Joseph narrative in A Brief and Candid Answer to a Late Printed Sheet Entitled The Selling of Joseph: the negroes character Cowardly and cruel are those Blacks Innate, Prone to Revenge, Imp of inveterate hate He that exasperates them, soon espies Mischief and Murder in their very eyes. Libidinous, Deceitful, False and Rude, The Spume Issue of Ingratitude. The Premises consider’d, all may tell, How near good Joseph they are parallel. As Sewall sought to forge a link between African Americans and Joseph (and by extension African Americans and Adam/Christ), Saffin’s goal is not only to weaken but to destroy the link through the use of racial stereotypes. The use of the word “parallel” in Saffin’s verse is interesting, as it resonates with “parable,” which in Greek means “to throw alongside.” The value of Joseph as a parable for African American identity in narrative depends, it seems, on the value one assigns to...

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