Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature

1. Making “Darkness Visible”: Milton and Early African American Literature

1 1 Making “Darkness Visible” Milton and Early African American Literature “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” —John 1:1 Ever since Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773, there has been a need for theorizing the Word that governs African Americans’ receptions of John Milton . That need has intensified for more than two and a half centuries as subsequent African American writers and orators continued to follow Wheatley’s Miltonic lead by making darkness visible in reception studies devoted to England’s epic poet of liberty. Through the art of poetic intertextuality, writers from Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Sutton Griggs have evidenced their remastery of the English language by completing and complicating Milton in ways that have yet to be examined in literary criticism. These interpoetic engagements are worthy of scholarly annotation because they appropriate Milton and his canonical authority beyond ornamentation. When early African American authors engaged Milton on rhetorical grounds of fallenness in poetic tradition , they participated in vocations of salvific ministry. Moreover , they enriched the gospel of biblical Scripture according to Milton’s reception of that canonical text. As a result, these lords of 2 Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt re-creation shift and remaster the Western canon, rupturing it with their orthodox and unorthodox interpretations of Milton in order to critique slavery and social injustice while enunciating political postures of black selfhood. Milton’s early African American audiences undertake these (w)rites of passage and English remastery by rhetorically identifying with the canonical Christian poet in causes of liberty and radical social reform. Literary criticism has yet to theorize on the hermeneutic practices deployed by this unseen collective of black authors. This void in scholarship proves increasingly detrimental to critics in Milton and African American literary studies as contemporary writers in the African American tradition continue to extend these intertextual ties to England’s epic poet of liberty. For instance, Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy is a recent text that tropes with Milton, yet no theoretical examination exists to account for her relation to her predecessors within this neglected literary tradition . Until now, Miltonic receptions by his black sisterhood and brotherhood have been nearly (in)visible, primarily relegated to footnotes and endnotes, but rarely considered in body paragraphs of literary criticism to any substantive degree. This void has denied scholars opportunities for discovering and exploring the racial trajectories associated with Milton’s afterlife throughout the literary histories of the African diaspora. To be (in)visible in Milton reception history is to exist in plain view yet unbeknownst to a seeing audience. It is a kind of (in)visibility closely aligned with Toni Morrison’s theory of “Africanist Presence” and its critical significance to studies of white-authored texts. Morrison’s theory challenges critics to “play in the dark” with overlooked figures of racial presence in white-authored texts. The result of such an investigative impulse enriches appreciations of the signifying power of Africanisms in literary works that would otherwise go unnoticed by readers who have not been encouraged to analyze racial signs of blackness in texts by white authors. It is in this spirit that I, like Milton in Paradise Lost, undertake a literary project that is “yet unattempted” in tradition. In Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt, I examine early African American audiences’ intertextual receptions of the epic poet. An examination of this type makes darkness visible in reception studies of Making “Darkness Visible” 3 Milton. Conversely, it illumines Milton’s absented presence in African American literary studies. By traversing within and across the color line in literary tradition, this project aims to encourage a new criticism that sheds further interpretive light on what Joseph Wittreich identifies as “Milton’s (Post)Modernity.”1 An understanding of this (post)modern Milton calls attention to a kind of poetry that “struggles against the outworn creeds of an atrophying religion, obliterates the pastness of the past and that, written emphatically in the present tense, strives to wrest from the present a new future.”2 Miltonic appropriations in early African American tradition reveal this distinct interpretive community as caught up in similar struggles due to their marginalized status in Western civilization. One of the routes this community charted in order to elevate themselves from spheres of...