Roundtable by Mindy Lin
Colonialism from Past to Present—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.5
Cite: Lin, Mindy. 2021. “Colonialism from Past to Present—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 16-17.
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Etched onto the ocean-battered surface of Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, the year 1620 remains ingrained in the cultural and literary memories of over three centuries of American identity. As a collective imaginary, the cultural monolith of American national belonging partakes in a historical narrative that extends its roots far beyond the shores of the North American coast and into the fragmented, mobile histories of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. The notions of Anglo-centricity in the dominant discourse of the Enlightenment are challenged by the existence of an extensive anthology of literatures that echoes many of the transnational experiences of the colonial legacy through storied portrayals of pivotal transatlantic figures.

Olivia Fairfield in The Woman of Colour, an anonymous novel about a mixed-race Jamaican heroine who must marry her white English cousin to retain her fortune, and the genealogical memories of the 1619 Project powerfully embody the voices of the oft-overlooked threads of Enlightenment prosperity—the plantations, the slave trade, and the fragmentation of people and communities—that characterize the timeline of New World discovery. Dating the history of the United States is an endeavor that necessitates a retelling of the stories that counter longstanding cultural narratives of white imperial dominancy. In the postcolonial context, apprehending the Enlightenment’s ideological narrative is a social imperative that necessitates the creation of literary spaces for the many Black men and women who embody Paul Gilroy’s vision of a “rhizomorphic, fractal” Atlantic.¹

Literature communicates the enduring effects of centuries of transnational interaction, one replete with struggles against the hierarchies of social power enabled by racialized imperialism. Having witnessed the subjugation of her people under imperial conquest in The Woman of Colour, Olivia Fairfield implicates her cousin’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Merton, for her prejudiced view of Olivia’s Jamaican heritage. Olivia’s unfettered observations of slavery’s inhumanity emerges within her dialogue as she condemns the hypocrisy of colonization and impels Mrs. Merton to affirm the immorality of racist imperial practices: “The feelings of humanity, the principles of my religion, would lead me, as a Christian, I trust, to pray for the extermination of this disgraceful traffic, while kindred claims . . . would likewise impel me to be anxious for the emancipation of my more immediate brethren!”² Likewise, the haunting poetries of the 1619 Project revolutionize modern perceptions of a nation born out of the ashes of a tragic colonial legacy; in each story is evidence of intergenerational trauma and systemic repression that speaks against privileging the colonizer’s narrative in our examinations of American history. Clint Smith writes in his poem, “I slide my ring finger from Senegal to South Carolina & feel the ocean separate a million families,”³ echoing the moving histories of people, communities, and nations that underwrite myths of a unified national identity. These declarations of transnational experience continue to resound the heterogeneity of resistances against the colonizer’s narrative and the salience of centering historically marginalized voices into the timeline of America’s inaugurating moments.

The imprints of racialized colonial ideologies remain embedded in the institutional workings of an American society that has historically privileged uncontested narrative portrayals of its conflicted past. It is the collective efforts of the many visionaries, scholars, and teachers of postcolonial methodology that inform future generations of the significance of revisiting historical experiences that speak against erasure. Contextualized in history and revived through mechanisms of postgenerational study, the literatures of colonialism continue to shape our understanding of the American identity as one partaking in intertwined discourses.

ENDNOTES

[1] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.

[2] Lyndon J. Dominique, ed., The Woman of Colour (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2007), 81.

[3] Clint Smith, “August 1619,” The New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/african-american-poets.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur.

Roundtable by Nourhan
Noury? Nourhan? —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.4
Cite: Nourhan. 2021. “Noury? Nourhan? —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 14-15.
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Names are political. Dealing with coloniality is acknowledging that it functions in both covert and overt methods—that this violence is often internalized. My name is Nourhan. It means “the light of heaven”; my family gave me this name because they found it fitting to my personality. When we immigrated to the United States in 2005, no one besides my family said my name out loud, and when I started my first day of public school in 2008, my third-grade teacher told me, “Your name is really interesting. How do you like Noury?” I stuck with it. I liked that people would finally call me by something, and here’s how I rationalized it: Noury is who I am as an American, and Nourhan is who I am as an Egyptian. I lived with this distinction for a long time and continue to live with it today—discomfort, coloniality, and everything in between. Reading The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi has taught me that reclaiming one’s native name is a form of resistance to the dominant culture’s hegemonic control. By tracing Equiano and Ethe’s relationship to their names, I outline a mode of resistance that I hope to adopt one day.

Olaudah Equiano titles his narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself. The evolution of his name goes as follows: Olaudah Equiano, Michael, Jacob, Gustavas Vassa.¹ To begin his narrative, Equiano gives a detailed account of his native land, citing the geographical markers, government hierarchical positions, economic standing, sociocultural traditions, religious practices, and his own familial background.² Accounts of Equiano’s homeland work together with his determined use of his birth name to claim and reclaim his African identity. In doing so, he resists colonial influence over his life experiences and writes his identity back into the colonial narrative. Equiano writes, “When you make men slaves, you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty.”³ Through the lens of Equiano’s double name, recontextualizing the line “set them in your own conduct” outlines a dichotomy between English and African names: the former is a signifier of oppression and the latter of liberation. The name Gustavas Vassa, which was assigned and not chosen by Equiano, serves as an afterthought in this title, reaffirming that the effects of colonization linger as an afterthought but do not dominate. By titling his narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, Equiano claims that this life belongs to the African man, Olaudah Equiano, and only he gets to name and define himself.

In Homegoing, we see a similar moment with Ethe and H in their chapter, which details the failures of the Reconstruction Era for Black Americans. Ethe leaves H after he calls her another name in bed, and during a tentative reunion, Ethe angrily echoes Equiano’s right to maintain one’s name. She says, “The day you called me that woman’s name, I thought, Ain’t I been through enough? Ain’t just about everything I ever had been taken away from me? My freedom. My family. My body. And now I don’t even own my name?”⁴ The importance of names for Ethe ties her to her cultural identity, the only essence of home she has left. When deprived of her name, Ethe’s personhood and identity were undermined; she was displaced from herself. Claiming her name and ensuring that those around her addressed her by her native name is her microcosmic act of power and resistance. Thus, the importance of her name is elevated to represent not just cultural ties and a claim to identity but also a place for healing from trauma.

Equiano and Ethe both demonstrate how reclamation of names plays a role in the reclamation of your own narrative. Decolonizing is a consistent effort based on the acknowledgment of the overt and covert ways that coloniality functions. How we name ourselves is a testament to that—and maybe someday my Massreya name, Nourhan, will function as a tool of decolonization.

ENDNOTES

[1] Olaudah Equiano, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African,” in Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas, ed. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 155–225: 159.

[2] Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 167–176.

[3] Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 221.

[4] Gyasi, Homegoing, 175.

Roundtable by Kate Ozment
Introduction—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.3
Cite: Ozment, Kate. 2021. “Introduction—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 11-13.
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Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing begins with the story of two eighteenth-century Akan sisters—Effia and Esi—as they stand symbolically above and below a grate in a castle in Cape Coast. The women are half-sisters who never meet and are physically joined only in that moment, unknown to one another, before being separated by an ocean. Above the grate, Effia has just married James Collins, the white British governor of the fort. Effia lives in relative comfort but is separated from her family, culture, and practices and must confront the contradictory dehumanization of and attraction to Black Akan women.¹ Navigating this precarious world is hazardous for Effia and the other wives, including Eccoah, who notes, “There are women down there [in the dungeons] who look like us, and our husbands must learn to tell the difference.”² Below the grate, Esi has been sold into slavery and sits in muck and filth. She and the other women are stacked on one another, raped and assaulted, and beaten until they are moved to ships for transport to the Caribbean. While Effia shudders at the fates of the women, termed “cargo,” below,³ Esi is unable to imagine anything other than the horror of her present, which she refers to as the “Now.”⁴ The destruction of Esi’s conscious ties to her history dominoes through the generations: her daughter Ness does not learn how to speak Twi or understand its ties to the Akan,⁵ and Ness’s grandson H does not receive a full name because his mother committed suicide when she was kidnapped and forced into slavery. Yet through the novel, Gyasi explores not only the destruction of the slave system but also the ability of diasporic Akan people to persist, thrive, and eventually come to a place of healing and return.

Among other things, Gyasi’s novel is evocative for readers of eighteenth-century English literature. In a weaving narrative, Gyasi fictionalizes the stories that we cannot tell because of the destruction of family ties and the subsequent lack of documentation or English interest in printing stories of Black resilience.⁶ Homegoing is resonant with another modern example of engagement with Enlightenment legacies, the 1619 Project. The name focuses on the date the first slave ship traded in North America, and the project combines journalism with creative pieces where authors like Eve L. Ewing, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Jesmyn Ward reimagine key moments in Black history. The project’s lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, explores slavery’s impact on American culture and Black Americans’ contributions to democracy. This focus has unsurprisingly been controversial because centering Black excellence in American culture clashes with national mythmaking rooted in American white supremacy, but it has also won Hannah-Jones a Pulitzer prize.^[7] Both the nonfiction and creative pieces work well with Enlightenment literatures; as an illustrative example, Ewing’s reflection on the Black poet Phillis Wheatley powerfully centers the humanity of an ambiguous author.

Homegoing and the 1619 Project frame a literature course on the British Enlightenment at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and provide a framework for “talking back” to historical literatures. The course’s syllabus features Anglo-American representations of Black and Indigenous lives alongside writings by Black and Indigenous authors. The course also asks students to explore how Enlightenment ideologies were simultaneously responsible for the language of natural rights and equality and the justification for mass enslavement and genocide. For its theoretical grounding, the course pulls from Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and its subsequent discourse and connects this field to resonant iterations in Indigenous studies with Jace Weaver’s Red Atlantic and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies.⁸ We use language about “contact zones” common in colonial studies as we position the work in the course as British identity globally constructed.⁹

Students interleave reading representations of Black and Indigenous peoples in Oroonoko (1688), The Female American (1767), Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack (1800), and The Woman of Colour (1808) with writing by Black and Indigenous authors. Some of these latter texts include Samson Occom’s A Short Narrative of My Life (1768), Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars (1772), Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (1773), Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789). Students contextualize these works with traditional secondary literary scholarship and contemporary perspectives: Gyasi’s novel and the 1619 Project. With Gyasi, students find that the novel seems to make explicit what many wish these texts had the ability to do in the period: articulate resistance to dehumanization in a form and language they recognize. With the 1619 Project, students were better able to look back at Wheatley’s careful coding and Cugoano’s meticulous spiritual arguments and recognize these authors’ intentions through the double alienation of eighteenth-century aesthetics and white supremacy operating through print norms.¹⁰

The following roundtable features the work of four students who completed this course during the Spring 2020 semester.  In a final project, students are asked to think about Homegoing and the 1619 Project in conversation with their reading of eighteenth-century literature. The prompt is open ended and allows students to make any connections they want between eighteenth-century texts and our contemporary perspectives: personal, pedagogical, interpretive, and so forth. These featured essays explore how contemporary perspectives could “talk back” to the past, helping modern readers understand implicit or obscured stories. Gyasi’s text is fiction, and Ewing’s “1773” poem about Wheatley hinges on the word imagine,¹¹ but both works provide catharsis and interpretation as they center a perspective—Black voices—that can feel muted in historical documents.

Like many courses during the Spring 2020 semester, this class was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic with a move to virtual instruction in March, and as most of our students live in the Los Angeles area, we sheltered in place for most of 2020. Because of decreased contact hours and where we were in completing the course readings, the course pivoted to focus more on Black writings in its last weeks. Given the extreme challenges of researching during a global pandemic that had shut down the university’s library, the final project did not require extensive engagement with secondary sources outside of those read in the class. Instead, the prompt asked students to respond personally and thoughtfully to primary sources—historical and contemporary—to center their own voices and perspectives and to articulate their responses to these narratives. Shortly after the course went virtual, the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others prompted months of protests that resonated with our coursework and increased the exigency of this work.¹²

In response, these students revised their essays, thinking carefully about the relationship between Enlightenment literatures (broadly defined) and our present discussions about race and equality in the United States and reflecting on the purpose of learning this literature during a global pandemic. Their perspectives, lives, and goals vary widely. They are all women of color with varying ties to American and other cultural, religious, and ethnic identities, and these backgrounds inform their work in different ways. Mindy Lin is a graduate student in English literature, Jasmine Nevarez is a recent graduate of the English BA program with intentions to go into academic curriculum development in California, and Nourhan and Jessica Valenzuela are seniors finishing their degrees in the English BA program. While each differs in their career goals and in their approach to the topic, they all consider how engaging with Enlightenment literature better prepares us to confront the challenges of the present. They think about the legacy of British constructions of identity, humanity, and power and how these constructions have been sedimented in the American school system; what it means to be women of color reading literature that dehumanizes their identities; and what our responsibility is as academics to engage with these literatures through an anti-racist pedagogy.

ENDNOTES

[1] This contradiction has been explored by Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

[2] Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), 25.

[3] Gyasi, Homegoing, 17.

[4] Gyasi, Homegoing, 31.

[5] Gyasi, Homegoing, 84.

[6] See Simon Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” Early American Literature 50, no. 1 (2015): 81–102, https://doi.org/doi:10.1353/eal.2015.0020.

[7] We feel no need to rehash what is largely a baseless controversy here and give it a greater platform, but addressing the controversy in class was a useful and important part of the lesson.

[8] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, Second Edition (London, New York, and Dunedin: Zed Books and Otago University Press, 2012).

[9] Kate Ozment would like to acknowledge several individuals for their influence on the development of this class. Shelby Johnson, Megan Peiser, Kerry Sinanan, and Lise-Hélène Smith provided a sounding board for its creation and execution. She has been inspired by many of the generous people using the #bigger6 and #litpoc hashtags, and she is particularly thankful for teaching models from Eugenia Zuroski and the Eighteenth-Century Fiction syllabus repository. Despite this advice, there were faults with this class; they are only hers, however.

[10] For more, see Joseph Rezek, “The Racialization of Print,” American Literary History 32, no. 3 (2020): 417–45 and Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

[11] Eve L. Ewing, “1773,” The New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/african-american-poets.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur.

[12] With this article, the authors stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and its work for racial justice in the United States.

Article Commentary by Victoria Ramirez Gentry 
‘Th’angelic train’: Evangelicals, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Anti-racist Christianity of Phillis Wheatley and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (Article Commentary)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.2
Cite: Gentry, Victoria Ramirez. 2021. “‘Th’angelic train’: Evangelicals, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the Anti-racist Christianity of Phillis Wheatley and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (Article Commentary),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 5-10.
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On September 17, 2020, President Donald Trump spoke at the National Archives Museum for the White House Conference on American History and quoted Martin Luther King Jr: “We embrace the vision of Martin Luther King, where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”¹ After misusing King to establish his point, Trump launched into his critique of “the left” and what he termed Critical Race Theory²: “By viewing every issue through the lens of race, [the left] want to impose a new segregation . . . Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison.”³ This evoking of King’s memory to denounce Critical Race Theory reimagines both American history and Black peoples’ experiences in two different ways. First, Trump defines recognition of racism in American history as racist itself, perversely branding the pursuit of inclusion and diversity as segregation. Secondly, Trump neutralizes King as a proponent of nonviolence and compliance, ignoring the fact that King was arrested and beaten while fighting for civil rights.⁴ Further, Trump positions Critical Race Theory as a threat to Christianity, asserting that it views “hard work, rational thinking, the nuclear family, and belief in God” as “aspects of ‘whiteness.’”⁵ In this statement, Trump frames the efforts of anti-racism as an attack against Christianity itself. Specifically, Trump uses King, a Black man, to uphold white supremacist ideologies while asserting that standing up for the rights of Black individuals is anti-Christian.

Trump’s critique of Critical Race Theory as anti-Christian affirms the security of his white, evangelical followers.⁶ Despite their support waning in 2020, 72 percent of white evangelicals continued to support Trump while the majority of Black and Latinx Christians did not.⁷ During the 2020 election, white evangelicals created churches called “Patriot Churches,” praying for Trump’s reelection and claiming, “Black Lives Matter isn’t being powered by the Holy Spirit.”⁸ Indeed, Christianity and race have been intertwined for centuries, with white Christianity consistently opposing racial liberation.⁹ I use the term white Christianity¹⁰ to describe the historical racism that Christians have upheld in imagining Christ as white, ignoring and perpetuating racial injustice, and conflating faith in God with patriotism while refusing to criticize the racism in the United States.¹¹ Anthea Butler discusses evangelicals in her forthcoming book White Evangelical Racism and emphasizes that evangelicals are not simply religious but “a political group who have power and authority and influence and who follow after Republicanism.”¹² Thus, white Christianity has become deeply intertwined with politics as evangelicals often believe Republicans to be the Christian political candidates.¹³ Further, as evangelicals imagine Christ as white, this “renders bodies of color simultaneously visible and profane through metonymy, substituting the spiritual purity of a white Christ with a racialized idealized in whiteness.”¹⁴ To combat white Christianity of the eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley’s (1753–1784) and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s (1757–1791) texts act as counternarratives that mount resistance to the oppression of their enslavers in their own, new forms of anti-racist Christianity. In her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773), Wheatley writes “Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.”¹⁵ Through her alignment of “Christians” and “Negros,” Wheatley not only establishes her right to the “angelic train” of Christian redemption but destabilizes the Black/white binary that wrongly identifies Christianity as belonging to whiteness. Joel Pace asserts that Wheatley enacts “Imag-I-nation,” a term he defines as involving “the ways identity is modified and maintained across the Atlantic by preserving as well as modifying cultural practices and yoking opposites.”¹⁶ While Wheatley and Cugoano destabilize the Black/white binary by “yoking” their own cultural identities with that of Christianity, I assert they also use that very binary to reject white Christianity and instead form an anti-racist Christianity in which blackness can no longer be equated with sin.

Wheatley and Cugoano rightly attack white Christianity’s designation of Blackness as sinful as this designation is exactly the relationship the present-day evangelicals continue to assert. A Christian opinion piece by Richard Land directs evangelicals to “reject” Black Lives Matter (BLM) because the movement is “antibiblical” because of its support of LGBTQ+.¹⁷ Land also insists that racism is an inevitable evil that “plagues every nation because this disgusting form of sinful human pride is common to the fallen human condition.”¹⁸ By conflating racism with pride, Land minimizes racism as a sin. Simultaneously, Land vehemently condemns the LGBTQ+ community, thus positioning some sins as inevitable and others as condemnable. Another evangelical, Mike Mazzalango, called George Floyd “a petty criminal who was killed while in police custody.”¹⁹ Both evangelicals condemn what they interpret to be sins of sexuality and perceived criminal activity but do not denounce racism for its inevitability. Despite Trump’s many sins, including sexual immorality and criminality,²⁰ “televangelist Jim Bakker urged his followers to oppose impeachment because God ‘anointed your president.’”²¹ Evangelicals like Mazzalango forgive Trump’s sins but do not offer the same grace to Floyd because he might have been a “criminal.”²² Cugoano and Wheatley countered this strand of white Christianity by advocating for resistance and rejecting hypocrisy that offers redemption and liberty to white people but not Black people.

Wheatley draws from her Biblical teachings to show her enslavers that Christianity does not only belong to them and that Black people should not be equated with sin:

’TWAS mercy brought me from my pagan land, 
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
‘Their color is a diabolic die.’
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.²³

Wheatley crosses the Black/white binary that imagines Christianity as belonging to whiteness by tying “pagan land” to “God” and “Savior” and “Christians” to “Negros.” She performs what Pace calls “Imag-I-nation”²⁴ wherein she draws together her own cultural history with that of Christianity, blurring the lines between what is white and what is Black. Wheatley further crosses the binary by embodying her oppressors’ voices, “Their color is a diabolic die,” undermining their judgement by asserting her skin color will not prevent her redemption. Further, she destabilizes the concept of Black skin as sinful when she writes “black as Cain,” referring to the biblical Cain who murdered his brother. Throughout history, religious leaders believed Black people came from “Cain, Canaan, Ham, and other ignoble biblical characters whom God ‘marked’ owing to transgression and sin.”²⁵ Thus, when Wheatley describes the sin of murder as black, she distinguishes Cain’s sin from the color of her skin, emphasizing that Blackness does not equal sin. Thus, Wheatley not only crosses the border but effectively claims Christianity for her own by drawing it to her side of the Black/white binary, constructing an anti-racist Christianity. In 2020, Black Christian minister Brenda Salter McNeil continues to embrace this anti-racist Christianity: “If you still support policies that cage up children, or that cause people of color to die of covid-19, that’s not reconciliation . . . It’s a smokescreen for racism.”²⁶ Black historian and writer Jemar Tisby notes, “What Black Lives Matter did was highlight the racism and white supremacy that still has a stranglehold on much of white Christianity.”²⁷ Like Wheatley, Black Christians uphold anti-racist Christianity, calling out white supremacy for its sins.

Cugoano also established anti-racist Christianity through Biblical language against his white oppressors, calling specifically for physical resistance in his text Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1791). In Thoughts and Sentiments, Cugoano tells Christians to abolish slavery because it is sinful according to the Bible: “all men should love their neighbours as themselves and that they should do unto others, as they would that men should do to them.”²⁸ He thus constructs his counternarrative by “yoking opposites,”²⁹ drawing white Christian logic into an anti-racist plea for freedom. Cugoano does not simply plead for the abolishment of slavery but encourages a resistance: “Wherefore it is as much the duty of a man who is robbed in that manner to get out of the hands of his enslaver, as it is for an honest community of men to get out of the hands of rogues and villains.”³⁰ Regardless of slavery being law, Cugoano asserts slavery is not lawful according to the Bible; it is a sin, and therefore Black people should resist this law. Today, Christians argue over the lawfulness of the BLM protests occurring because of police brutality. Writer and founder of the Black feminist community “For Harriet,” Kimberly Foster has shared her views on protests and riots: “We don’t have to be respectable in this fight. People are dying . . . . We are past trying to neatly package our rage.”³¹ Foster’s views on property damage reflect Cugoano’s call for resistance—if the law is unjust, the people must “get out of the hands of rogues and villains.”³² 

The transatlantic archive depicts this physical resistance of enslaved people against the upholders of the law. Stephanie Smallwood writes of the way the Middle Passage turned enslaved people into commodities, detailing the enslaved people’s experiences on ships and in underground prisons.³³ Despite this “human commodification,” enslaved people revolted against their captors: “Though the captives managed to kill the ship’s doctor, boatswain, and two other crewmen, a hundred slaves also were killed in the fighting that ensued and the surviving rebels were eventually subdued.”³⁴ Even with the passive voice in the line “the surviving rebels were eventually subdued,” the slave traders are the active force in this sentence, killing and beating the enslaved. This description of the enslaved people’s rebellion and their consequent punishment parallels contemporary experiences between police and Black people. Mariame Kaba describes how police continue to “keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.”³⁵ Police use violence against BLM protestors even though these protests are overwhelmingly peaceful.³⁶ Trump’s declaration “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”³⁷ and the outcry of Christians condemning rioting suggest that certain evangelicals value property more than the lives of Black people and prefer to condemn some sins—rioting, looting—more than they condemn the sin of murder. Instead of trying to understand the BLM cry for help and condemning the police who kill Black people, Trump labels protestors “THUGS,”³⁸ a highly racialized word,³⁹ heightening white evangelical fear of Black bodies and condemning Black resistance as a sin.

The labeling of Black resistance as sinful only further marks evangelicals’ attempt to exclude people of color from Christianity and mark them as dangerous. Christina Sharpe reminds us that a young Black boy is not just a boy but is labeled “thug.”⁴⁰ Pointing to the example of Michael Brown’s murder at the hand of Darren Wilson, Sharpe details how Wilson likens Brown to “Hulk Hogan,” describing him as “grunting” like an animal.⁴¹ This rhetoric removes all accountability from the shoulders of the cop responsible for killing Brown and simultaneously paints Brown as a monster, refusing to recognize him as a child. Cugoano also argued for the humanity of Black people: “Every man of any sensibility, whether he be a Christian or an heathen . . . must think, that for any man . . . to deal with their fellow-creatures as with the beasts of the field; or to account them as such  . . . those men . . . are the greatest villains in the world.”⁴² Cugoano establishes that white people have likened Black people to “beasts” and that Christians who think of Black people as animals are “the greatest villains in the world.” Therefore, while Christians condemn the sins of BLM and ignore murders by police, Cugoano makes it clear that the worst sin, the worst villains in the world, are the racists.

While Donald Trump used Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to make his point that anti-racism and Critical Race Theory are indeed anti-Christian and anti-American, King argued in the mode of the anti-racist Christianity of Wheatley and Cugoano. King states, “as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”⁴³ King marched against the law, the very law that Trump and many evangelicals uphold, to fight against the sin of racism. Thus, while anti-racist Christianity offers redemption for all, Wheatley’s “angelic train” makes a distinction: Those who “join th’ angelic train” are “refin’d.”⁴⁴ To be refined means one must ask for forgiveness, must be cleansed of their sins. However, if Christians refuse to condemn racism and murder, they align themselves with “the greatest villains in the world.”[1] Wheatley’s “angelic train” may be just out of reach for white Christianity.

ENDNOTES

[1] Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump at the White House Conference on American History,” The White House, 17 September 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-white-house-conference-american-history/.

[2] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2017). Delgado and Stefancic define Critical Race Theory as “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power” (3). Critical Race Theory requires that racism be recognized, and it is this recognition of racism throughout the history of the United States that Trump dislikes.

[3] Trump, “Remarks by President Trump,” para. 19–20. For an explanation of the aims of the 1619 Project, see Jake Silverstein, “Why We Published The 1619 Project,” The New York Times, 20 December 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html. According to the New York Times, “the goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”

[4] Laura Visser-Maessen, “Getting to That Promised Land: Reclaiming Martin Luther King, Jr. and 21st Century Black Activism in the United States and Western Europe,” European Journal of American Studies 14, no. 1 (2019): 1–25.

[5] Trump, “Remarks by President Trump,” para. 15.

[6]  Daniel Miller, “The Mystery of Evangelical Trump Support?” Constellations 26, no. 1 (2019): 43–58; Dante Scala, “Polls and Elections: The Skeptical Faithful: How Trump Gained Momentum Among Evangelicals,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2020): 927–47; Gerardo Martí, “The Unexpected Orthodoxy of Donald J. Trump: White Evangelical Support for the 45th President of the United States,” Sociology of Religion 80, no. 1 (2019): 1–8.

[7] Michael Lipka and Gregory A. Smith, “White Evangelical Approval of Trump Slips, but Eight-in-Ten Say They Would Vote for Him,” Pew Research Center, 1 July 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/01/white-evangelical-approval-of-trump-slips-but-eight-in-ten-say-they-would-vote-for-him/.

[8] Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Seeking Power in Jesus’ Name: Trump Sparks a Rise of Patriot Churches,” The Washington Post, October 26, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/10/26/trump-christian-nationalism-patriot-church/.

[9] Michael G. Lacy, “Exposing the Spectrum of Whiteness: Rhetorical Conceptions of White Absolutism,” Annals of the International Communication Association 32, no. 1, (2008): 277–311, 281.

[10] I chose not to capitalize the word “white” because, as the Columbia Journalism Review asserts, “For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.” See Mike Laws, “Why We Capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’),” Columbia Journalism Review, 16 June 2020, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php.

[11] In using the term white Christianity, I am aware there are progressive Christians of different races and ethnic backgrounds (including white individuals) who fight for racial justice and stand up for LGBTQ+ rights. These individuals do not fit within the term “white Christianity” as defined above but move into the realm of anti-racist Christianity.

[12] Act.tv, “White Evangelical Racism. Anthea Butler Joins,” November 19, 2020, YouTube video, 00:56, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMZpsrYGLeA.

[13] Daniel Miller, “The Mystery of Evangelical Trump Support?” Constellations 26, no. 1 (2019): 43–58; Dante Scala, “Polls and Elections: The Skeptical Faithful: How Trump Gained Momentum Among Evangelicals,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2020): 927–47, 929.

[14] Gloria Nziba Pindi and Antonio Tomas De La Garza, “The Colonial Jesus: Deconstructing White Christianity,” in Interrogating the Communicative Power of Whiteness, ed. Dawn Marie D. McIntosh, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama (New York: Routledge, 2019), 218–238, 218.

[15] Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” in Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 13.

[16] Joel Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination in Wheatley and Coleridge,” in Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660–1830, ed. Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 238–253, 239.

[17] Richard Land, “A Southern Baptist Leader’s Response to the Black Lives Matter Movement: Opinion,” Tennessean, last modified August 20, 2020, https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2020/08/20/southern-baptist-leader-richard-land-response-black-lives-matter-movement/5616017002/, para. 8.

[18] Land, “A Southern Baptist,” para. 8.

[19] Bobby Ross Jr., “Why the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement is so Controversial to Many Christians,” last modified July 8, 2020, https://christianchronicle.org/why-the-black-lives-matter-movement-is-so-controversial-to-many-christians/.

[20]. Jacques Berlinerblau, “Donald J. Trump, the White Evangelicals, and Martin Luther: A Hypothesis,” Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 73, no. 1, (2018): 18–30, 19.

[21] Sarah Posner, “No the Latest Scandal Won’t Make White Evangelicals Ditch Trump. Whatever It Is,” Washington Post, October 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/01/white-evangelicals-stay-trump/.

[22] Ross, “Why the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement.”

[23] Wheatley, “On Being Brought,” 13.

[24] Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination,” 239.

[25] Lacy, “Exposing the Spectrum,” 281.

[26] Eliza Griswold, “How Black Lives Matter is Changing the Church,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/on-religion/how-black-lives-matter-is-changing-the-church, para. 9.

[27] Griswold, “How Black Lives Matter,” para. 6.

[28] Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Classics, 1999), 11.

[29] Pace, “Journeys of the Imagination,” 239.

[30] Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 59.

[31]  Kimberly Foster, “Looting Should be the Least of Your Concerns,” For Harriet, June 2, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GPdkXV2t2Y.

[32] Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 59.

[33] Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2007).

[34] Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 34, 43.

[35] Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html, para. 8.

[36] Sanya Mansoor, “93% of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful, New Report Finds,” Time, September 5, 2020, https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/?fbclid=IwAR1s5AyO8tsb1R3F9oPrUX7rmIwulfIhEkrkL3ZH0QzL4D5BlaCoour2YqU.

[37] Donald Trump, “These THUGS are dishonoring,” Twitter, May 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1266231100780744704. Due to Twitter suspending Donald Trump’s account, the tweet was removed. Responses and comments to the tweet can still be seen at this link.

[38] Trump, “These THUGS,” Twitter.

[39] Fakunle Smiley, “From ‘brute’ to ‘thug:’ The Demonization and Criminalization of Unarmed Black Male Victims in America,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26, no. 3–4, (2016): 350–66. Trump’s use of the term “thug” is highly racialized. Smiley asserts that the word “has become a way to describe Black males who reject or do not rise to the standard of White America” and has developed from the stereotype of Black men as “brutes.”

[40] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 12.

[41]. Sharpe, In the Wake, 82.

[42] Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 25.

[43] Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963, available at NPR, https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety.

[44] Wheatley, “On Being Brought,” 13.

[45] Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, 25.

Article Commentary by Erica Johnson Edwards
Christianity’s Role in Colonial and Revolutionary Haiti (Article Commentary)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.1
Cite: Edwards, Erica Johnson. 2021. “Christianity’s Role in Colonial and Revolutionary Haiti (Article Commentary),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 1-4.
PDF

On October 26, 2020, the US Senate confirmed Amy Coney-Barrett’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. In the lead up to her confirmation, while senators and the media focused heavily on her Catholic faith, some on social media drew attention to the two Haitian children she and her husband adopted following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.² The connections between Coney-Barret’s Christianity and the Haitian earthquake recalled Pat Robertson’s controversial claim that the earthquake was caused by a Haitian “pact with the devil” during the Haitian Revolution.³ Whatever else one might say about Robertson’s comments, they show his ignorance of the important but little-known role Christianity and the Catholic clergy played in eighteenth-century colonial Haiti.

Scholarly work on the Catholic Church and its clergy in the colony is minimal and does not offer much information on the Haitian Revolution.⁴ George Breathett claims the Catholic Church in colonial Haiti “practically disappeared during the excitement of the years following the revolt of 1791.”⁵ Sue Peabody suggests Christianity made the enslaved docile, and low eighteenth-century conversion rates allowed the enslaved to remain wild and violent, helping to bring about the Haitian Revolution.⁶ Other scholars, however, have begun to uncover the contributions of the religious to the Haitian Revolution. For instance, Laënnec Hurbon claims various primary sources demonstrate “the participation of the clergy in the insurrection of August 1791.”⁷ Hurbon references a similar study by Father Antoine Adrien that “makes it possible at once to abandon the current view that the clergy was wholly committed to the cause of slavery.”⁸ Indeed, my own research shows how the enslaved embraced Christianity throughout the eighteenth century and allied with Catholic clergy members during the Haitian Revolution.⁹

Scholars have long recognized the African religious origins of the Haitian Revolution but have focused too narrowly on Vodou.¹⁰ However, the enslaved brought other religious influences from Africa. Black Haitian Christianity traces back to the western coasts of Africa, where the Portuguese introduced Catholicism even before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas. In the Kongo in particular, the local population embraced Christianity following the voluntary conversion of the Kingdom’s royalty and nobility. Over time, the Kongolese incorporated Christianity into their culture and adapted it for their own needs. Dating from the sixteenth century, Catholic clergy permitted syncretic practices in Kongolese Christianity.¹¹ A civil war in the Kingdom of Kongo lasting from the 1760s through the 1780s resulted in great numbers of prisoners of war who were sold into slavery in colonial Haiti. Many of the Kongolese soldiers would have been Christians or had at least been exposed to Christianity. By the time of the Haitian Revolution, the Kongolese had been practicing Christianity continuously for more than two centuries. European missionaries also had success in the Kingdom of Warri in West Africa. Under the Portuguese, a group of Augustinian monks introduced Christianity into the Kingdom of Warri in the second half of the sixteenth century. As in the Kongo, the king of Warri led his people, the Itsekiri, to accept Christianity. Local ministering, beyond the efforts of the royal family, would have been necessary to perpetuate Christianity in the Kingdom of Warri. Missionary activity waned and came up against resistant Itsekiri leaders throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nonetheless, more than one hundred years later, a new ruler of the Itsekiri in the 1760s repeatedly requested that missionaries be sent to his kingdom, demonstrating a significant Christian spirit in Warri.¹² A significant proportion of those enslaved in colonial Haiti before the Haitian Revolution were from the Bight of Benin, a bay along the Atlantic coast stretching across modern Ghana and Nigeria that included the historic Kingdom of Warri.¹³

Before the Haitian Revolution, the Catholic clergy were not the only people taking part in the religious instruction of the enslaved population. Black catechists were vital in communicating Christianity with enslaved African populations because they better understood the languages and cosmologies of the potential African converts.¹⁴ Similar to the catechists in Africa, enslaved and free Blacks in colonial Haiti shared Christianity with one another. Haiti’s shortage of priests and growing enslaved population made it necessary for people of African descent to provide religious instruction.¹⁵ The religious hierarchy implemented by the Capuchins starting in the 1760s included the elevation of several baptized and married enslaved persons to lead catechism and prayer and serve as beadles while wearing a cassock and surplice.¹⁶ By rewarding certain enslaved peoples with church functions and official clerical attire, the Capuchins gave other enslaved peoples incentive to embrace Catholic rituals of baptism and marriage as well as instilled a positive perception of Catholicism and the clergy. In giving a small number of the enslaved an elevated status and observable benefits, the Capuchins positioned themselves as respectable paternal authorities for the enslaved. There was an active and faithful enslaved Christian population aiding the official clerics in spreading and maintaining Catholicism in the colony before the Haitian Revolution.

When the Haitian Revolution began in August 1791, parish priest Father Cachetan allied with the insurrectionists, serving as their chaplain. One plantation attorney explained, “Father Cachetan . . . preferred to stay in the midst of the black insurgents to preach the Evangel of the law to them, and encourage them to persist in an insurrection that was holy and legitimate in his eyes.”¹⁷ The attorney implied that the priest, like most whites, had the option to flee or be taken prisoner, but he willingly stayed with the insurgents because he fully supported their cause. In fact, when authorities took over the rebel camp where Cachetan resided, the priest claimed that “he was peaceful in the midst of his parishioners [the Blacks].”¹⁸ In calling them his parishioners, Cachetan demonstrated how he saw the shared humanity of enslaved Blacks and free whites. In keeping the priest among them, the revolutionaries signaled their value of Christianity and some clergy members in their fight against slavery. Authorities eventually imprisoned Cachetan but kept his punishment secret “in order not to scandalize the public and above all the blacks.”¹⁹ The perceived need for confidentiality regarding the consequences of Cachetan’s actions further indicates the depth of the alliance between the priest and the insurgents as well as a sense of denial on the part of many whites that the enslaved would rise up on their own. Nonetheless, if some believed that news of his death could incite further rebellion among the enslaved, he must have been a genuine ally, perhaps even an abolitionist.

Nearing the end of the Haitian Revolution, Black revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture assembled a group of colonists to draft a colonial constitution in 1801, which declared Catholicism the official religion of the island. Louverture corresponded with Abbé Henri Grégoire, member of the philanthropic society the Amis des Noirs in Paris, seeking more priests to volunteer to go to colonial Haiti. According to Paris’s Annales de la Religion, “For three years and on several occasions, he [Louverture] solicited Grégoire, his friend and that of the blacks . . . for the sending of twelve priests . . . . Grégoire proposed . . . to found a great church in [colonial Haiti].”²⁰ Eventually, Grégoire arranged for the establishment of four constitutional bishops in colonial Haiti.²¹ After Haitian independence from France in 1804, while the country continued to experience political struggles, the religious leaders continued as counsel to the newly founded Black nation. Just after declaring independence, Haiti’s leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the massacre of most of the whites in Haiti. However, Dessalines spared “a handful of whites,” including many clergy members, “distinguished by the opinions they have always held and who, besides, have taken the oath to live with us obedient to the law.”²² Through the revolution and independence, one priest continuously counseled the Haitian authorities. Corneille Brelle, or Corneille de Douai, served as a chaplain to Louverture and performed Dessalines’s coronation as emperor in 1805.²³ When Dessalines signed the first Haitian constitution as emperor in 1805, independent Haiti did not have an official religion but allowed for freedom of worship.²⁴

Christianity and the Catholic clergy maintained a constant presence in eighteenth-century Haiti, and that legacy lives on in Haiti’s current Christian population. In fact, despite what Pat Robertson would have us believe, it is likely the children Coney-Barrett adopted came from Haitian Christian homes. According to The World Factbook put out by the CIA, Haiti’s population is more than eighty-two percent Christian, with over half of the Black nation being Catholic. Through the effort of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, around twenty-eight percent of Haitians identify as Baptist, Pentecostal, Adventist, or Methodist.²⁵ Yet, only two percent of Haiti’s population reports practicing Vodou, even though it was recognized as an official religion in 2003.²⁶ Of course, Vodou is a syncretic religion, combining African animism with Catholicism, so some Haitians may practice a form of Catholicism quite different than people in France or other parts of the world. Nonetheless, Christianity has been part of Haitian life since its beginnings as a French colony and continues in the twenty-first century.

ENDNOTES

[1] Following the lead of Rob Taber, I use colonial Haiti instead of Saint-Domingue. See Robert D. Taber, “Saint-Domingue or Colonial Haiti? Naming Conventions and Perspective in Historical Analysis” (paper presentation, Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Atlanta, GA, February 2019); Taber, “Family Formation, Race, and Honor in Colonial Haiti’s Communities, 1670–1789,” in French Connections: Cultural Mobility in North America and the Atlantic World, eds. Robert Englebert and Andrew Wegmann (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 146–169.

[2] John Cormack, “The New York Times Digs into the Adoptions of Amy Coney Barrett’s Children,” National Review, October 21, 2020, https://news.yahoo.com/york-times-digs-adoptions-amy-154928157.html.

[3] Frank James, “Pat Robertson Blames Haitian Devil Pact for Earthquake,” NPR, January 13, 2010, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/01/pat_robertson_blames_haitian_d.html.

[4] See for example, J. M. Jan, Les Congrégations religieuses à Colonial Haiti, 1681–1793 (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1951); R. P. Joseph Janin, La Religion aux Colonies Française sous l’ancien régime (de 1626 à la Révolution) (Paris: D’Auteuil, 1942).

[5] George Amitheat Breathett, “Religious Missions in Colonial French Saint Domingue” (PhD diss., State University of Iowa, 1954), 154.

[6] Sue Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal’: Catholic Missions in the French Antilles, 1625–1800,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 53-90, 57.

[7] Laënnec Hurbon, “Church and Slavery in Colonial Haiti,” The Abolitions of Slavery: From Léger Félicité Sonthonax to Victor Schoelcher, 1793, 1794, 1848, ed. Marcel Dorigny (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 62.

[8] Hurbon, “Church and Slavery in Colonial Haiti,” 62.

[9] See Erica R. Johnson, Philanthropy and Race in the Haitian Revolution (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 23–67.

[10] See for example Léon-François Hoffman, “Un Mythe national: La cérémonie du Bois-Caïman,” in La République haïtienne: Etat des lieux et perspectives, eds. Gérard Barthélemy and Christian Girault (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 434–48; Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); and Hein Vanhee, “Central African Popular Christianity and the Making of Haitian Vodou Religion,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 243–264.

[11] John K. Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” The Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1994): 147–167; Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas,” The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988): 261–278; and Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of the Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

[12] Alan Ryde, “Missionary Activity in the Kingdom of Warri to the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2, no. 1 (1960): 1–2, 5, 7, 21.

[13] Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal,’” 65.

[14] Thornton, “On the Trail of Voodoo,” 270–71.

[15] Breathett, “Catholic Missionary Activity,” 281.

[16] Peabody, “‘A Dangerous Zeal,’” 85.

[17] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, contenant tout ce qui s’est passé dans la colonie française depuis le commencement de la Révolution jusqu’au départ de l’auteur pour la France, le 8 septembre 1792,” 300, F 3 141, 268, Archives nationales d’outre-mer.

[18] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, 268-269, Archives nationales d’outre-mer.

[19] Anonymous, “La Révolution de Saint-Domingue, 269, Archives nationales d’outre-mer..

[20] Annales de la religion, vol. 12 (Paris: Imprimerie-Libraire Chrétienne, 1801), 25–27.

[21] Jean-François Brière, “Abbé Grégoire and Haitian Independence,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 37.

[22] “Dessalines’ Proclamation, 28 April 1804,” translated and printed in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, 182.

[23] Hubert Cole, Christophe: King of Haiti (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 145, 191; Jacques de Cauna, Haïti: L’Eternelle Révolution (Monein: PRNG, 2009), 146.

[24] “Haitian Constitution,” translated and printed in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents, eds. Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 194.

[25] Bertin M. Louis, Jr. “Haiti’s Pact with the Devil?: Bwa Kayiman, Haitian Protestant Views of Vodou, and the Future of Haiti,” Religions 10, no. 8 (2019): 1–15.

[26] “Haiti: People and Society,” The World Factbook, accessed October 27, 2020, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/resources/the-world-factbook/geos/ha.html.