Fall Faculty Lecture: Kim Coles, "The Blood of Christians: Phillis Wheatley and White Christianity"
Fall Faculty Lecture: Kim Coles, "The Blood of Christians: Phillis Wheatley and White Christianity"
Please join us for our annual Fall Faculty Lecture featuring Professor Kim Coles. The talk will be in Ulrich Recital Hall with a reception on the 2nd floor of Tawes to follow.
Abstract:
The Blood of Christians: Phillis Wheatley and White Christianity
There is a biting criticism embedded in Phillis Wheatley’s most-anthologized poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” that only an exposition of early English slave codes, and the logic that underwrites them, can offer. Her literary experiments should be read in terms of an alert mind that was deeply critical of the commercial traffic into which she had been captured, but with nonetheless a limited capacity to express her critique. This talk will track the evolution of a racial logic in England and how it resolves in the early English slave codes of an emerging transatlantic world and a developing slave economy. The English colonial project demanded subjects that were not Christian—slaughter and enforced servitude could not be enacted against other members of the faith. Since many of the casualties of English colonial policy actually were Christian, they had to be proven non-Christians. This proof took the form of a permanent, heritable condition of irreligion—the mark of which was black melancholy—that passed from parent to child and that made baptism or conversion to Christianity impossible for certain groups. Thus a 1682 Virginia statute defined “as slaves all those without Christian ancestry or parentage.” In a system that assumed the heritability of belief—and of paganism—surface markings eventually became both evidence and justification for holding groups of people outside of Christian communion and in bondage. My argument is that Wheatley was keenly aware of how closely this ideology was tied to racial capitalism and that “On Being Brought from Africa to America” is a coded critique of how Christianity is used in America to retain white supremacy and remand Black people to permanent depravity and enslavement.
Kim Coles has written articles on the topics of race, women’s writing, gender, sexuality, and religious ideology. Her current book, Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, emerged from University of Pennsylvania Press in April 2022. The book uncovers how belief itself — the excess, defect, or lack of religion — was largely apprehended and understood in terms of temperament in the early modern period. Race in this period is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. Bad Humor is about how these concerns converge around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination. In addition to two monographs, Kim has also co-edited four essay collections and two special journal issues. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Please join us for our annual Fall Faculty Lecture featuring Professor Kim Coles. The talk will be in Ulrich Recital Hall with a reception on the 2nd floor of Tawes to follow.
Abstract:
The Blood of Christians: Phillis Wheatley and White Christianity
There is a biting criticism embedded in Phillis Wheatley’s most-anthologized poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” that only an exposition of early English slave codes, and the logic that underwrites them, can offer. Her literary experiments should be read in terms of an alert mind that was deeply critical of the commercial traffic into which she had been captured, but with nonetheless a limited capacity to express her critique. This talk will track the evolution of a racial logic in England and how it resolves in the early English slave codes of an emerging transatlantic world and a developing slave economy. The English colonial project demanded subjects that were not Christian—slaughter and enforced servitude could not be enacted against other members of the faith. Since many of the casualties of English colonial policy actually were Christian, they had to be proven non-Christians. This proof took the form of a permanent, heritable condition of irreligion—the mark of which was black melancholy—that passed from parent to child and that made baptism or conversion to Christianity impossible for certain groups. Thus a 1682 Virginia statute defined “as slaves all those without Christian ancestry or parentage.” In a system that assumed the heritability of belief—and of paganism—surface markings eventually became both evidence and justification for holding groups of people outside of Christian communion and in bondage. My argument is that Wheatley was keenly aware of how closely this ideology was tied to racial capitalism and that “On Being Brought from Africa to America” is a coded critique of how Christianity is used in America to retain white supremacy and remand Black people to permanent depravity and enslavement.
Kim Coles has written articles on the topics of race, women’s writing, gender, sexuality, and religious ideology. Her current book, Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, emerged from University of Pennsylvania Press in April 2022. The book uncovers how belief itself — the excess, defect, or lack of religion — was largely apprehended and understood in terms of temperament in the early modern period. Race in this period is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. Bad Humor is about how these concerns converge around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination. In addition to two monographs, Kim has also co-edited four essay collections and two special journal issues. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Ulrich Recital Hall false