Introduction; 1: Race, Religion, and Regeneration; 2: Samson Occom and the Poetics of Native Revival; 3: John Marrant and the Lazarus Theology of the Early Black Atlantic; 4: Prince Hall Freemasonry: Secrecy, Authority, and Culture; 5: Black Identity and Yellow Fever in Philadelphia; Conclusion: Lazarus Lives; Appendix 1: Samson Occom's Collection of Divine Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774); Appendix 2: Author-Unknown Hymns Original to Occom's Collection; Appendix 3: Original Hymns by Samson Occom; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Summary
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of colour in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, "the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust." This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as early Black a