American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures

by Joanna Brooks

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color 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 and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions.

While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals, and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.

American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

Genres: Religion

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 11, 2003

About the author

Joanna Brooks is a national voice on Mormon life and politics and an award-winning scholar of religion and American culture. She covers Mormonism, faith, and politics for ReligionDispatches.org and has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” by Politico.com.

A twenty-year veteran of the Mormon feminist and LGBT equality movements, Brooks grew up in a conservative Mormon home among the last great orange groves of Orange County, California. She attended Brigham Young University and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imaginative and lucidly written history. Joanna Brooks is just as accomplished with academic nonfiction as she is with creative writing (see her luminous memoir, "The Book of Mormon Girl"). Her study of African and Native American religious invention in literature is a bit lopsided — only one chapter about a Native American author, compared to four chapters about black authors — but each essay works well as a microhistory or snapshot. Taken together, the essays produce a counter-narrative of American religious history. Unlike white Enlightenment philosophers, black and Native American authors did not assume that rationality and goodness would always prevail. Knowing how easily their world could descend into chaos, people of color reinterpreted Christianity in ways that affirmed their humanity and wrote works of literature that called for resilience and courage in the face of oppression.