The Racialization of Print

This essay reimagines the centuries-long process through which printed objects in the Anglophone world became powerfully associated with white supremacy and ideologies of racial hierarchy. It argues that the racialization of print was not inevitable but contingent, uneven, and always contested; that it continually shifted, varying widely from place to place; and that it occurred in relation to the medium’s changing associations with such other unstable social and ideological categories as class, gender, religion, and nation. The essay proposes two phases for this historical process: the establishment phase, during which the hyperelite medium of the printed codex acquired an association with white authorship in the early modern period; and the essentializing phase, during which, over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a printed book by a single author came to be understood as capable of representing the essential nature of an entire race of people. Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley wrote during the shift between these two phases of print’s racialization. A comparative case study of Occom’s and Wheatley’s relationships to book publication suggests that early modern social and class hierarchies were more important to their navigation of the medium’s racialized dynamics than is commonly granted.

Fire and Chain

Chapter 2 analyzes competing aesthetic traditions in the copious letters, journals, and tracts produced by missionaries to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois; Six Nations) Confederacy in the second half of the eighteenth century. In their interactions with missionaries, Haudenosaunee nations adhered powerfully to aesthetic conventions developed over centuries. A Haudenosaunee-specific understanding of form and eloquence determined how missionaries who worked among them circulated and produced texts and shaped the outcomes of their work. Congregationalist minister and founder of Moor’s Indian Charity School Eleazar Wheelock refused to engage the ethical imperatives of Haudenosaunee eloquence and eventually gave up on his design to convert the Six Nations, despite the insistence of his missionaries Samuel Kirkland and Joseph Johnson on keeping with Haudenosaunee conventions. Meanwhile, Mohegan minister Samson Occom incorporated into English letters Haudenosaunee imagery designed to clarify relations and bring people together, in a remarkable layering of literary traditions.

The deaths of Moses: The death penalty and the division of sovereignty

Derrida insists that any effort to think theological–political power “in its possibility” must begin with the death penalty. In this paper, I revisit the death of Moses Paul, “an Indian,” executed in New Haven in 1772 for the murder of Moses Cook, a white man. The Mohegan minister Samson Occom delivered Paul’s execution sermon and accompanied him to the gallows. Revised, Occom’s sermon was one of the first works published by a Native American author in English. Occom suggests there can be a theological–political power that signals itself not by decreeing the death penalty, but by opposing it. Hence sovereignty can be thought, with and against Derrida, as the theologico-political power to restore life. By opposing death to grace, moreover, Occom achieves a division of sovereignties, creating an opening for Indigenous nations within the scaffolding of the settler state. Working in collaboration, then, Occom and Paul produce a political theology.

Paul, Samson Occom, and the Constraints of Boasting: A Comparative Rereading of 2 Corinthians 10–13

Few texts in the Pauline corpus have been subjected to such extensive and varied comparative analysis as 2 Cor 10–13. Since Hans Windisch's influential designation of the passage as aNarrenrede(“fool's speech”), wherein Paul apes the boastful fool (ὁ ἀλαζών) of the Greek mime, exegetes have assembled a remarkable array of additional comparanda: theperistasisor hardship catalogues of Cynic and Stoic philosophers; Augustus'sRes gestae; apologies epistolary, forensic, and Socratic; conventions forperiautologia(self-praise) as attested by Quintilian and Plutarch and as demonstrated by Demosthenes; conventions forsynkrisis(comparison) as preserved in theProgymnasmata. Despite the diversity of the evidence adduced, methodologically these studies have much in common. In general, their explanatory mode is formal and genealogical—that is, they elucidate the characteristics of Paul's boasting by identifying and describing the literary or rhetorical forms to which he is indebted.