African-American
Religion: A Documentary History Project
Teaching Resources
The encounter of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans in the world of the colonial Atlantic from the mid-fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries constituted America. Over time and space, the Atlantic Ocean sustained a series of economic, military, and cultural relations between these peoples. This lecture and discussion course will offer students the opportunity to read primary and secondary sources narrating the formation and development of a new world. Reading, writing, and reflection will focus upon the dynamic and complex processes of cultural change that resulted in religious conflict, resistance, exchange, and innovation.
Required Texts:
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possesions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (New York: Penguin Books, 1995)
James Axtell, The Invasion Within (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)
Richard Price, Alabis World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
A Course Reader, including selected documents, headnotes, and narrative taken from working drafts of the first two volumes of African-American Religion: A Historical Interpretation with Representative Documents, co-edited by Albert J. Raboteau and David W. Wills.
Course Outline and Readings:
I. The Formation of the Atlantic World
Course Reader, pp. 390, 14058, 17081, 199212
II. An African-Iberian Atlantic
Course Reader, pp. 12439, 15969, 18289
III. Interpreting the New
Greenblatt, Marvellous Possesions
IV. Spiritual Conquest?
Course Reader, pp. 21340
Clendinnen, Aztecs
Video, The Mission
V. Resistance
Course Reader, pp. 24256, 276305
Price, Alabis World
VI. Conversion(s)
Axtell, The Invasion Within
Video, Black Robe
VII. Telling the Story
Equiano, The Interesting Narrative
VIII. The Cultures of Slavery
Morgan, Slave Counterpoint
IX. The Cultures of Slaver (cont.)
Morgan, Slave Counterpoint
Video, Bahia: Africa in America
X. Summary and Conclusion
Requirements:
Attendance in class and participation
in discussion is essential. Unavoidable absences should be cleared
with the instructor beforehand. There will be a take-home midterm
and a take-home final exercise, based upon readings, discussion,
and reflection. Each student will offer a brief definition (two
pages) of one of a series of models of religious encounter, such
as syncretism, acculturation, juxtaposition,
or reinterpretation.