- Citation/Abstract
- Dissertation or Thesis
Abstract (summary)
The Crisis of Exuberance: Faith and Nation in Early African American Autobiography explores the intersection of community and personal identity within the context of the rise of American Methodism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What I term a “crisis of exuberance” is the success of the Methodist movement in converting large numbers of free and enslaved Africans to Christianity by providing a niche in which they could fuse the diverse beliefs brought from their homeland with those of evangelical Christianity, and the inability of the Methodist movement to maintain at the same time its practice of de-emphasizing the outward status of its followers. In African American spiritual autobiographies of the period, the rhetoric of Methodism works in tandem with an emerging Afro-Christian discourse of community development and sustenance that theorizes and asserts universal humanity under God. At the same time, this focus on the communal unsettles the autobiographical act.
Reading spiritual autobiographies and other writings by John Marrant, Richard Allen and John Jea, I examine how the representation of the black Methodist itinerant minister illuminates tensions between individual and group cultural identification among early African Americans. In imagining the purpose and possibilities of liberation, Marrant and Allen transgress boundaries between theology and ecclesiastical practice and between individual and communal identification. John Jea positions himself as a diasporic subject, framing his spiritual identification against, rather than within, a communal narrative.