Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic
Title | Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew E. Barnes |
Publisher | |
Pages | 205 |
Release | 2017 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9781481306324 |
Many Europeans saw Africa's colonization as an exhibition of European racial ascendancy. African Christians saw Africa's subjugation as a demonstration of European technological superiority. If the latter was the case, then the path to Africa's liberation ran through the development of a competitive African technology. In Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic, Andrew E. Barnes chronicles African Christians' turn to American-style industrial education--particularly the model that had been developed by Booker T. Washington at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute--as a vehicle for Christian regeneration in Africa. Over the period 1880-1920, African Christians, motivated by Ethiopianism and its conviction that Africans should be saved by other Africans, proposed and founded schools based upon the Tuskegee model. Barnes follows the tides of the Black Atlantic back to Africa when African Christians embraced the new education initiatives of African American Christians and Tuskegee as the most potent example of technological ingenuity. Building on previously unused African sources, the book traces the movements to establish industrial education institutes in cities along the West African coast and in South Africa, Cape Province, and Natal. As Tuskegee and African schools modeled in its image proved, peoples of African descent could--and did--develop competitive technology. Though the attempts by African Christians to create industrial education schools ultimately failed, Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic demonstrates the ultimate success of transatlantic black identity and Christian resurgence in Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. Barnes' study documents how African Christians sought to maintain indigenous identity and agency in the face of colonial domination by the state and even the European Christian missions of the church.
Rebecca's Revival
Title | Rebecca's Revival PDF eBook |
Author | Jon F Sensbach |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 315 |
Release | 2009-06-30 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0674043456 |
Rebecca's Revival is the remarkable story of a Caribbean woman--a slave turned evangelist--who helped inspire the rise of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. All but unknown today, Rebecca Protten left an enduring influence on African-American religion and society. Born in 1718, Protten had a childhood conversion experience, gained her freedom from bondage, and joined a group of German proselytizers from the Moravian Church. She embarked on an itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans of St. Thomas, a Danish sugar colony in the West Indies. Laboring in obscurity and weathering persecution from hostile planters, Protten and other black preachers created the earliest African Protestant congregation in the Americas. Protten's eventful life--the recruiting of converts, an interracial marriage, a trial on charges of blasphemy and inciting of slaves, travels to Germany and West Africa--placed her on the cusp of an emerging international Afro-Atlantic evangelicalism. Her career provides a unique lens on this prophetic movement that would soon sweep through the slave quarters of the Caribbean and North America, radically transforming African-American culture. Jon Sensbach has pieced together this forgotten life of a black visionary from German, Danish, and Dutch records, including letters in Protten's own hand, to create an astounding tale of one woman's freedom amidst the slave trade. Protten's life, with its evangelical efforts on three continents, reveals the dynamic relations of the Atlantic world and affords great insight into the ways black Christianity developed in the New World.
Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835
Title | Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835 PDF eBook |
Author | Cedrick May |
Publisher | University of Georgia Press |
Pages | 168 |
Release | 2010-01-25 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0820336335 |
This study focuses on the role of early African American Christianity in the formation of American egalitarian religion and politics. It also provides a new context for understanding how black Christianity and evangelism developed, spread, and interacted with transatlantic religious cultures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cedrick May looks at the work of a group of pivotal African American writers who helped set the stage for the popularization of African American evangelical texts and the introduction of black intellectualism into American political culture: Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, John Marrant, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, and Maria Stewart. Religion gave these writers agency and credibility, says May, and they appropriated the language of Christianity to establish a common ground on which to speak about social and political rights. In the process, these writers spread the principles that enabled slaves and free blacks to form communities, a fundamental step in resisting oppression. Moreover, says May, this institution building was overtly political, leading to a liberal shift in mainstream Christianity and secular politics as black churches and the organizations they launched became central to local communities and increasingly influenced public welfare and policy. This important new study restores a sense of the complex challenges faced by early black intellectuals as they sought a path to freedom through Christianity.
Christian Slavery
Title | Christian Slavery PDF eBook |
Author | Katharine Gerbner |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Pages | 293 |
Release | 2018-02-07 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0812294904 |
Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, then how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy," which excluded the majority of enslaved men and women from Christian communities. For slaveholders, Christianity was a sign of freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. When Protestant missionaries arrived in the plantation colonies intending to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity in the 1670s, they were appalled that most slave owners rejected the prospect of slave conversion. Slaveholders regularly attacked missionaries, both verbally and physically, and blamed the evangelizing newcomers for slave rebellions. In response, Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries articulated a vision of "Christian Slavery," arguing that Christianity would make slaves hardworking and loyal. Over time, missionaries increasingly used the language of race to support their arguments for slave conversion. Enslaved Christians, meanwhile, developed an alternate vision of Protestantism that linked religious conversion to literacy and freedom. Christian Slavery shows how the contentions between slave owners, enslaved people, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race in the early modern Atlantic world.
Mastering Christianity
Title | Mastering Christianity PDF eBook |
Author | Travis Glasson |
Publisher | OUP USA |
Pages | 329 |
Release | 2012 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0199773963 |
This book examines how missionaries of the Anglican Church in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa initially spread a religiously-grounded understanding of human diversity that stressed the essential unity of all people but over time developed the idea that slavery and Christianity were entirely compatible and could be mutually beneficial, leading the Church to become an institutional opponent of the abolition movement.
Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism
Title | Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism PDF eBook |
Author | Erin Kathleen Rowe |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 317 |
Release | 2019-12-12 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1108421210 |
This is the untold story of how black saints - and the slaves who venerated them - transformed the early modern church. It speaks to race, the Atlantic slave trade, and global Christianity, and provides new ways of thinking about blackness, holiness, and cultural authority.
The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present
Title | The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present PDF eBook |
Author | Andrew Eugene Barnes |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Pages | 694 |
Release | |
Genre | |
ISBN | 3031482700 |