those hierarchies, as its promotion of abjection worked in and through its management of lay preaching and publication. Whether in his Faithful Narrative, his own conversion narrative, or his later treatises on conversion and revivalism, the difficulty with evaluating Edwards’s use of a discourse of abjection as entirely in favor of or opposed to the maintenance of institutional power derives from Edwards’s navigation of a revival discourse in which the form of subjectivity invoked through that discourse was itself unstable and contested, helping establish a white male revolutionary liberal subject as well as African and Native subjects and communities. The radical promise of affective revival was tied up with its incorporation into public ministerial practice. Edwards’s attempt to contain the communicative potential of an affective performance of abjection participated in the revivals’ eventual contribution to the rearticulation of power along new liberal republican lines but also provided Native and African Americans theological principles and public models for stabilizing and managing affective religious communities in the face of increased skepticism and hostility.119
Subsequent chapters follow two generations of Christian social reformers as they moved away from church-based social reform and toward nonsectarian radical evangelical organizing in the public sphere.120 Many of these reformers read Edwards’s work; even those who did not would have been influenced by his epistemology of conversion. In particular, the cultural reverberations of eighteenth-century notions of conversion, suffering, and publicity resound in nineteenth-century developments of race, including racializations of religious abjection, speech, and publication.
CHAPTER 2
Indian Abjection in the Public Sphere
In January 1836, William Apess, a Pequot, adopted Mashpee, and former Methodist preacher, twice delivered his “Eulogy on King Philip” at the Odeon, a luxurious Boston lecture hall that was a short distance from the Brattle Street Congregational Church where Jonathan Edwards gave his first recorded revival. The “Eulogy” as part of its celebration of Indian martial and moral virtue and denunciation of English creole violence, took issue with an emerging racial conception of Indian drunkenness or what Edwards and his disciple, David Brainerd, had called Indians’ “drunken and Pagan howlings.” Apess’s long missionary career helped him recognize a new wrinkle in the Euro-American view of Indian drunkenness. Drunkenness had long denoted Indian abjection in the absence of European missionary sympathy and connoted human abjection in the absence of God’s grace. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the denotative and connotative value of drunkenness grew apart. Drunkenness and paganism, wedded together in the animalistic practice of inarticulate “howlings,” became more closely linked to an intrinsic racial identity rather than to faith or religious practice.
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