as performances of abjection, such as ancient Christian rituals of circumcision, were used to manage the threat of abject classes by celebrating, incorporating, and containing their practices.7 Moreover, behaviors or characteristics abjected by others were adopted for self-definition, as when terms of derision and ridicule (“methodist,” “quaker,” “black”) were reclaimed for use as a means of self-identification. The ambivalence of abjection—its positive and negative connotations—appears in cognates such as the Greek καταβάλλω, which, as an 1841 Boston lexicon has it, connotes both “to throw down” and “to lay, as foundations.”8 Abjection is characterized by this twofold ability to suspend the marginal in the center of society and to transform the terms and processes of marginalization into means of public self-instantiation.
Cast Down is primarily concerned with religious discourse’s historical and symbolic development of abjection in relation to race. Discourses of abjection paved the way for and sometimes complicated the development of race in both sectarian religious publics and the reformist publics that developed out of sectarian organizing. New notions of gender and race often supported social practices otherwise called into question by Enlightenment concepts of universal rights and subjectivity.9 They did so by transforming the meaning of race, first through a scientific biologism and later with a Romantic emphasis on social difference, spiritual complexity, and psychological depth. One American exemplar of this process is Thomas Jefferson. His articulation of Enlightenment freedoms in his 1782 Notes on the State of Virginia coincided with both a scientific “suspicion” that African Americans’ low social status was grounded in biological difference and a traditional religious admonition that the sin of slavery would result in divine judgment against the nation as a whole.10
In my study, abjection is separable into at least three distinct elements: exclusion from civic or church recognition, psychological depression, and internalized low status. These elements can function separately but more often work together in unexpected ways. For example, writing in 1833, Pequot Methodist William Apess reminded his “brethren in the ministry” that his Indian “brethren,” stranded on New England’s reservations, are “the most mean, abject, miserable race of beings in the world.” Here, Apess’s pride in his marginalization from an evangelical mainstream takes shape through racial self-abnegation. His portrait of low racial status attempts to shame his more elite interlocutors by juxtaposing biblical and modern scientific notions of family, spiritual abjection, and racialized abjection.11
Abjection’s frequent connection to race in early nineteenth-century writing suggests the two terms’ ideological mobility and interconnection. When abjection was explicitly conjoined with race, abjection’s deep religious history helped structure a gradual movement from class- to race-based accounts and rankings of difference.12 For example, a series of late eighteenth-century English colonial letters, reprinted in Philadelphia in 1819, described servants in Calcutta as alternately an “abject class” and an “abject race.”13 Religion also lent an air of continuity to what were actually new ideas about inherent racial difference percolating in popular discourse. When the term was used in a more modern, racial form, it was most often associated with Africans and enslavement. In 1812, the Rev. Thomas Scott, in an essay republished in several Anglican and other house organs, encouraged all Christians to pray for “the poor African slaves … that abject race.”14 More taxonomic accounts employed the term “abject” as an ostensibly objective descriptor to help rank different racial subgroups. For example, an 1834 account of Oceania’s “minor nations” in London’s Foreign Quarterly Review opined that one “race will be found more abject, miserable, and mischievous, than the lowest of the yellow race.”15 This merely descriptive use of abjection unmoors the concept from a religious basis and rejects possible social origins for racial difference in favor of attributing racial abjection to prior conditions, such as biology.
On the other hand, even when discussing “abject Africans,” evangelical writers well into the nineteenth century resisted the taxonomic divisions instituted by scientific racism. For example, although early nineteenth-century white evangelical colonizationists agreed with the practical conclusions of Jefferson’s scientific racism, they still described African American inferiority as contingent on social circumstance rather than inherent. As one 1828 Connecticut evangelical colonizationist tract has it, “The free coloured population … are, and, in this country, always must be a depressed and abject race.”16 Evangelicals’ insistence on social circumstance is creditable to their enduring belief in a monogenetic creation in the face of scientific evidence in favor of polygenetic human origins. One Presbyterian minister’s 1847 tract promoting the colonization of Australia, for example, asserted that even the “abject race” of Paupauans were still of “one blood” with the Europeans.17 Some went further. Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet, in a post-Revolutionary letter reprinted in an 1826 issue of the abolitionist African Repository, posed abjection as a condition separate from race. Benezet began by offering a monogenetic account of African Americans as “our fellow creatures of the African race” before noting that it was suffering alone that placed African Americans in an “abject situation.” Rather than treating African Americans as social outcasts, Benezet suggests, their abject status actually “gives them an additional claim to pity.”18 In sum, while abjection’s connotation of absolute destitution made the term valuable as a descriptor in the construction of modern racial taxonomies, these uses could not escape the term’s religious origin and ambivalence.
As the above examples indicate, large-scale ideological shifts in the meaning of religion and race were often made in incremental steps. This attenuated process allowed for tremendous amounts of what might appear to be, from our vantage point, contradiction or ideological confusion. Indeed, popular discussions of religion and race, rather than simply disseminating authoritative moral or scientific conclusions, were grounded in cultures of performance, citation and reprinting that offered multiple religious, political, scientific, rhetorical, and other appeals. In this context, the religious rhetoric of abjection participated in the creation of new and wide-ranging racial norms while also allowing and sometimes even encouraging participants in evangelical discourse to depart from those emerging norms. Put another way, the rhetoric of abjection in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped construct, consolidate, and reify racial difference. At the same time notions of abjection and eroticized accounts of differences in power demonstrated a competing tendency toward the dissolution or disordering of racial difference well into the nineteenth century.19 The tension between consolidation and dissolution is thrown into sharp relief in work that places disparate images, scenes, and narratives of suffering and abjection cheek by jowl, thereby highlighting contradictions in racial ideologies. This combination of censure and qualified permission was part of a larger process in which desire and identity were reproduced and contested through speech, writing, and embodied practice.
Jefferson, Apess, Lang, and others conjoin, to various degrees, Enlightenment scientific rationality and religious warning in ways that might seem, at first, unusual. In part, then, my work here is to identify and interpret the widespread combination of early modern and modern notions of the self, the divine, and community, especially the endurance of religion in modern developments of race. Religion remained central to notions of the self in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most important, religion participated in a larger shift in the power of suffering to license speech and writing within religious bodies and in more public evangelism.20 The mystical or supernatural charge that bodily suffering held in the early modern era was increasingly derided in the eighteenth century, and Enlightenment humanitarianism, premised on a notion of rational and free public discourse, similarly chipped away at martyrology by making expressions of desire for suffering morally suspect.21 Ascetic forms of suffering retained their capacity to license speech and leadership among Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, and some smaller sects. More generally, though, authoritative religious speech, including speech that engaged sentimental appeal, was increasingly linked to rational, empiricist Enlightenment discourse grounded in ascetic self-control.22 Many religious communities harnessed the power of sentiment to institutionalize white male control. Leaders
