African American Female Mysticism

Nineteenth-Century Religious Activism

Joy R. Bostic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137375056
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

African-American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth Century Religious Activism is an important book-length treatment of African-American female mysticism. The primary subjects of this book are three icons of black female spirituality and religious activism - Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, and Rebecca Cox Jackson.

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African American Female Mysticism: The Nineteenth-Century Contextual Landscape

The religious quest of African American women is fundamentally a search for place and space. These movements involve the work of constructing emancipatory identities in the face of gender and racial stereotypes of blackness and femaleness. For nineteenth-century African American women this meant having to navigate competing notions of feminity and hierarchical notions of race entrenched within the cultural and social institutions that affected their lives, their communities, and the nation. It also meant working to transgress the boundaries of externally and structurally circumscribed roles for black women while struggling to inhabit complex subjectivities within public and private domains. In exploring the Afra-American¹ search for place and space, it is important to note that the contextual landscape of black female social existence in nineteenth-century North America was shaped by “systematic attempts” to “physically, psychologically, culturally, economically, and spiritually” subjugate African American people.² Moreover, “[l]egally and or socially sanctioned forms of violence, intimidation and exploitation (including rape, lynching, beating, and economic deprivation) were tools designed” to silence and control African American women, and perpetuate the dehumanizing system of slavery and the suppression of free blacks.³ Religious, social, scientific, and economic structures and institutions collaborated in many ways to objectify African American women as “Other.”⁴ Black women were typecast as stereotypical Mammies and Jezebel’s in the drama of an American racial narrative steeped in the patriarchal and white supremacist value systems of plantation life in the South and white paternalism and black servitude in the North.

Longtime free and soon-to-be freed women and men labored to rehabilitate the objectifying images of black women as loyal Mammies or promiscuous Jezebels by promoting notions of black femininity and the black family that, while debunking the aforementioned myths in many ways, remained consistent with white patriarchal norms of gender roles and delineations of public and private power.⁵ This meant that free and freed African American women, in their navigations of place and space within nineteenth-century America, still had to contend with strange and strained gender and racial demarcations related to private responsibilities and public roles even within African American social, political, and religious institutions. In spite of these attempts to control, circumscribe, and exploit them, black women exercised the agency to carve out public lives of engagement. As social agents women such as Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells, Julia Foote, and Sojourner Truth exercised radical subjectivities that flouted the circumscribed roles black women were expected to fulfill and countered the stereotypical images of black feminity. These women embodied identities that were multipositional, relational, and complex.⁶ In so doing, they were influenced by the religious, political, economic, and social diversity of nineteenth-century North America. Given the social, political, and ecclesial marginalization of African American women, in particular, and the predicament of African American people, in general, how did these women create their own autonomous spaces for activism and agency? How did nineteenth-century black women resist and even transcend the systems of domination that pervaded North American life? For many black women, it was their religious experiences and practices that empowered them to transgress gender, race, and class boundaries and to, therefore, combat social, political, and economic oppression.

In this book, I will explore, more specifically, the ways in which Christian-identified African American women’s mystical experiences enabled these women to assert themselves as emancipated Subjects⁷ and empowered them to both define themselves for themselves and to live out transformative, active public lives within a patriarchal, white supremacist culture. I contend that it was black women’s mystical encounters and the resultant sacred-social connections drawn from an African American mystic culture and the broader North American habitus that enabled them to engage in embodied countercultural action. These women constructed and participated in “mystical spaces”⁸ in which they laid claim to vital personal cohesion despite problems of social and cultural fragmentation. Within these mystical spaces they exercised the authority to act as mediators of sacred power. In this way, nineteenth-century African American women resisted the cultural impositions of one-note stereotypes and gendered role limitations to assert complex subjectivities and embodied practices that defied cultural circumscriptions.

Below, I describe and analyze the contextual environment that shaped and impacted these African American women and their religious experiences and practices. In so doing, I draw upon Carmel Bendon Davis’s work in spatial theory and mysticism and the works of Pierre Bourdieu and his theory of practice. In his essay, “Simulating Pure Land Space: The Hyperreality of Japanese Buddhist Space,” William E. Deal cites biblical scholar Jim Flanagan’s work, “The Trialectics of Biblical Study,” as establishing the importance of using spatial theory in the academic study of religion to “bridge the gap” between historical approaches and social contexts. Flanagan, drawing from the works and spatial theories of Edward Soja, develops a “trialectic” that includes discourses of historicality, sociality, and spaciality as a way to understand the multiple dimensions of the human context. Spatial theory is critical in that for human beings “[s]pace is a fundamental sub text in all social understandings. And space is constructed through praxis and therefore based on experience.”⁹ Sterling Stuckey and Rachel Harding both discuss the significance of space in the mystic and religious cultures of the African diaspora. In Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, Stuckey points to the importance of sites that, for example, connect African Americans to sacred power, and serve as mediating ground for sacred-social relationships.¹⁰ In her book, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness Harding stresses the importance of how black people used “physical, socio-political, cultural, psychic, and ritual-religious locations”¹¹ in order to create and recreate relationships and countercultural identities “within the matrix of slavery.”¹² Here, I use spatial theory as a way of grounding women’s textual, historical, and social lives in mystical praxis. In addition, I utilize the concept of mystical space to identify and analyze the ways in which nineteenth-century black women’s mystical encounters created alternative sites for mediating spiritual and social power. I will explore this notion of mystical space further in chapter 2. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice will assist me in further analyzing the ways in which power operates within social and religious contexts.

Bourdieu developed his theory of practice as a way of understanding how social structures influence what we understand as the individual, and how these social influences are expressed in individual and group practice. Bourdieu contends that persons are molded by structural mechanisms and power dynamics within society.¹³ He identifies his approach as “generative structuralism” that provides the basis for how dominating structures and class divisions are reproduced within a given society. Bourdieu’s generative structuralism is based on the assumption of a “homologous” culture. Within the context of the modern construction of “America,” I am investigating sociohistorical conditions that have produced what Charles Long identifies as a “culture of contact”¹⁴ and a religious orientation rooted in processes of exchange among European, African, and Native American people. Therefore, I am utilizing Bourdieu’s theory in order to not only explicate how the structures of social domination operating in nineteenth-century North America and their reproduction impacted African American female life, but also how Bourdieu’s theory applied to a nonhomologous social and cultural context reveals the ways in which individual and group identity-constructions can counter these structural reproductions and lead to social transformation. Later, I will discuss limitations of Bourdieu’s theory and introduce correctives that will better enable us to apply his theory in an analysis of nineteenth-century black women’s sacred-social worlds. I begin now with a discussion of the key concepts of Bourdieu’s theory.

The key concepts of Bourdieu’s theory of practice are field, habitus, and capital. According to Bourdieu, “Society consists of a collectivity of interrelated and ‘homologous’ spaces, or ‘fields.’” These spaces or fields are “networks of relations between individuals and institutions competitively engaged in the dynamics of capital production, pursuit, consumption, and/or accumulation.”¹⁵ These fields are multidimensional. They are always in flux and constantly changing as social agents act in and upon the field.¹⁶ The relationships among actors in the field are reciprocal (though not necessarily mutual), and are based on status and varying levels of power. Diverse social activities make up the various fields. Fields operate according to particular interests, strategies, and legitimating authorities. The various fields include social, political, economic, and religious spaces. Within each field diverse social agents and institutions compete and struggle to accrue capital and the power this capital carries within the field.¹⁷ Dominating structures within the fields serve to legitimize the social order as “natural” and to enable persons to “make sense of their positions in the social order.”¹⁸

At the same time, social fields perpetuate their own social structures through the inculcation of habitus that is the character, dispositions, perceptions, thoughts, actions, or more generally a “feel for the game [of the particular social field]” inhabited by social agents.¹⁹ In turn, social agents interact within social fields, that is, engage in social practice through habitus. Practice is bodily practice that takes place in the social world. Individuals and groups develop and practice strategies that are appropriate to meet their material and social needs.²⁰ Because habitus is developed at an early age bodily practices are pre-reflexive. Habitus is informed by embodied memory on an unconscious level and operates as the embodiment of structure. Bourdieu also understands habitus to be deeply associated with class that for him is “defined as individuals sharing the same dispositions as well as the same external conditions of existence.”²¹ Social agents reproduce structures of the social field by way of bodily practices. Within the social fields, agents occupy spaces of status based upon capital. Capital involves the resources that accrue to groups or individuals involved in a network of relationships that are mutually recognized within particular fields.²² Forms of capital include social, cultural, religious, and economic. Religious capital, for example, provides individuals and groups with status and power within the religious field. According to Terry Rey the practices of social agents are “the sum produce of a persons’ active engagement of capital in any given field.”²³ Bourdieu understands religious capital to be produced and amassed within the hierarchies of religious institutions.²⁴ The religious field operates in the same manner as other fields. Within the religious field social agents and institutions struggle to accrue religious capital and the power this capital conveys within the field.

For Bourdieu, religion especially serves to “consecrate” and legitimize the social order as “natural” and normative. In other words, religion serves to define and defend the places of social agents within the hierarchical institutions of the religious field. Bourdieu developed the notion of symbolic violence to explain how agents within a society come to view the social order and their respective places within it as “natural.” Symbolic violence is characterized by masking and denial and is socially recognized by its “misrecognition.” Symbolic forms of violence are “euphemized”—hidden and presented as unquestioned norms within the culture and society. Therefore, symbolic violence serves as the primary mechanism that perpetuates structures of domination.²⁵ Bourdieu also recognizes that actual forms of violence are used as well to establish and maintain domination. He identifies elementary forms of domination with “overt physical or economic violence.”²⁶ However, Bourdieu also argues that overt forms of violence within established structures of domination coexist with symbolic forms.

Once a system of mechanisms has been constituted capable of objectively ensuring the reproduction of the established order by its own motion . . . the dominant class have only to let the system they dominate take its own course in order to exercise their domination; but until such a system exists, they have to work directly, daily, personally, to produce and reproduce conditions of domination which are even then never entirely trustworthy. Because they cannot be satisfied with appropriating the profits of a social machine which has not yet developed the power of self-perpetuation, they are obliged to resort to the elementary forms of domination, in other words, the direct domination of one person by another, the limiting case of which is appropriation of persons, i.e. slavery.²⁷

The political, social, and religious structures that dominated nineteenth-century Nor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   African American Female Mysticism: The Nineteenth-Century Contextual Landscape
• 2   Defining Mysticism and the Sacred-Social Worlds of African American Women
• 3   Standing upon the Precipice: Community, Evil, and Black Female Subjectivity
• 4   God I Didn’t Know You Were So Big: Apophatic Mysticism and Expanding Worldviews
• 5   Look at What You Have Done: Sacred Power and Reimagining the Divine
• 6   Weaving the Spider’s Web: African American Female Mystical Activism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index