Diamond, David
M 1 :50 PM
Park Hall 61
Empire of Faith
The institutions and ideology of empire famously crystallize in the middle of the nineteenth century, but its origins can be traced back much further. This seminar is concerned with the literature of the period, circa 1660 to 1800, which immediately precedes the consolidation of colonialist thought into an ambition of planetary dominion. More specifically, we examine the role that religion plays in the formation of Britain’s imperialist global imaginary. During the long eighteenth century, as this period is known, Britain ascends Europe’s geo-political order by way of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, war, and economic imperialism. Our course considers writers who draw on religious forms and affects to describe, naturalize, or resist these practices.
How do these writers apply or adapt the teachings of Protestant Christianity and its “Others,” such as Catholicism, Quakerism, Islam, Hinduism, and Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean belief systems? What do their complex negotiations of religion say about the still-powerful historical narrative of “secularization,” the story of religion’s gradual decline? In what ways must this account change to accommodate the persistence, even intensification, of religiosity in, for example, work by Black British authors Ignatius Sancho and Quobna Cugoano? How do forms of religious thought shape literary forms, and vice versa? As we pursue these questions, we also attend to relationships between religious identity and other categories of difference, like race, class, nationality, gender, and sexuality.
Primary materials may include fiction by Daniel Defoe, Penelope Aubin, and Charlotte Dacre; epistolary prose by Sancho, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Sake (Sheikh) Dean Mahomet; autobiographies by Equiano, James Albert Ukasaw Gronniosaw, Thomas Hammond, and Samson Occom; drama by John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan; and poetry by John Grainger, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Francis Williams, and Helen Maria Williams. Although our methods derive from literary studies, this seminar is a scene of robust interdisciplinary exchange. We draw on the insights of Black historiography, religious studies, philosophy, and cultural anthropology as well as literary criticism.