Rebecca Jackson and the Archive

In 1981, Jean Humez published the first widely available volume of the life writing of Rebecca Jackson, a 19th-century Black Shaker Eldress. Since then, public and academic scholars have written thoughtfully on Jackson’s visionary writing on race and gender. All (that I found) use Humez’s edited volume for their analysis; almost none attend to Humez’s editorial process. Surely this lack of attention to editing indicates a commitment to increasing public knowledge of Black religious women, without getting distracted by publication history. But Humez’s editing fundamentally changed Jackson’s work, changing spelling and punctuation, adding section breaks, and arranging disparate works in a single volume. In this talk, I ask how the editing of archival materials impacts our understanding of Black religious figures. Further, I ask how the reception and use of Humez’s volume reveals contemporary desires for cohesive historical narratives, and the stakes of this for histories of Black religious women.