Papers examine religions in North America which combined revolutionary thought and religious action, yet in ways that might not be expected and thus not readily legible. Papers span the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries along with issues of race, gender, and ideology. Collectively, they argue that the public image of the religious groups does not match the internal views and intentions of those making these transformative acts. Examples include the Haitian Revolution, Black Shakers, and the 1967 March on the Pentagon.
This paper proposes examining the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) as an event whose religious and spiritual dimensions were not peripheral to the uprising but constitutive of it. Vodou ceremonies, African cosmologies, Catholic sacramental practice, and prophetic leadership coalesced to produce what scholars increasingly recognize as one of the most consequential revolutions in the history of the Atlantic world. Drawing on the conference theme of 'Future/s,' this proposal situates the Revolution as a generative site for thinking about enslaved peoples' insurgency, Caribbean religion, and the entanglement of spiritual authority with political violence.
By centering the religious dimensions of the Revolution, this paper intervenes in two intersecting conversations: the study of North American and Caribbean religions and the broader scholarly reckoning with how spiritual life energizes and shapes revolutionary action. The paper argues that adequate historiography of the Haitian Revolution demands not merely political or economic analysis, but sustained attention to the cosmological frameworks and ritual practices through which its leaders and participants understood freedom, death, the ancestors, and the divine.
This paper looks at nineteenth-century Black Shakers in Philadelphia and South Union, Kentucky to investigate how those Shakers helped shape their communities, and particularly their communities’ responses to enslavement and inequality. Despite increasing interest, there is woefully little historical research on Black believers, participants, and observers. Scholars of Shakers tend to make similar arguments: Shakers were pacifists, opposed to enslavement, and committed to racial equality. This portrayal of Shakers is not wrong, but it is not quite right. Shaker communities had diverse and complex approaches to Black members, and Black participants in Shaker communities were at times deeply committed, and at times deeply critical of the Society, and often both. African American Shakers in Philadelphia and South Union developed communities of critique that helped shape their Shaker communities.
The October 21, 1967 March on the Pentagon represented an expansive slice of nationwide dissent against US involvement in the Vietnam War. As part of the protest, counterculture leaders engineered an attempt to exorcise the US military headquarters via levitation, which comprised a ten-step ritual and spoken invocation that borrowed from religious traditions across time and space. The paper argues that the visibility of this action confounds a classic conception of ritual, while renegotiating the terms by which to adjudicate ritual success. Further, the paper resituates accusations of Hippie appropriation within a metaphysical tradition, while seeking to expose those reactionary currents stirred during a so-called revolutionary decade that remain salient today. A brief episode in the turbulent history of the American 1960s, the levitation of the Pentagon critically triangulates discourse around the efficacy of ritual, the ethics of combinative religion, and the possibility of revolution by metaphysical means.
| Emily Clark | clarke2@gonzaga.edu | View |