Slavery and the Moravian Mission
21 November 2023, 16:00 - 21 November 2023, 17:30 Divinity Faculty, Lightroom Room
Dr Heike Raphael-Hernandez
Abstract:
The talk will focus on the complex and at times contradictory encounters of Moravian missionaries, a Protestant group from Saxony, with enslaved Africans. The early period of Moravian missionary presence—between the 1730s and 1760s—differed from subsequent periods because later periods lost the original attempts to establish spiritual equality. A close reading of the various documents allows one to detect forms of active protest and creative agency on the part of enslaved people that were fostered, wittingly or unwittingly, by the Moravian missionaries.
In their mission-related contacts during this specific period, both groups would receive glimpses of secular possibilities for future societies which eventually would help bring changes to their own specific secular settings. For the enslaved Africans, it implied an insistence on freedom from the misanthropic institution of New World slavery; for the Germans, it implied a maturing of progressive ideas in regard to the still existing secular estates system. This could happen only because these first missionaries often operated with means that were not part of any official mission directives. I will demonstrate this with three aspects: the missionaries’ approach to literacy for the enslaved, their encouragement of the enslaved to verbal and even legal protest, and, probably the most empowering tool, their invalidation of white people’s assumed God-given superiority in the eyes of black people.
Bio:
Heike Raphael-Hernandez is Associate Professor of American Studies at U of Würzburg, Germany, and Adjunct Professor of English at U of Maryland Global Campus. Among her research interest are Black Atlantic Studies, past and present; Global South Diasporas; German Involvement in Transatlantic Slavery; Migration and Visual Culture. Among her publications as co-editor are Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017), and German Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery (2018). For the forthcoming Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture, she is the volume editor for “Globalities and Diasporas.” She is author of Contemporary African American Women Writers and Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (Edwin Mellen Press 2008) and Fear, Desire, and the Stranger Next Door: Global South Immigration in American Film (U of Washington Press, forthcoming).
