This is the opening chapter to the final part of the book entitled “Redirecting Race: Outlines of a Theological Program”. The program will provide “theological readings” of three slave narratives. The meaning of theological reading was provided in the preceding interlude on Gregory of Nyssa and in this case the requirement for reading these narratives theologically is to read them against and through the story of Christ. In the case of Hammon’s narrative the task is to both theorize the theological aspect of writing autobiographically and to read the ambiguity of the text faithfully in order to read both the way the narrative re-inscribes itself into a white supremacist narrative as well as the possibility of a narrative of liberation.
The question of autobiography is intimately tied to the question of whether or not these narratives can escape a logic of white supremacy. Carter calls on various theories of autobiography, both concerning theological autobiographies and slave autobiographies, that all argue for the autobiography being a fundamentally dialogical act. It is a relation to the self through other texts, to other times (in what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., yes that Gates, calls “critical time machines”), as well as “nonidentical repetition” of the self that liberates it to “embrace, revitalize, and re-create reality” (259). These theories of autobiography are augmented by Carter by reading them through the doctrine of Creation in order to so show that autobiographies “carry ontological weight” in their re-narration of the self.
The self is narrated in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, according to Carter, through four basic covenantal statuses:
1. One’s status as a Jew: one in relationship with YHWH by means of YHWH’s covenant with the people of Israel.
2. One’s status as a Gentile: one not in relationship with YHWH by the direct or unmediated means of YHWH’s covenant with the people of Israel.
3. One’s status as a Jewish Christian: one in relationship with YHWH by the unmediated means of YHWH’s covenant with the people of Israel with Jesus of Nazreth (Yeshua) as Messiah with YHWH’s covenant.
4. One’s status as a Gentile Christian: one in relationship with YHWH by means of YHWH’s covenant with the people of Israel but only through the mediation of one from among this covenantal people, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of Israel who as such is head of the Church (261).
Carter then asks what the history of the meaning and status of whiteness consists in as it is “principally” a Gentile Christian phenomenon. Somehow this group was able to retell their story and interpret it outside the frame of Israel’s.
This retelling of Christianity closes off Christian theology from its Jewish roots in the doctrine of Creation. For Creation and the human soul are intimately connected in that both are created. This created status means that, in itself, creatures have no access to self-possession. Human beings as made in the image of God are themselves outgoing, as God is and this participation grounds the self-articulation from becoming self-enclosure, as it is outside of this participation.
The themes of possession and self-articulation are important elements of Carter’s reading of Hammon’s slave narrative. Hammon’s narrative was chosen by Carter because it stands, according to literary historian William L. Andrews, as “the beginning [of] black autobiography”(267). As such it carries with it all the ambiguities concerning the underlying logic of these narratives that Carter wants to highlight. In a perverse twist it is within this narrative that we see the whiteness of theology come through. For by reading Hammon through Christological themes Carter is able to see both “elements for liberation” and how the salvatory aspect of Hammon’s narrative is written into a logic of white culture such that Hammon acquiesces in some sense to the whiteness of this culture with his return to his “good master”.
Carter’s reading of Hammon’s narrative explores the ambiguity of the text. For through the text we are shown both a black man resisting the culture of whiteness as well as a black man whose salvation is only to be found in a return to his “good master”. Thus the old Neoplatonic schema, appropriated by Christian theology in the explanation of salvation, of exitus-reditus is present in Hammon’s narrative with regard to his leaving a free man, being captured and imprissioned before gaining freedom of a kind through service in the British navy, and finally returning to his “good master”. It’s unclear, due to the narrative’s status as both an dialogical autobiography and because of the existence of an editor, who is the true messianic figure in the text. Hammon or the master.
I don’t feel entirely sure that I understood the main thrust of this chapter. As much as I appreciate Carter’s audacity and attempts to deal with the problem of whiteness in theology, his writing style often leaves me confused as to the flow of the argument. This isn’t a damning criticism and I’m far from the clearest of authors, but as a reader unfamiliar with slave narratives in general and no familiarity with this particular narrative, I think the chapter could have benefited from a recapitulation of the chapter prior to his setting up the theoretical basis of his interpretation. So, I’m unsure of what the status of this narrative is in terms of the resistance to theological white supremacy or in terms of the white closure of theology.
It seems that Carter wants a more nuanced account of Afro-American religion, and perhaps this is the reason for his ambiguity, but I’m unsure of the principles that would guide that study. So for instance we find him writing, “For as there can be resistance through the rejection of ‘the religion of the master,’ there can also be resistance through its appropriation. In the latter case, the resistance effects renewal (267).” Now, this is fair enough and falls well within his advocacy of a theological reading of the history of race, but we also see him throughout the text owning up to the fact that a theological reading does not necessarily result in abolitionist thought. My question, after reading this chapter, is what is primary: the theological reading or a more practical commitment to equality? Or, if equality is too embedded in the logic of whiteness and universality, a commitment to the free self?