Plantation Pluralism: Expanding Forms

We’re at a moment when white Protestants claim their private religious convictions merit public deference (the pharmacist who won’t dispense Plan B, for instance), even as Native Americans’ relations to their sacred... [ view full abstract ]

We’re at a moment when white Protestants claim their private religious convictions merit public deference (the pharmacist who won’t dispense Plan B, for instance), even as Native Americans’ relations to their sacred lands (as in the Dakota pipeline protests) go largely unacknowledged by the federal government. What makes this conflict tenable is a particularly American way of legitimating attachments to abstract ideas and principles while dismissing the intimacies people have with the material world. Religious freedom belongs to the mind, not the body, or so the story goes. My book project Plantation Pluralism: An Alternative History of Religious Freedom in the 19^th Century Atlantic describes how this division became common sense. As a scholarly project, though, it isn’t easily accessible to the general reader who cares about religion’s place in public life. Plantation Pluralism offers a counternarrative to stories in which white men become increasingly free to debate their convictions in Northern public squares. Instead, it centers the encounters c19 texts stage between whites and the figure of the black animist—the imaginary subject whose amulets, charms, and other fetishes exercised power over him and others. Describing these encounters allowed writers to work out ideas about how other people’s attachments—their visceral sense of the forces that had a claim on their lives—mattered in public. Writing for this seminar would help me reach audiences whose thinking about religious freedom doesn’t account for the existence of plantation slavery or the relations between mind and body it sought to naturalize.