Christianity and racemaking: a conference report

5th October 2023

The full programme for Christianity and Racemaking in the Early Modern Atlantic World, including paper abstracts and speaker bios, is available here.

Last month, my project colleagues and I welcomed a diverse, interdisciplinary cohort of scholars to King’s for a two-day conference exploring the complex entanglement of Christianity and racemaking in the early modern era. This conference had been in the making since I joined MMoR in October 2022 and developed out of my doctoral research, in which I argued for the centrality of Christian doctrine to interpretations of bodily and human difference – including the nascent category of race – in early modern England. With seventeen panellists and two keynote speakers, this conference presented a wonderful opportunity to learn from and be in conversation with a range of brilliant scholars exploring the entanglement of race and religion across various geographies and time periods.

Using case studies from colonial Mexico, the Black Pacific, Lima, and the French Caribbean, the conference’s first pair of panels – featuring papers from Danielle Terrazas Williams, Bethan Fisk, Eduardo Dawson, and Domitille de Gavriloff – revealed how evangelisation and the administration of the sacraments were differentiated according to emergent racial categorisations. How was the capacity for religious faith and salvation racialised? How did this affect the day-to-day administration of the sacraments? How did the racial idiom of religious figures overlap with or depart from that of colonial administrators? How did religious authorities inhibit (or in some cases enlarge) the material and mental freedom of enslaved peoples? Answering these questions and more, these papers showed how racial categorisations were worked out on the ground by priests and missionaries, as well as imposed from above by religious authorities and colonial administrators. Crucially, they also showed how enslaved peoples navigated and exploited the interstices of colonial and religious administration to gain some measure of freedom and self-determination. 

Turning to the theories which provided the justification for these categorisations, our second group of panellists carefully elaborated how various points of Christian doctrine contributed to the process of early modern race-making. In first panel, Matthew Elia, José Juan Villagrana, and Brian Hamm tackled the relationship between race and religious identity. They noted that in the case of Black Africans, Indigenous Americans, and Jewish people, religious faith (and thus spiritual status) was presumed to be heritable. For these racialised groups, Christian faith was always contingent and under suspicion. For Black Africans in particular, enslavement was constructed as the only reliable means to salvation. In second panel, Bento Machado Mota and Lindsay C. Sidders explored the symbolic meanings of colour – particularly the binarized comparison of black and white – in two distinct religious contexts. For both Jesuits in Brazil and creole elites in Mexico, they showed, whiteness was a shorthand for purity, immortality, and the knowledge of God. In contrast, sin was understood as a stain which was related by association to the dark skin of racialised people.

Danielle Terrazas Williams and Bethan Fisk, chaired by Chloe Ireton

Lindsay Sidders and Bento Mota, chaired by Liesbeth Corens

These explorations of the relationship between colour symbolism and chromatic race laid a helpful groundwork for the next day’s first group of papers. Drawing on a vast and varied body of sources, from demonological treatises, to Biblical translations, to court masques, to devotional objects, the panellists showed how allegories of race pervaded early modern European thought. As the first pair of papers – presented by Cecilio M. Cooper and Ashleigh Elser – demonstrated, blackness was not only attached to racialised bodies and identities, but instead threatened and permeated white bodies, souls, and subjectivities. The second pair of papers, presented by Anita Raychawdhuri and Caitlin Irene DiMartino, extended the discussion of the symbolic capacities of blackness, recognising the traditional associations with sin and staining, and yet raising alternative associations with fertility, beauty, and ostentatious wealth. These papers also explored the contradictions between symbolic, artificial representations of blackness, and the material reality and ubiquitous presence of enslaved black workers in European society. 

Moving from the realm of theory back to day-to-day practice, the conference’s final group of papers considered the possibility of resistance to racialisation. How did Indigenous Americans and Black Africans push back against the coloniality of religion? Which collaborative epistemologies were produced by encounters between European, African, and American actors? Ashley Coleman Taylor and Justine Walden explored these questions in relation to Indigenous Taíno and Afro-Catholic spiritual practices respectively. Then, in the final panel of the conference, Angelo Cattaneo and Ty M. Reese confronted the question of global religious encounter from two vastly different scales: first, examining the painstaking construction of a Kimbundu grammar over many decades and the religious networks this depended on; second, describing the inculcation of a Fante child in English religious and cultural practices, and his alienation on the return to Cape Coast.

These two days of incisive, thought-provoking papers were framed by keynote lectures by scholars whose work has been deeply formative for my own thinking. Heather Miyano Kopelson opened the conference with a sensitive account of how the field of premodern critical race studies has reshaped conversations concerning race and religion since the publication of her Faithful Bodies (2014). Dennis Austin Britton opened our second day with a series of careful readings of English dramatic texts in relation to aspects of Calvinist theology, thus building on the insights made in his Becoming Christian (2014). Both lectures broached the question of evidence, particularly with regards to the relationship between scholar and sources. What is accepted as evidence for the study of racemaking? What is left unspoken in the archive, and what was so pervasive it never needed saying? What role does scholarly intuition have in the research process?

Keynote from Heather Miyano Kopelson, chaired by Hannah Murphy

Keynote from Dennis Britton, chaired by Eli Cumings

I am delighted to say that Dennis and Heather will be joining us in Chicago in March to continue these conversations as part of a roundtable at RSA. Further details about this roundtable and an accompanying new research panel (both on the topic of Christianity and racemaking), will be announced in due course. For the time being, I want to express my deep gratitude to our panellists, chairs, and keynote speakers, as well as to my colleagues and to the engaged audience who joined us across the two days. The conference demonstrated, I think, the necessity of keeping Christianity at the forefront of our minds when approaching the question of early modern racemaking, as well as the necessity of thinking in interdisciplinary terms which bridge the gap between theory (i.e. organising ideologies) and practice (i.e. lived experience).

I look forward very much to following the future work of our conference participants, as well as the development of the field as a whole!

Eli Cumings

Research associate