A HOMILETIC EXAMINATION of the AFRO-AMERICAN TRICKSTER By
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Vanderbilt Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive EXCUSE ME WHILE I ACT A FOOL: A HOMILETIC EXAMINATION OF THE AFRO-AMERICAN TRICKSTER By Zachary William Mills Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in Religion December, 2015 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Date: _______________________________________________ ____________________ John S. McClure, Ph.D _______________________________________________ ____________________ Dale Andrews, Ph.D _______________________________________________ ____________________ Victor Anderson, Ph.D DEDICATION To my father, Russell Henry Mills, who taught me the sacred calling of living life as a complete Fool and To my mother, Janet Lea Mills, who taught me to love Fools unconditionally ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A mentor of mine once stated that starting the race is easy, finishing the race is difficult. This thesis, three years in the making, has proved that adage true. There were moments after eagerly starting this thesis that I doubted whether or not I would finish. Every word of this thesis was written while serving as the full-time Associate Minister of Hyde Park Union Church. During the production of this thesis, I officiated one wedding, four funerals, served as an adjunct faculty professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, served on a planning committee for McCormick Theological Seminary, served on a national planning committee for the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education’s Congress for Urban Ministry, taught multiple Bible studies and adult education classes, proofread multiple graduate student papers and advised graduate students, and preached 50 sermons. Most of this thesis was written while I was recovering from surgery, unable to walk, with my right leg in a cast. I am grateful and indebted to those mentors, friends, and family members who encouraged me, during the most difficult moments, to keep writing. And I am grateful to God for giving me the mysterious energy and enthusiasm that pushed me, late at night and early in the morning, to press on until this race was completed. I am in awe, and on some days in disbelief, that in spite of every challenge, frustration, and unexpected detour this project is indeed finished. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iii Introduction I. VERNACULAR THEORY ............................................................................................ iv Chapter 1 II. A GENEALOGY OF KEY SIGNIFYING TROPES .................................................... 1 Chapter 2 III. THE TRICKSTER’S TOOLS AND SLAVE PREACHING ..................................... 31 Chapter 3 IV. THE 21ST CENTURY FOOL ..................................................................................... 71 iv INTRODUCTION During the past two decades, groundbreaking advances in literary critical theory among African American scholars have forever changed the way literary critics, biblical scholars and even homileticians have engaged texts composed by black authors. A host of African American scholars pioneered this new academic trajectory. Two of those scholars, whose work serves as the theoretical foundation for this thesis, include Huston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates Jr.1 Their seminal works, Blues, Ideology and Afro- American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984) and The Signifying Monkey (1988), respectively, have offered literary critical theory other investigative tools to reach where previous tools had not. Consequently, in light of Gates’ and Baker’s work, literary and oral works produced by authors of African descent were no longer solely judged according to classical Eurocentric literary critical standards. These scholars’ academic contributions served as undeniable evidence that the single Eurocentric standard of literary criticism, though valuable, could not exhaust the potential meanings in texts produced by non-white authors.2 More pointedly, Gates and Baker demonstrate that 1 Houston Baker, Jr.’s work analyzes cultural at the vernacular level. His primary concern in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature is to examine the relationship between an American culture fueled by the commercial deportation of black bodies and the artistic and expressive productions that emerge from communities of enslaved Africans and African Americans. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s analyzes a specific vernacular ritual utilized within Afro-American culture known as Signifyin(g). Signifyin(g) refers to the rhetorical play, characterized by critique and revision, utilized by Africans and African Americans to navigate slavery and racism. Baker’s work provides the theory from which this thesis is derived and Gates provides the application to which this thesis points. 2 It must be noted that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Houston Baker, Jr. certainly do not exhaust the repository of African American scholars who made pioneering inroads into transforming American literary-critical theory. Indeed there are likely scholars, women v distinctively “black”3 theories of literary criticism stand to offer insights about texts produced by black authors or orators that traditional literary-critical axiology utilized by white scholars cannot, alone, adequately mine. The method of analysis proposed by scholars like Gates, Jr. and Baker, Jr. endeavors to create in readers an epistemological shift, that is, an enlargement of perspective that alters notions of historicity altogether.4 In light of Gates’ and Baker’s work, the literary world had to confess that the written history of literary critical discourse in America was insufficient, or at the very least, incomplete, and thus in need of re-figuration. This subsequent paradigm shift is what Michel Foucault refers to as an epistemological rupture.5 This rupture is succinctly illustrated in the retelling of the discovery of a pre-historic fossil in the early 1800s: In 1822, Gideon Mantell, an English physician with a consuming interesting in geology and paleontology, made a routine house call in Sussex. On the visit, he discovered a fossilized tooth that seemed to be a vestige of a giant, herbivorous reptile. Since he had nothing in his own collection comparable to his find, he traveled to the Hunterian Collection of the Royal College of Surgeons in London and spent hours searching drawers of fossil teeth attempting to find a comparable specimen. When he had nearly exhausted the possibilities, a young man who was also working at the Hunterian, and who had heard of the Sussex physician’s quest, presented him with the tooth of an iguana. The match was nearly perfect. On the basis of the similarity between the tooth of the extant iguana and his own fossil discovery, Mantell named the bearer of the older tooth Iguanodon (“iguana and men whose academic contributions to this subject are not formally recorded or published. Other scholars thinking about this subject might have chosen to list two entirely different scholars to signify key changes in literary-critical theory. I highlight Gates and Baker simply because their respective works most appropriately serve the chief aims of my goals for this thesis. 3 By using the term “black” here I’m referring to Stephen Henderson’s idea of the inner life, or constellation or matrix of cultural values and beliefs of black folk. It will be helpful to read Baker’s description of Henderson’s use of the term “reference public” in Baker’s work Baker, Huston, Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984, 78. 4 Baker, 61. 5 Ibid., 61. vi tooth”) … As the nineteenth century progressed and the fossil record expanded, it became apparent that Iguanodon was but one member of a family of reptiles that, in 1841, received the name ‘dinosaur’ from Sir Richard Owen. By mid-century, it was possible to construct a feasible model of Iguanodon. Available evidence (including assumed homologies with living animals) indicated that the prehistoric creature was a giant, quadripedal reptile with a small triangular spike on his nose. The concrete and plaster model that was built on this plan in 1854 can be seen in England today. The story of Iguanodon does not conclude at mid-century, however. The fossil record was substantially augmented later in the century by a splendid find of Iguanodon fossils at Bernissart, Belgium. Louis Dollo, the French paleontologist who oversaw the Bernissart site, was able to revise all existing models. Through cross-skeletal comparison and ethological inference, he concluded that Iguanodon was, in fact, bipedal. Moreover, he persuasively demonstrated that the triangular bone that had been taken for a nose spike was actually a horny thumb spike peculiar to dinosaurs.6 Although academic determinations had already been published about Iguanodon, Louis Dollo’s discovery required that the model of Iguanodon, and the entire body of literature produced on the subject, be re-figured to account for the new discovery. Similarly, African American scholars’ respective discoveries about standards of literary criticism indigenous to black culture and experience, which emanate from outside