RETRACTION: The original version of this editorial introduction has been retracted. I apologize to readers and contributors, and take full responsibility for the misguidedness of centering the editorial difficulties of a white Christian woman in an issue devoted to racial justice. Samara Anne Cahill Editorial Introduction: Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment SAMARA ANNE CAHILL Blinn College Ahmaud Arbery (February 23, 2020) Breonna Taylor (March 13, 2020) George Floyd (May 25, 2020) Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Yong Ae Yue (March 16, 2021) Adam Toledo (March 29, 2021) Daunte Wright (April 11, 2021) Ma’Khia Bryant (April 20, 2021) All deaths from the COVID pandemic hristina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is a meditation on “the wake as the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still C unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery.”1 The wake is the legacy of the ships of the Middle Passage, but also the emotional and creative response of members of the Black diaspora to that legacy. Sharpe’s witnessing raises issues of continuing systemic racism, the violence that continues to be visited upon Black bodies and Black lives, and the weight of history on the present. This special issue on “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment” was prompted by the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer, and the recognition that a journal dedicated to the study of religion and the Enlightenment has a duty to give a platform to those living in the wake. History—and the imbrication of history and the present—cannot be ignored, and that is why the New York Times’ 1619 Project is so crucial as a corrective to mythologies of the national identity of the United States. That perspective is also why removing Confederate statues and those of other enslavers from public places of honor is not about destroying history, but about choosing how we understand, transmit, and teach histories.2 There are many responses to the legacies of slavery. There is, for instance, 1. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. 2. For the purposes of this editorial I am bracketing criticisms of the 1619 Project, but they include: (1) the 1619 Project’s chronological slippages are pedagogically dangerous—Len Gutkin, “‘Bad History and Worse Social Science Have Replaced Truth’: Daryl Michael Scott on propaganda and myth from ‘The 1619 Project’ to Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2, no. 2 (spring 2021) ISSN: 2661-3336 © Samara Anne Cahill the “community choir” of Ibram X. Kendi’s and Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 as a landmark of public scholarship.3 There is the anger of watching the differential treatment of Black and white bodies by the police and by White House security on January 6, 2021. There is Amanda Gorman’s hopeful performance of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the presidential inauguration on January 20. History is crucial not simply for social justice, but for a collective moral imagination.4 Yet part of answering Eugenia Zuroski’s call to undercut the imperialism of “academic intellectual authority” by answering the question “where do you know from” is admitting the limitations of one’s perspective.5 If the US nation has a race problem, so, too, does religion, and particularly US Christianity. The historical Jesus Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew; yet Christ is often depicted as a white man on Crucifixes, paintings, even in stained glass windows.6 Clearly, US Christianity must confront its own racist traditions. This issue on “Race, Religion, and Revolution in the Enlightenment” begins with two contributions that examine the complex relationship between Christianity, particularly evangelism, and historical race relations. Erica Johnson Edwards explores the role of Catholic priests in the Haitian Revolution and attends to the asymmetrical media portrayal of Haitian Catholicism and vodou. The Haitian Revolution is a particularly important touchstone Trumpism,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/bad- history-and-worse-social-science-have-replaced- truth?fbclid=IwAR1E0R8hDWRA1ZzaQAmtkdb9d0kQfhtFQhxradFD_AS53iesqQgyAcJwA9Y; (2) by focusing too much on race and slavery and by allowing journalists to bypass historians, the 1619 Project ignores the influence of class (and cross-racial class solidarity among workers) in the formation of the US—see a number of articles on the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), but particularly the anthology The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History: Essays and Interviews, edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman (Oak Park, Michigan: Mehring Books, 2021); (3) the 1619 Project threatens to replace one “consensus history” with another—William Hogeland, “Against the Consensus Approach to History: How not to learn about the American past,” The New Republic, January 25, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/160995/consensus-approach- history?fbclid=IwAR2ZsNUQAGoEENswp7ekjcnZVdyvc-M76CyNC59xtpVscZl8UwI5s9cmQTU. A stark contrast to these informed critiques, the justly scorned 1776 Report was released on January 18, 2021. The Biden administration soon disbanded the 1776 Commission (January 20, 2021). 3. Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, eds., Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (New York: One World, 2021), xv. 4. Alongside In the Wake a number of poetry collections have addressed the creative quest of crafting a Black diasporic identity within the occlusions and fragmentations of the archive and the dehumanization of slavery. These writers have chosen poetic expression to instantiate fragmentation, hybridity, the weight of the past on the present, and the pained relationship to water (a cleansing, purifying element while also being the ocean grave of so many enslaved ancestors transported on the Middle Passage). See M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008); Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2017); and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2020). A number of contributors to this issue discuss creative responses such as those mentioned above in terms of Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation.” See Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2 (2008), 1-14. For a useful online introduction to Zong!, see Jenny Davidson, “Trauma and representation: NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG!” YouTube, February 21, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3uOjbOC8zQ. 5. Eugenia Zuroski, “‘Where Do You Know From?’: An Exercise in Placing Ourselves Together in the Classroom,” MAI, no. 5, “Feminist Pedagogies,” January 27, 2020, https://maifeminism.com/where-do-you- know-from-an-exercise-in-placing-ourselves-together-in-the-classroom/. For further resources on challenging racism in the long eighteenth century, particularly during the Romantic period, see the work of Zuroski, Manu Samriti Chander and other members of the Bigger 6 Collective who seek to “challenge structural racism in the academic study of Romanticism,” see https://bigger6romantix.squarespace.com/. 6. For a helpful capsule history of how Jesus has increasingly been portrayed as blue-eyed and blond, see Anna Swartwood House, “The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European,” The Conversation, July 17, 2020, https://theconversation.com/the-long-history-of-how-jesus-came-to-resemble-a- white-european-142130. See also Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 29 for thinking about race and the Enlightenment, though for centuries it has been subject to silencing or misrepresentation through racist tropes.7 Next, Victoria Ramirez Gentry discusses the consequences of the long history of white Christianity for contemporary US evangelicals as well as for eighteenth-century Black believers such as Phillis Wheatley (Wheatley Peters after her marriage) and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano.8 In fact, Wheatley Peters has come to the forefront of eighteenth-century studies this year, particularly amidst calls to decolonize the leading eighteenth-century conference, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), which was held April 7-11, 2021 (virtually, due to the COVID pandemic). Wheatley Peters is the inspiration behind Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ tour-de-force poetry collection The Age of Phillis (2020). Several contributors see Wheatley Peters as the primary touchstone for decentering white eighteenth- century studies not just as a matter of greater inclusiveness on the syllabus, but also as a formal and structural intervention for decolonizing the curriculum. Phillis Wheatley Peters comes to represent Black joy and survival but also what it means to live in the wake of slavery. Formally rigorous while also formally experimental, the fragmented collage of The Age of Phillis registers the labor, beauty, and suffering of Black lives in the wake of the Middle Passage. It also registers the failures of white Christianity to acknowledge that mourning or to acknowledge the full range of emotions that the wake calls forth. Indeed, Laura Stevens’s recent article about abolitionist rhetoric brought into sharp relief exactly what is excluded when righteous anger is occluded in favor of appeals to compassion or, worse, of imposing a particular kind of “happiness” onto the already oppressed. As Stevens points out in her study of William Warburton’s 1766 sermon, sensibility and compassion have featured centrally in studies of the intersection of “histories of emotion” and abolitionist rhetoric; what has received less attention are the “less gentle passions.” This lack of attention is perhaps because, if “pity invites action, outrage demands it.”9 Stevens’ is a searing argument about the limits and historical failures of white compassion and moral outrage.