Healing Rhetoric: Racial Identities
and New Testament Receptions in
Nineteenth-Century America

Steven Mailloux
University of California, Irvine

 

This paper will track the trope of rhetorical healing within the nineteenth-century reception of St. Paul's preachings by African-American intellectuals. I will begin with Alexander Crummell's 1859 sermon in Harper, Liberia, on "The Fitness of the Gospel for Its Own Work." Crummell takes Romans 1:14 as his text--"I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians"--and argues that the Gospel must be preached to all the world because it is "the one and only remedy for that which, without it, is the incurable disease of all human souls, the leprosy of sin." I will explore the role of rhetorical healing in African-American articulations of Christian and Greco-Roman traditions throughout the century as those
articulations provide figurative and suasory resources for the public performance of racial identity.

 

PDF of Article forthcoming