Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South with Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Kristian Petersen:

Welcome to Religious Studies News. I’m your host, Kristian Petersen, and today I’m here with Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, assistant professor of religious studies at Stanford University and co-winner of AAR’s 2022 Best First Book in the History of Religions Award. She’s here to speak to us about her book, The Souls of Women Folk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South, published with the University of North Carolina Press. Congratulations Alexis, and thanks for joining me.

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh:

Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, you’re probably used to the accolades with such a well-awarded book. After my read through, it’s definitely deserving of all that, so congrats. Thank you. As your title alludes to, your project is marking a key shift in approaches to the religious life of enslaved peoples in the Americas. Can you tell us a bit about how the framework for your project first emerged for you, and what were some of the broader conceptual interventions you were hoping to make with the project?

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh:

Sure. Thanks for the question. The project first emerged out of my general interest in slavery, gender and religion. As I was reading through the very limited histories of religion and slavery, particularly in the United States, I realized that so much of the history assumed a particular type of subject. It assumed a particular day-to-day existence for enslaved people. And that tended to be a subject that cohered with the public imagination around what an enslaved person was or looked like or did. But I was trained to be a slavery historian and a religious historian, and as I got deeper into slavery history, histories of slavery in the United States in particular, I saw the amazing diversity and complexity of the lives of enslaved people. Even when we’re talking on the meta level about what they did every day, what their work hours looked like, where they could go and who they could talk to, marriage patterns, things that just are really integral to how someone can move, what they thought about, what kinds of privileges and opportunities they had access to.

With this project, the goal was really to communicate the importance of gender to how we not only construct histories of religion and slavery, but histories of religion in the United States and more broadly, because religion is such a radically embodied enterprise when people do it, even when we’re talking about cosmological features, we are anchoring them in these embodied conceptual frameworks. And so that was really the intervention I wanted to make, not only in my field of Africana religious history, but also in religious studies more broadly to encourage people to think about how histories of reproduction and violence and gender and race all intersect when we think about and construct this category of religion.

Kristian Petersen:

And I hope members of the AAR will take up this work. I think that critique could probably be made across all of our sub-disciplines, that the religious subject is assumed to be male. So I think you’re doing really important work with that kind of movement. Another framework that you introduce is this idea of dismemberment, and I don’t know what the best way to say this would be, but remembrance or re/membrance. So how do you use these concepts to understand the experience of violence as well as the humanity of enslaved black women in your project? And this is also where religion as a category of analysis seems to intersect with these ideas. So how does that also figure into this?

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh:

Yes. I mean, you hit the nail on the head actually. It really was thinking about violence and humanity. So dismemberment was a way for me to really conceptually think about this long history of violence against people who would first be known as African and then Black. Oftentimes when we think about histories of slavery, we think about this long, centuries long institution as something that just happened very, very quickly. It’s a flash, in particularly American history, and then we move on. But this is a long enterprise and it’s a global enterprise. It’s something that touches so many colonial contexts around the world in the early modern period. So dismemberment was me trying to think about this global experience from the perspectives of the people who experienced it. What is it like for your body, your family, your reproductive practices, your practices around who and how you love people, your cultural practices, your cultural ideas to all become a part of this global project.

And they’re being lampooned and talked about and they’re being taken apart. They’re being dismembered. You’re being physically dismembered, your families are being dismembered. And so I wanted that violent imagery woven into the conceptual framework of the project and really into the methodological structure because how I approached the sources was really with an eye towards how did enslaved people experience this? Because so often I think in histories of slavery and religion, when we talk about enslaved people, we inadvertently take things from the perspective of the people who were talking about them. This is a Charles Long, the great historian of religion’s, critique about religious studies more broadly. And I found that to be particularly useful as I approached thinking about how to shape the project.

Remembrance was me trying to define what religion would be for a group of people who are so culturally different. They’re linguistically different in some ways, they’re intellectually, they’re cosmologically different, and then they’re being thrust into this experience that is incredibly violent and disruptive together. So what does religion become for them? And we can’t assume one consistent definition of religion because as we know in the early modern period, especially in the Western hemisphere, and really the dawn of what we call modernity, religion is emerging as a category alongside these colonial projects and as a category, not as a phenomenon obviously, but as a category. And so what does it mean for them to say they do or have a religion? And so that’s what remembrance was. It became less me trying to solve the what is problem and much more of what did it do for them.

So if dismemberment was the problem of slavery, it was the experience of being an enslaved person, then remembrance, both in terms of putting back together, piecing back together families and psychological and emotional features of one’s individuality and communal life, but also memory. Remembering the things and the people that you had lost or were losing in process. It was about memories of West and West Central Africa and these ancestral ties that were reconstructed or maintained. And so remembrance became the way for me to really carve out how I was working with the category of religion in the project.

Kristian Petersen:

Another idea that you introduced that really I think is a strong thread throughout the whole book, so it’ll help us think about these more specific chapters in a moment, but is this idea of triple consciousness. What does this term mean for you in the book? And how does this model operate in your study?

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh:

Yes, that’s a great one. I really didn’t work with it as much as I thought I should have, but it was really important to me to really go back to the roots of black religious studies. In particular, W. E. B. Du Bois is so central to the entry of the study of Black people’s religiosity into the academic world. And he is still, I would argue, the first and primary theorist that we start with when we start telling people about the intellectual history of the larger subfield. And so The Souls of Black Folk obviously is where The Souls of Womenfolk, the title, came from. And within the souls of black folk, W. E. B. Du Bois makes the very famous argument about double consciousness, thinking about the two-ness of black experience, both having to understand and express your own individuality as a human being, as a person, as a member of a community, but then also being subjected to these larger forces, external gazes, that also shape how you’re able to respond and express yourself as an individual or community member.

And so he understood this as the quintessential problem of Blackness, and it’s a powerful concept that has been used to great effect in a lot of other areas. But within that same essay, “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” within The Souls of Black Folk, he creates this powerful construction that has very much structured methodologically how we study religion and slavery. So he talks about the preacher, the music, and the frenzy, but this is a very androcentric framework, except for the frenzy where you see women-gendered people showing up. And so I was thinking about those two things, double consciousness and the preacher music and the frenzy, as ways that I wanted this study to intervene in the conversation in Africana religious studies firstly, but then in religious studies more broadly, because a lot of religious studies, theories and methods courses, use Du Bois. And so triple consciousness was me centering the woman-gendered subject in this conversation, in this framework.

So when we talk about double consciousness, yes, you have the external gaze and then you have the individual. Triple consciousness adds the reproductive layer. Enslaved women in particular were always thinking about what happened to their children. And this is not a universal case, obviously, I don’t want to assume maternity and biology are always linked, but for enslaved women, they were in a structure where it was always linked. So even if it wasn’t linked for them on an individual or communal level, they were being forced into this framework. And so what happened to their children was always central to how they constructed their own identities, how they moved through space and time, how they theorized and thought about the cosmos, how they practiced and what rights they chose to practice. And so that’s why triple consciousness became central to really how I wanted to intervene in that conversation. I wanted it to call our attentions to the fact that there are other features beyond the individual and kind of just this broad amorphous community that operate when people are making religious decisions.

Kristian Petersen:

I think it’s very useful and it’s strong throughout all the chapters. You begin the book looking at this kind of connection between West Africa and the genesis of enslaved female religiosity in the Americas. I’m going to ask you more about the chapters that take on specific case studies of enslaved women. As you move through the chapters, in chapter two you look at motherhood and experiences of maternity. What were the moral dimensions of women’s enslavement regarding birth and pregnancy and abortion?

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh:

The chapters two and three really are the core of the book in terms of how I started my thinking around race, reproduction, and gender, and the ways that the unique violence of enslavement shaped all these features. It shaped how gender was emerging for people who would become Black and gendered woman. It shaped how race was emerging because reproduction was so critical to these racial fantasies about Blackness, and it shaped how the nation was emerging because of course, US slavery was critical to how the US was able to emerge very, very quickly onto the global scene as a player among these very long, well-funded colonial empires like France and England and Spain. So slavery is not peripheral to this project or peripheral to histories of global development. It’s really central to these trends that we see in the early modern period that these histories, they’re all interconnected.

And at the core of that is something very, very private. It’s very intimate. It’s reproduction. Because the US, unlike the Caribbean and South America, was able to increase its enslaved population through natural reproduction. So the reasons why so few enslaved people were imported into the United States, relative to places like Brazil or Barbados or Jamaica, is because enslaved people in the United States produced the enslaved population, and it grew at a faster clip. And so reproduction is this global piece, it’s the subject of conversations. Doctors are talking about how to get enslaved people to reproduce more. They’re talking about the reproductive systems, of course, in these very, very problematic ways. But these are sources of, it’s a part of a global economic conversation, a global conversation around development, around markets and exchange. But it’s also, again, very, very intimate. It’s people interacting, it’s people starting families.

And so this disjuncture, it’s a very violent paradigm to be situated within. This is where enslaved people sit as people who love and people who have families every single time they have a child. These children become cogs within this larger system, as I say in the book, that will inevitably kill them and it will kill their families. It will destroy them. It will attempt to destroy them psychologically and socially and emotionally. So what does religion and what do ethics, what do values look like to these people, to the people who have to raise these children? What do they tell their children at night? What do they pray for if they pray? What rights do they perform? These were my questions, and that’s the subject of these two chapters around maternity. It really is about these very difficult negotiations. So for instance, I talk about things like sexual compromise.

We know the histories, or many people are familiar with the history of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings because this was a part of a global conversation in the US, a national conversation. And for me, when we’re looking at these types of situations, particularly ones where you have these very high profile people and of course this is not normative, oftentimes these were highly coercive. This was nothing but long-term assault. But in these situations where the children are liberated, for instance, but the mother is never liberated, how do we talk about that ethically? How do we talk about the choices that are being made and how do we do so from the perspective of the enslaved woman? So sexual compromise became me trying to parse through some of these more difficult things. There were moments where women understood that they were up against powers that they could not control.

They couldn’t stop. And so one of the most powerful episodes that I talk about all the time is this enslaved woman who’s being judged by her mistress for having sex with the driver, who is the enslaved Black overseer. The enslaved Black overseer was the driver, if you’re on a large plantation. Now, everybody wasn’t on a large plantation, but if you were, sometimes you had this structure and the mistress is judging her according to these Judeo-Christian standards about having sex outside of marriage and all that. And her response was, well, “What was I supposed to do? He had the power to make me.” And I titled one of my subsections that because that was really the quagmire. Either I go violently or I go ‘willingly,’ with the kind of air scare quotes around them. I go without violence, but either way, he’s going to be able to do to me what he wants to do. So my choices are limited.

This is where enslaved women’s ethics really emerge, between these really difficult rocks and hard places. And so that’s where reproduction, maternity, abortion, all of that comes into the conversation where I’m really trying to help people understand that when we impose these very presentist understandings of choice upon people globally whose context do not allow for that, we really do a disservice to our profession and our field because we are missing so much of the nuance in how humans actually make decisions about their lives.

Kristian Petersen:

You kind of alluded to some of the conversation you have in the following chapter, which focuses on sexual ethics and social values more specifically, and there’s a lot in between. But I want to jump to the final kind of core chapter that you have, which looks at women’s contributions to institutional religiosity, which people might not be thinking about when they’re thinking about the kind of religious lives of enslaved people. So in regards to that, why have women been overlooked in thinking about their contributions and how should we understand the efforts of enslaved women to the development of institutional Protestantism?

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh:

Yes. Well, this takes us back to the original kind of response around Du Bois voice and that preacher music frenzy construct because it’s been so central to your point, not just how people in Black religion have thought about the religions of enslaved people in the field, but it’s been really central to the emergence of a particular type of Protestantism that is visible in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Black people are a really core part of that story. And so I really wanted to move backwards and to think much more critically about this framework. This is why I introduced power, sounds, sociality, and movement as a counter framework. What that does is it still encompasses, it allows space for Protestantism, but I think my goal was to acknowledge that Protestantism is not the only thing at play when we start talking about enslaved people emerging into the Civil War period, the post civil War period in the early 20th century. There are still a lot of religious systems and ideas and practices that are swirling around and constituting the religious cultures of these groups of people.

And so when thinking about Protestantism, it’s important to think of it as one piece of a much larger puzzle of religiosity. And so that’s what that last chapter was about. It was thinking about enslaved women in particular’s imprint upon Protestantism, but also me trying to situate Protestantism just more broadly for people. Because the first question I usually get when I say, oh, I do religion and slavery, it’s about Christianity and slavery. And that’s where most people have always started. There’s an assumed Christian base among enslaved people, even though Michael Gomez told us a very long time ago that that is not the case in his book, Exchanging Our Country Marks. And so we’ve known for a while that this is not the majority, and this is maybe not quite the framework, but we’ve been working with it nonetheless because I think many people have not had another framework through which to think through what we’re seeing. And so that’s what the last chapter really is about. Both the imprint but also situating Protestantism within this larger framework and introducing concepts that are much more inclusive of Africana formations that may not fit very perfectly or aligned with Protestantism or even Christianity, but are still extent within the population in a very visible and prominent way.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, and I’m glad you brought this kind of more category-defining part of the work, which I think is a real key contribution that you make across the book in many ways, kind of repositioning us and how we approach materials or how we think about the kind of interiority of individuals. So I think people in a lot of subfields really would benefit from taking a read. There’s a whole lot in the book that we didn’t get to discuss, but I want to give you an opportunity if there’s any kind of final takeaways or thoughts you want to just let listeners know that maybe of why they might want to pick up the book.

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh:

Oh yeah, thank you. I mean, again, you read so well the interiority piece, that’s the final word where I want people to sit. Interiority and humanity are the two big pieces. Those are the key takeaways I want people to leave the book with. Thinking about enslaved people, not as a monolith, but as this incredibly diverse group of people who were thrust into a collective experience and through whom came these global cultures that are still, I mean, that are still operative and highly influential to the contemporary period. And so understanding them, understanding the how of their moment is I think, critical to thinking about many movements like Pentecostalism and like you said, global Christianity and Islam. There are so many places –  the emergence, the reemergence of du and conjure and Spiritism and Sania – all these really very present and now critical conversations we’re having about religious phenomena have moments of intersection, sometimes centuries long, sometimes brief, with this history.

And so my goal was really for people to leave here asking those questions about their own fields, about their own subfields, about how we contextualize our subjects within these projects, what their connections are to these much more global conversations, if any. And then also interiority and the interiority of people who to this day are still stigmatized, stereotyped and understood to, we understand them to be human, but we don’t assign human thoughts and processes and fears and struggles unless you’re a member of the subgroup. So it’s thinking about anti-Blackness globally. It’s thinking about gender and the ways gender, sexuality, and intimacy are still integral to much larger public conversations. And so hopefully people again are invited to ask more questions after reading the book.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, that’s a great way to leave it. Well, congratulations again on the award. Certainly well deserving. I gained a lot from reading the book, and I hope others will pick it up as well.

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh:

Thank you so much. This has been wonderful.