In 1836 John Mewburn, a justice of the peace in the Niagara district of Upper Canada, meeting in quarter sessions, fined George Ness, a farm laborer, fifteen shillings and costs for disturbing the worship in St. John's Church “by talking and whistling during the time of divine service.” William Johnston and John Ferrin, as well as being fined, spent twenty-four hours in jail in 1840 for shooting their guns close enough to St. Andrews Church to annoy the parishioners during their Sunday service. In extending to the rough settler culture of Upper Canada the enforcement of a Sabbath observance that reflected the religious and moral enthusiasm of late-eighteenth-century England, Upper Canada's magistrates were part of an Anglo-American world whose cultures, though distinct, were also interconnected. As J. G. A. Pocock famously noted over a decade ago, and as many historians have since elaborated, colonial societies were part of “a constellation of cultures constituting the Atlantic region, between which boundaries were so far permeable that we need not pay much attention to their existence.”

Central to shaping this transatlantic British identity was religion; it was assumed that the colonies Britain created would be Christian societies. This entailed the challenge of preaching the gospel and establishing churches in new settlements over a vast geographic area, but also implanting English political and legal structures. Religion and law went hand in hand.

African slave religions were rooted in the cultural forms of western and central African religions. The paradigmatic features of these religions included central concern with powerful beings of the extraordinary realm who were related to the phenomenal world of experience through African ideas of matter and spirit. African religions had established a tradition of incorporating elements of theology and ritual from cultures other than that of the devotee. This history of refashioning and blending continued in the religion of African slaves that resulted from the dispersion of the transatlantic slave trade.

PRE-COLUMBIAN ERA TO 1600

The nature of African slave religions is discernible from the major patterns of theology and culture that had defined African societies for centuries. The oldest stratum of religion in western and central Africa is Orisha religion, which mutually obligated humans and members of the extraordinary realm of divine and ancestral beings. Beginning in the ninth century of the Common Era, varieties of Islam would become familiar to the region. And by the early 1500s, the Kongo state, followed by the Ndongo kingdom, would establish an African form of Christianity as its official religion. Orisha religion, nevertheless, by far and away dominated the numerous states of West Africa. The theological interpretations of matter, commerce, and governance throughout West Africa were deliberately shaped and continually refashioned to conform to Orisha philosophical norms.

In 1962, an important conference on African writing “Of English Expression” took place in Kampala, Uganda. As the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o was to recall almost thirty years later, the list of participants at the conference “contained most of the names which have now become the subject of scholarly dissertations in universities all over the world” (1981b: 5). But among the many luminaries attending the conference at Makerere Hill – among whom Chinua Achebe and Peter Abrahams were prominent – none were from East Africa. And since writers in African languages had not been invited to the conference, the most important East African writers, such as the Swahili poet Sir Shabaan Robert, were excluded by default. Among the assembled makers of African literature, the East African region was represented by student writers and apprentices (Ngugi, Rebecca Njau, and Grace Ogot) whose only claim to literary reputation was a few short stories in college journals such as Penpoint. The Kampala conference was, nevertheless, a remarkable event in the history of African writing in English: it raised many significant questions about the historical and cultural conditions in which African literature was produced, its relation to literatures in the African diaspora, and the epistemological and theoretical questions that were central to the identity of an emergent literature, including what came to be known as the language question. The conference had brought together a distinctive group of writers from Africa and its diaspora, and in doing so it had come to embody what Ngugi was later to characterize as “the energy and the hope and the dreams and the confidence … of a continent emerging from a colonial era” (1981b: 142).

Orality is the exercise of human verbal communication. Orality transmutes into orature, oracy, or oral literature when either unconsciously or deliberately couched in esthetic forms rather than when deployed in perfunctory manner or primarily for content transmission. Chirograph-centered analysts such as Walter Ong (1982: 11–14) consider the term “oral literature” an oxy-moron. However, if the concept of “literature” is not indivisibly tied to language inscription, and its esthetic function foregrounded, then it equates with “verbal art.” Esthetic structures are culture-specific to the extent that they are grounded in the sound, syntax, semantic and idiomatic configurations of a particular language system, but such structures occur universally and attract hearer attention within each language community. Among these structures are syntactic and semantic parallelisms which produce rhythmic phrasing; stock attributions and idioms, and their converse–syntactic inversions and unexpected semantic manipulation; imagery, metaphor, and simile; rhyme and alliteration; irony in plot or word-choice; dialogue which advances plot and consolidates character and setting; witty verbal exchange producing humor or surprise; conflictual situations; opposed character traits; the evocation of contrasting moods. These are also the very structures employed in scribal literature.

Given the traditionally limited use of literacy in most African societies (see Gregsen 1977: 174–93; Gérard 1981), orature genres, themes, styles, and performance techniques have historically been primary vehicles of communication, enculturation, entertainment, and societal acclamation. As cognitive and performative skills, these verbal traditions were among the few but highly significant possessions brought to the Americas by the enslaved survivors of transatlantic crossings.

Background and research trends

North African oral traditions have left early and powerful traces despite their apparent ephemeral nature. The Golden Ass by the Roman writer Apuleius, born in Algeria in the middle of the first century of the Common Era drew, in text and texture, on the North African oral culture of his era. Apuleius, whose first language was probably Punic rather than Libyan (Berber), nonetheless claimed membership of two distinct Berber communities. To these African connections were attributed both his strengths (a facility for verbal artistry, a seeming naturalness and lack of artifice in his writing, an infusion of the techniques of African oral literature and magical and religious traditions in his work) and his weaknesses (the same). His work, like other literary works of the “African School,” enlivened Greek and Roman metropolitan literature – displaying vivid color, a fondness for allegory, and a grotesque realism harvested from, by that time in western North Africa, a rich blending of Phoenician and various Berber cultures and in eastern North Africa, ancient Egyptian culture. Until recently, the influences of the Berber or Egyptian languages and culture(s) on Punic, Latin, or Greek have remained mostly unconsidered (but see Scobie 1983 for a discussion of the influence of Berber nannies and their storytelling on the children of Phoenician or Latin-speaking households and Black Athena and the controversy surrounding it).

The religious complexion of the United States changed spectacularly in the two and one-half generations between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. These changes were wrought, above all, by the conquest of the West, by the unleashing of populist forces, by the rise of new religious groups spawned by the country's political freedoms and geographical expanse, and by immigration. At the end of the era, groundwork had been laid for what was emerging as the most religiously complex nation in history.

GEOGRAPHICAL EXPANSION

Grants of land from Europe's powers to the original American colonists were conceived on a heroic scale. In 1620, for example, the Council for New England secured from King James a new charter granting it all the territory between 40° and 48° north latitude, “from sea to sea.” As with other charters, this extreme reach to unexplored lands in the West has struck modern observers as outrageous, avaricious, grandiose, humorous, or simply naïve. In their own time the reach seemed, to most of the land's inhabitants, remote and unfathomable. Unfathomable, that is, until American independence revolutionized not only the political, but also the geographical consciousness of those inhabitants, thereby unleashing new forces. Even then, the continental space to fill seemed infinite.

No sooner had the newly formed United States wrested free of Britain than it quickly acquired the heart of the remainder of the habitable continent.

CONTRA AND PRO THE SYLLOGISM

Most seventeenth–century textbooks of logic follow the usual pattern according to which a discussion of the constituents of propositions and of propositions themselves leads up to a part dealing with those combinations of propositions which exhibit a valid form of deductive argument. From Aristotle onward the core of this part of logic had been the doctrine of the syllogism. Already during the period of the Renaissance, however, the privileged position of the syllogism had been vehemently attacked by those humanist dialecticians who wanted to restrain the influence of Aristotelianism on their subject. Their criticisms were taken over and elaborated by such modern thinkers as Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Locke.

Bacon bases his disapproval of the use of syllogisms in natural science on the consideration that, if the notions which are signified by the words making up their constituent propositions are improperly and overhastily abstracted from facts, the whole edifice tumbles. Though he admits that the syllogism may be an acceptable instrument of reasoning in such fields as divinity, ethics, politics, and the law, in dealing with the nature of things he wants to use induction throughout. In the same vein, Descartes contends that traditional dialectic is quite useless to those who are seeking truth and that at best it can serve to expound more easily to others things that one already knows; rather than to philosophy, it belongs to rhetoric. Moreover, it is, he says, an illusion to think that the truth about any question can be reached by the mechanical application of the formal rules ofsyllogistic inference.

The Caribbean is a wide and diverse geographical region. Sometimes, the region is expanded to include islands – like Bermuda and the Bahamas – that are not technically located in the Caribbean Sea. In addition, nations like Venezuela, Colombia, and Guyana are sometimes included, although technically these nations are located on the South American mainland. As an area, the Caribbean is united by a common history of colonialism, ethnic and cultural diversity, and strong cultural and religious connections to both Europe and Africa.

This essay covers the period from 1865 to 1945 including the transition from large-scale plantation economies to economies dependent on small-scale farming and tourism, the turn of a new century, World War I, a worldwide depression, and World War II.

Caribbean cultures have often been seen in terms of “creolization.” The term “creole” refers to the first generation of Europeans born in the Americas. The term also refers to institutions and ideas that first developed in the New World. In his essay “On the Miracle of Creolization,” Richard Price makes the point that the people of the Americas have always borrowed religious and cultural expressions from outside the region and modified them to make them “their own.” This is inevitable in a region where almost everyone is from someplace else and people with diverse backgrounds coexist in close proximity one to another. Proximity has fostered the creation of new meanings from older ideas.

Swahili literature, broadly defined as that body of verbal art originally composed in the Swahili language, is a product of what Ali Mazrui (1986) has termed Africa’s triple heritage. It emerged out of a confluence of three forces: the indigenous tradition, the Islamic legacy, and the western impact. The indigenous contribution has, of course, featured primarily in the realm of orature; but, over the years, it has continued to affect the destiny of Swahili written literature that is the focus of this chapter. One must also bear in mind that the boundary between what is written and what is oral in the various genres of Swahili literature is not always easy to determine.

With regard to the interaction between the Arab-Islamic and indigenous factors, in particular, the general tendency, until relatively recently, was to privilege the former (usually seen as the “donor”) over the latter (regarded as the “recipient”) to a point where it has supposedly lost its local identity. But as Rajmund Ohly observes, “The overlapping of these two cultures – the local, Bantu and the Oriental – took place on the basis of mutual adjustment and not, as has been thought until now, on the basis of assimilation, so that a two tiered development of literature can be observed which embraces both the pure elements of Bantu folk culture and the inflowing Muslim-Oriental elements” (1985: 461). In fact, the so-called layers became integrated into a new organic synthesis and, in time, fused with other influences reflecting, among others things, the tensions between town and country, and between “gentry” and “commoner.”

A large number of early Americans thought often about religion. Until the 1770s, the most frequently published and reprinted books in the American colonies were sermons and religious treatises. But the colonists – and the Native Americans who preceded them – also differed about religion. It divided them. The most prolific producers of formal theology were the Calvinist clergy of New England, but Christian alternatives could be found among Catholics, Anglicans, Swedish and German Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Universalists, Gortonites, Rogerines, Shakers, and an assortment of even smaller groups like the Ephrata utopians or the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness. But Christian thought was far from the sole option. Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, although lacking rabbis, preserved ancient traditions and practices along with many of the ideas embedded within them. Deists dispensed with notions of a special biblical revelation. Africans, most enslaved, some free, imported not only African traditional religions but also Christian and Muslim ideas; and more than 250 Native American societies interpreted their ritual practices and ethical injunctions with a vast collection of narratives and beliefs. Americans could also be eclectic, combining inherited traditions with strands of esoteric and metaphysical ideas that had different origins. The realm of religious thought was turbulent.

The diversity registered conflicting interpretations of scripture, opposing assessments of the authority of tradition, differing views about the value of primitive precedents, controversies about ritual, disputes over ethics, and incompatible attitudes toward the broader culture.

The history of Judaism in America from the 1820s through the end of World War II falls into two unequal time periods. The long century from the 1820s through the middle of the 1920s took its basic shape from the fact that three million European Jews immigrated to the United States. The second, much shorter, from the end of mass migration until 1945, reflected the increasing American nativity of the Jewish people as well as their steady journey into the educated middle classes.

In the 1820s and before, Jews constituted a tiny fraction of the American population, limited in their settlement to a few eastern seaboard cities as well as to a number of emerging inland communities like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. They maintained a relatively invisible persona and did not seek to impress the American landscape with markers of their presence. They did little to make other Americans aware of their presence, and their religious institutions constituted the dominant forms of Jewish communal life. In most places they maintained only one synagogue, and it constituted the only functioning center of Jewish life, taking care of the Jews' religious, educational, and charitable needs.

By 1945, while Jews still constituted a minority in a predominantly Christian populace, never making up more than 4 or 5 percent of the population, they assumed a prominent place in American society. They drew attention to themselves as Jews.

GODS AND GIANTS

Introduction

Here is a traditional view. The conception of knowledge as an infallible cognitive act was a distinctively seventeenth-century manifestation and consequence of a new obsession with doubt and its resolution. Whereas earlier epistemology, following Plato and Aristotle, had focussed on the move from particular beliefs to general science (‘the Problem of Universals’), Cartesian and post–Cartesian epistemology was very differently shaped by a scepticism which extended even to the existence of material objects (‘the Problem of Perception’). The latter took the form of a new quest for certainty and ‘given’ foundations which, although dominated by the metaphors of sight and enlightenment, in fact spread a veil–indeed, drove an ontological wedge — between subject and object, a thinking self and an ‘external’ world. Two schools of philosophy are assigned their origin in this supposedly novel problematic. ‘Rationalists’ sought a remedy for doubt in quasi–geometrical systems built on supposedly innate axioms evident to the self in independence of the world, while ‘Empiricists’, with equal egocentricity, looked for the foundations of knowledge in the pure content of sensory experience.

When the English set up their first permanent settlement in what became the southern United States, they envisioned transplanting English life and institutions with relative ease. Those who survived the first year at Jamestown, Virginia, after arriving in 1607, knew differently. The struggle to carve a society in what seemed a strange wilderness required extraordinary strength and determination. It also involved fashioning afresh social institutions, including religious ones, for familiar models simply did not transfer readily from the mother country to the colonial enterprise.

The traditional story of religion in the southern colonies focuses on the Church of England, which had legal standing at some point in each of them, and then on the gradual ascendancy of an evangelical style. In reality the picture is more complicated. From the start, religious life included interaction with Native American tribal cultures and their ways of being religious. After 1619, when the first slave ship arrived in Virginia, it also involved intimate association with African tribal modes of religious expression. Although the assumption was that the church in the southern colonies echoed the Church of England as it existed across the Atlantic, the colonial setting as well as the interplay with Native Americans and Africans meant that many religious cultures were transformed, not just transplanted.

Native American “religion” may be a misnomer for many traditionally oriented Native Americans, as well as for some academic scholars. Native Americans frequently associate religion with a rigidly organized orthodoxy and orthopraxy anchored by sacred scriptures and an established ecclesiastical hierarchy. In point of fact, the vast majority of Native Americans today are true believing Christians who clearly embrace a religion and subscribe to its basic tenets. However, Native American traditionalists with at best a nominal tie to Christianity often prefer to use the term “spirituality” to refer to their sacred belief systems and related practices.

The idea of spirituality invokes indigenous conceptions of a fluid, unwritten sense of profound power ordering the visible and invisible universe. Such power infuses the worldviews of traditionalists; it goes under various names but can also operate as an unnamed category. It is manifest in sacred sites, and it can be activated by ritual publicly performed during collective ceremonial periods or in privately practiced rites by individuals during times of personal crisis.

Spirituality claims a timeless authenticity seamlessly interwoven within distinctive cultural patterns. These patterns extend far into the past, embody the present, and project into the near and distant future. Native spirituality was closely connected to prophecy. From a traditionalist viewpoint, prophecy was history and history was prophecy. Linear temporality alternated with nonlineal time and with a sense of eternality. These alternative systems of time may be best exemplified by various forms of divination.

INTRODUCTION

At the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle cautioned against confusing the kind of evidence and degree of certainty suitable to various disciplines: ‘For it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.’ Seventeenth-century thinkers from the most varied backgrounds and with the most varied objectives made Aristotle’s warning their motto but turned it to quite non-Aristotelian ends. Theologians, jurists, historians, and natural philosophers vastly expanded the realm of the probable at the expense of that of the demonstrative and denied the possibility of irrefragable certainty to all disciplines except mathematics and perhaps metaphysics. Whereas Aristotle had hoped for sciences of, inter alia, physics and astronomy worthy of the name, grounded in demonstration, the seventeenth-century admirers of the introduction to the Nicomachean Ethics doubted that any part of natural philosophy could aspire to such certainty. However, theirs was not a counsel of despair. On the contrary, they regarded contemporary developments in natural philosophy as marked advances over scholastic achievements. They were able simultaneously to demote the new physics to the status of probable knowledge and to affirm its superiority to Aristotelian physics because they understood ‘probable’ in a new way.