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Questions of Self-identity and Self-Autonomy: African Texts and Religious Conversion in the Eighteenth Century Danish-Norwegian West Indies

Ray A. Kea, Department of History, University of California at Riverside
ray.kea@ucr.edu

Antonio Gramsci has shown that wherever there is history, there is class and that the essence of the historical is the long and extraordinarily varied socio-cultural interplay between the dominant and the subaltern. Focusing on the period from the 1730s to the 1750s, the paper traces and examines this interplay on the slave plantations in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in the eighteenth century texts of converted African subalterns. The eighteenth century was a time of globalization and globalizing divisions of labor.
The texts are to be found in the mid-eighteenth century newsletter (Büdingische Sammlung), the archival records of the Moravian Church, and C.G.A.Oldendorp’s multi-volume history (published in 1777) of Moravian missionaries in the Danish Caribbean. They include letters, petitions, and testimonials, some of which were composed by literate Africans.
The converts engaged in a bitter and brutal struggle with the plantation owners and the Danish-Norwegian Lutheran Church who were adamantly opposed to the proselytizing efforts of Moravian missionaries from Denmark and Germany. Representing responses to the slave owners’ opposition, the texts were composed in an environment of violent contention and repression. Although the texts name historical subjects and express definite historical subjectivities, they never entered the world historical stage under the signs of the global or the modern. In its conclusion, the paper addresses this issue by arguing that the texts add cultural depth and historical density to current discussions about American chattel slavery, the Atlantic world, and modernity.