Candelaria devotes a chapter each to Salvador Dalí, Fray Angélico Chávez, José Clemente Orozco, Miguel de Unamuno, Jorge Luis Borges, and Richard Rojas. Subsequent chapters take up contemporary tendencies in “Liberation Theology” and “The Mestizo Christ” (which includes a bit on the Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa). A coda emphasizes the diversity of the images of Christ. The diversity is obvious when the hyper-sophistication of Dalí’s The Madonna of Port Lligat and Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) is set side by side with the raw muscularity of Orozco’s The Trinity of the Revolution, or when the passionately personal witness of de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life is compared with the playfully polysemic Three Versions of Judas. But it isn’t fully clear how such figures all fall within the category “Latino.”
While biographical and professional exposition dominate the treatment of each figure, Candelaria does not spare criticism. Mainly, he seems bothered when his outliers’ appropriation of Scripture does not match the historical certitudes offered by NT100 (see the gratuitous criticism of Fray Angélico Chávez), and even more distressed by what he considers a strain of “Gnosticism” afflicting many of these figures, a fault he seems to equate with traditional Chalcedonian piety (see his treatment of de Unamuno). It is surprising that Candelaria did not treat perhaps the most famous of Dalí’s treatments of Christ, The Sacrament of the Last Supper.
Candelaria’s prose—the standard for the academy these days—is a chore to read. Consider this typical sentence: “With an ancient Greek theme, Orozco expresses a universal ideal, transcending the provincialism of nationalistic art and the particularism of Mexican Catholic religious art, in contrast to the particularity of the revolutionary panels.” Where is an editor when we need one?
The Latino Christ in Art, Literature, and Liberation Theology
Michael R. Candelaria
University of New Mexico Press, $65, 248 pp.
In case we thought that North American problems with slavery were homegrown, Katharine Gerbner (a professor of history at the University of Minnesota) shows in great detail how the same problems existed in the colonized islands of the Atlantic as far back as the early seventeenth century—and indeed were imported directly from these islands to Maryland, South Carolina, and other Southern colonies. Gerbner’s analysis deals specifically with the deep ambiguities surrounding the baptism of African slaves. On the one hand, such a missionary effort would seem to be a Christian imperative; on the other, slaves holding Christian status could threaten the planters’ social order. Should not the “freedom of a Christian”—a Protestant ideal if ever there was one—be translated into social and political freedom as well?
Although her main focus is the island colony of Barbados, Gerbner devotes considerable attention to the Danish West Indies; and she gives as much or more attention to the efforts of George Fox and the Quakers, as well as Count von Zinzendorf and the Moravians, as she does to the Anglicans. The term “protestant” in the title is carefully chosen. Gerbner shows that Catholics cheerfully and methodically baptized slaves by the score, abetted by imperial edicts (especially of Portugal and Spain) and the coordinated efforts of religious orders like the Jesuits and Dominicans. No double-mindedness afflicted Catholic conversion activity among slaves, because unlike Protestants, Catholics generally didn’t elevate “freedom” as a distinctive mark of being Christian.
Protestant proselytism enjoyed the benefits of neither imperial will nor Jesuitical sweat. It tended to be sporadic, freelance, and undersupported. A perfect example is the Oxford-educated Christopher Codrington, whose fervent efforts to Christianize slaves in Barbados remained frustrated, and whose bequest to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel—a bequest he intended for the conversion and education of African slaves—had the paradoxical effect of making the SPG a slaveholding organization. All these good-willed people were caught up in the incompatibility of enforced slavery and the Christian life; none of them could overcome the ideology of a planter establishment so powerful and pervasive that it even made profitability the measure of the keeping of the Sabbath.
Gerbner also carefully examines how slave conversions tended to shift the official Barbadian documents from the language of “Protestant Supremacy,” which distinguished slave and master on the basis of religion, to the language of “White Supremacy,” which distinguished them on the basis of race. This “need to distinguish” in favor of one over another is part of the toxic brew (mixed in part by Christians themselves) from which many still drink today. The book closes by treating George Whitefield’s 1740 “Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina,” which defended the conversion of slaves, as a transition point to a “formal defense of slavery in the Atlantic world” via its argument that becoming Christian made for better (i.e., more obedient) slaves.
“[T]he most self-sacrificing, faithful, and zealous missionaries in the Atlantic world,” Gerbner sums up, “formulated and theorized a powerful and lasting religious ideology for a brutal system of plantation labor.” Her judgment is harsh. But it is a judgment based on impeccable research. Christian Slavery is the sort of well-grounded microhistory that, in the end, proves more valuable than wide-ranging surveys and broad declarations.
Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World
Katharine Gerbner
University of Pennsylvania Press, $24.95, 296 pp.