American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures. By Joanna Brooks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 272. $45.00, cloth.

No more fitting titlecould be found for Brooks's reclamation of little known works of major significance by the eighteenth century Native American and African-American clerics and writers upon whom she constructs this book -- a resurrection in itself, it is. Brooks, who (with John Saillant) gave us texts for four pioneering African-American writers in "Face Zion Forward": First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798 (Northeastern University Press, 2002), returns to elucidate the work of Samson Occum, John Marrant, Prince Hall, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. In this groundbreaking and illuminating book, Brooks treats their influence and impact in their communities as well as "the diversity of their literary products" (7).

Not Eden but death and resurrection, not an American Adam but an American Lazarus, patterns the different tale told by these early Native American and African-American writers who "in addition to setting powerful precedents for future authors of color" had by the end of the eighteenth century "established a defining trajectory for the development of American literature in the next century." As white American writers moved "toward the privatization, professionalism, and domestication of literary enterprise and the presentation of literary products as ornaments of entertainment and refinement . . . African- and Native American writers defined authorship as the public exercise of creative, intellectual, and political agency" (179). Brooks, in this groundbreaking book, probes the roots of that development.

Brooks moves lucidly through the thorny thicket of colonial American history placing these writers in the intellectual milieu of which they were an integral part–the social movements (e.g., Great Awakening, Freemasonry) the theological controversies (e.g. Old Lights, New Lights, psalmody vs. hymnody), the scientific controversies (in medicine, the debate between the contagionists and climatists), and their occasional internecine conflicts. Her balanced account of these historic events and arguments is enriched by her gracious appraisals of current scholarship, those she disputes as gracefully as those which support her arguments.

Recognizing the inextricable connection of "the advent of African-American and Native American literatures . . . to the rise of American evangelicalism in the eighteenth century," (21) Brooks lays the groundwork for an informed reading of these texts, reviewing not only "the dominant theologies, religious movements, and racial ideologies of the late eighteenth-century" (19) but also examining the "racial policies and theologies" (24) of those evangelical movements that most attracted Native Americans and African-Americans. In artfully balanced fashion, Brooks conveys the mainstream activities and ideologies of, for example, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, while attending to the communities of color "in those crucial years of national formation, when whiteness assumed a positive legal value in the United States, [and] blackness and Indianness were constructed in negative and oppositional terms." (45)

In penetrating readings, Brooks conveys the sophisticated craft and acumen by which the pioneering writers "gradually reclaimed and reinvested racial identity with positive values" (45) as they "appropriated and reinvested Christian worship with their own distinctive spiritual and cultural values" (48). Mindful that (and reminding scholars that) "historically marginalized literatures" call for an heightened alertness to "textual features" (11) specific to them, Brooks provides the necessary (and longed for) context, with particular mindfulness to Biblical allusion and nuance, for an informed reading of these consciously crafted works.

Occum, a founder of the Brotherton movement, a Christian Indian community in New York, produced a hymnal, Choice Collection, that was precedent setting in its inclusiveness. Little known by the twentieth century, it was both popular and influential in the eighteenth century. The appearance in one volume of English, American, Anglican, dissenting, Methodist, and Baptist hymns make it "one of the first interdenominational American hymnals" (54). After an examination of the whole hymnal "as a pioneering work of American Indian literature and American religion," (70) Brooks turns to a close examination of Occum's own writing, his hymn "Throughout the Savior's Life We Trace" and five other poems written by him during the 1770s, establishing him as "the first Native American to write and publish poetry in English" (74). (Full texts appear in the appendices.)

In the ministry and writings of John Marrant, Brooks finds the embodiment of the "emergent role of the preacher in black Atlantic Christian communities" (94). Although Brooks makes perspicacious use of the fourth edition of Marrant's Narrative, directly supervised him, her focus is on the newly rediscovered Journal covering his three year mission to Birchtown, Nova Scotia, home to the largest community of free blacks outside of Africa. Brooks reads this "most extensive black-authored account of evangelism and community life in the eighteenth century" with an eye to "textual features" beneath the radar of contemporary readers, discerning the "account of a covenant community struggling to realize its prophetic destiny" (89).

Although notice has been taken of Prince Hall's activities as a deeply influential member of Boston's colonial black community and founder of the African Lodge of Freemasons, little attention has been paid to his spoken and written word. Brooks's meticulous consideration of three speeches delivered to the African Lodge ( Marrant's Sermon, June 24, 1789, Hall's Charge, June 25, 1792, Hall's Charge, June 24,1797) addresses that void. Ever alert to the conscious crafting of these documents, Brooks reveals how Hall "framed the lectures as steps in a building process" (146) – Marrant's speech providing "a foundation of ‘anciency,'" Hall's speeches providing two pillars, the first of "of civic duty," the second "of sympathy, or racial solidarity" (146-47). The "textual features" examined here (particularly as Hall and Marrant craft "a consciously African-American genealogy" to the Order) contribute substantively to the accessability of these works and should, in consequence, open the doors of current African-American anthologies to these works.

Following Hall, Brooks turns to the activist Philadelphia black community during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, attending particularly to the "aftermath [which] generated an unprecedented public discourse about blackness, its significance, its symptomaticity, and its place within the body politic" (154). The text explored is the response made by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in their Narrative to misrepresentations of the African American community propagated in Mathew Carey's Short Account. "As a document of conscious community formation," Brooks reads their Narrative as "a constituting moment in black political, cultural, and textual history" (166). In this "first moment in African-American literature when writing assumes both a collective subject and a specific cultural function," (172) Brooks locates the space where "literary products of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic reveal racially divergent modes of textual response to social crisis" (178) and presage the different trajectories along which African-American and American literature will develop.

Brooks's originality, clarity, and scholarship in American Lazarus are noteworthy. The textual analyses are thorough and meticulous. The Appendices supplement her account Occum's Choice Collection with an author index, a numerical list of hymns by unknown authors original to that hymnal, and the texts of the six Occum hymns. The Notes that indicate and supplement her sources often enrich her text. The Bibliography confirms the depth beneath Brooks's provocative restoration of the personal authority and public importance of these writers.

Early Brooks urges the reader:

It is not enough to recover these texts from the archival tomb. We must also be willing to believe in and search out their meaningfulness, even if the search entails a reformulation of our assumptions about literature, history, race, and religion. (11)

Later she issues a call for action:

it would be a mistake to imagine ourselves accomplished as scholars in the mere retrieval of these early American writing from their archival tombs. (181)

The service performed in the reclamation of these little known texts of major significance in native American and African-American intellectual history can hardly be adequately lauded. Brooks's groundbreaking American Lazarus makes inexcusable our "mere retrieval."

Quandra Prettyman, Barnard College