Uncle Tom's nation: Race, religion, and the American paradise

The theological imperative---a strategy of implicitly or explicitly uniting racially hierarchical ideology with appeals to theological authority---enables authors to prescribe "unquestionable" solutions to cultural crisis. Thus, the theological imperative masquerades as authoritative discourse, silencing counternarratives. In this vein, Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) offers an often problematic model for black-white relations, particularly via the novel's racialized appeals to theologized tropes of "home" and "paradise." The first chapter of this dissertation reveals Stowe's concern that slavery makes a female domestic space impossible for both black and white women to attain. Problematically, however, Stowe attends primarily to the impediments to white female domesticity, particularly in her denunciation of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law crisis because it denies the biblical mandate to "help the least of these," precluding white female salvation. In spite of the novel's flawed theologized model, its extraordinary influence on American literature and culture orients many authors' later engagement with race and religion.; Subsequent chapters consider how Thomas Dixon, Jr., James Weldon Johnson, and Toni Morrison engage, revise, or repudiate Stowe's theologized model. Chapter two argues that Dixon's white theology in his sermons and the anti-Tom The Leopard's Spots (1902) extends, rather than undoes, Stowe's theological imperative. Responding to the cultural crisis to white male supremacy, Dixon transforms North-South sectional division into black-white racial division. Chapter three shows that in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Johnson's narrator, who says Uncle Tom's Cabin gave him his bearings in the United States, rejects Stowe and Dixon's racialized theology by deconstructing the color line, thereby undermining race as a valid means of categorization. Finally, the fourth chapter examines how Baby Suggs in Morrison's Beloved (1987) and the Ruby townspeople in Paradise (1997) respond to crisis by (partially) adopting the logic of white racial theology. The conclusion probes how yoking racial and religious theology can contribute to exclusionary views of who shall be allowed, or---often---violently denied, access to the American paradise.