‘A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Jamaica’: Pseudobiblical Style and Jamaican Proto-nationalism

Abstract

Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, now widely recognized as a watershed in the history of the Atlantic world, fundamentally shaped discussions about Jamaica’s political and legal status within the British empire. Here, I analyze a little-known narrative of the rebellion written by Jewish newspaper editor Sidney Levien in pseudobiblical style, with almost every sentence of the account echoing the language of the King James Version of the Bible. I locate Levien’s narrative within a literary tradition that used pseudobiblical style to describe contemporary political life, especially in America. The literary tradition, identified by historian Eran Shalev, transposed contemporary politics into events of biblical proportion. By using pseudobiblical style, Levien advanced a sense of Jamaica’s importance in nineteenth-century political imagination. While many accounts conceptualized the rebellion as a struggle between White landowners and Black laborers, Levien refused to present Jamaica as a White fatherland or a Black republic.