Mary Wood Apess, Methodism's Method, and Biopower's Soul

Abstract:This essay reads a critically neglected conversion narrative by a nineteenth century Pequot woman to argue that biopower has materialist specificity. Mary Apess's name for her experience of that specificity was "the soul." And biopower was effective because that ensouled experience was one of deep loneliness. This argument begins with the modest but undertheorized proposition that for native converts, the returns on Christian conversion were not often clear or prompt. This essay examines conversion's risks as one native woman tallied them, risks shaped by her experience of gender and Indigeneity. It contrasts those risks with conversion's gains, specifically, conversion to Methodism. Methodism interested Apess—and should interest us—not simply for its affordance of fraternity among the socially and politically disesteemed, but because it was one of the earliest examples of biopolitical discipline, the "Wesleyan pedagogy" that Foucault named in his History of Sexuality. Methodism's method answered Apess's loneliness, her risky desire "to see and be seen." As a way to negotiate the vagaries of what recent Indigenous studies has called liberalism's "politics of recognition," Apess's critique of white ensoulment recalibrates the horizon of biopolitical criticism in the present—not so much an opportunity to conceptualize ecstasy as an invitation to imagine alienation's relief.