Cugoano and the Hermeneutics of Black Calvinism

Abstract:This essay offers a fresh analysis of Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery (1787), an abolitionist text still best known for its radical call to end the slave trade and free all enslaved laborers. Next to no scholarship addresses Cugoano’s Calvinist commitments, largely because Calvinist thought has long seemed inextricable from proslavery politics. Cugoano belongs, however, at the forefront of a group of eighteenth-century Black Anglophone writers who both shared the predestinarian theology of George Whitefield and Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and turned it to their own literary and cultural ends: not a Calvinism that landed on Black people, then, but one actively produced by them, a Black Calvinism. I focus on Cugoano’s racial hermeneutics--the highly developed figural method of biblical interpretation on which his antislavery logic relies--and I ask whether his neglected brand of Calvinism belongs to a longer genealogy of Afropessimism, a framework that has sparked vibrant literary production and theoretical reflection in the twenty-first century.