From Phillis Wheatley to Alice Walker, the figural readings of Psalm 68:31—”Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”—have been instrumental in the articulation of black American historical subjectivity, imagination, knowledge, agency, and figurations of Ethiopia. This book maps the various allusions to and interpretations and citations of Psalm 68:31—a largely Protestant and Anglophone phenomenon—in black American letters, to show how it was read and to trace the readings it produced. Its method is twofold. First, the book demonstrates how black read ... More

From Phillis Wheatley to Alice Walker, the figural readings of Psalm 68:31—”Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”—have been instrumental in the articulation of black American historical subjectivity, imagination, knowledge, agency, and figurations of Ethiopia. This book maps the various allusions to and interpretations and citations of Psalm 68:31—a largely Protestant and Anglophone phenomenon—in black American letters, to show how it was read and to trace the readings it produced. Its method is twofold. First, the book demonstrates how black readers emerged as historical subjects through reading, arguing that reading is a material, eventful, performative, and transformative practice. Second, it shows how black readers read Psalm 68:31, also known as the Ethiopian Prophecy. For some readers, the psalm pointed to the Christianization and modernization of black peoples in both America and Africa, engendering, for instance, romantic ideas of race and the development of racial narratives such as the Afro-Asiatic myth. For other readers, Psalm 68:31 signified the emancipation of black slaves in America and their full inclusion as American citizens, or the end of colonialism and the rise of African independence. Another collection of black exegetes read the verse as one fragment in a vast textual storehouse that could be re-woven to create new poetic figures, narratives, and possibilities for black people and humanity. What the book demonstrates is the plasticity of Ethiopia as a figure of black imagination and thinking.