Cedrick May

Road Kill 7 is like an awkward family portrait. Apocalyptic Karma stands poised behind a pink curtain. A frustrated cryptid reemerges behind the Pine Curtain. A haunting act of penitence occurs at a blood-soaked battleground. A stark Lone Star lottery costs a woman both her sons. Then, there's a slippery connubial nexus, a bizarre diluvial disappearance, a spry, mysterious book sniffer, and an avenging hoodoo demon. There are elements in the frame you don't recognize until you see them up close, with your own eyes. By then, of course, it's too late.

Cedrick May's The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon offers a complete look at the literary achievements of one of the founders of African American literature. Born into slavery on the Lloyd plantation in 1711, Jupiter Hammon became the first AfricanAmerican writer to be published in the present-day United States at the age of fortynine. It has been decades since a collection of Hammon's work has appeared, and May's intensive research has yielded two additional poems, adding new layers to his works andlife that, until now, have gone unexplored. The most comprehensive volume on Hammon's works to date, The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon carefully reconstructs the historical, political, social, and religious contexts that shaped his essays and poems throughout the late eighteenth century. This attentive reconstruction, which takes full account of Hammon's prose works as well as his more well-known poetry, gives readers provides a radical re-reading of Hammon as a much more complex and intellectually curious commentator on his historical and political period, while providing ample evidence of his literary importance and artistic integrity. Cedrick May's fresh presentation and insightful reevaluation of Hammon's life and writings will change the way Hammon is studied and appreciated among literary scholars and readers alike. This edition will become the definitive one for many years to come.

This study focuses on the role of early African American Christianity in the formation of American egalitarian religion and politics. It also provides a new context for understanding how black Christianity and evangelism developed, spread, and interacted with transatlantic religious cultures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cedrick May looks at the work of a group of pivotal African American writers who helped set the stage for the popularization of African American evangelical texts and the introduction of black intellectualism into American political culture: Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, John Marrant, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, and Maria Stewart.Religion gave these writers agency and credibility, says May, and they appropriated the language of Christianity to establish a common ground on which to speak about social and political rights. In the process, these writers spread the principles that enabled slaves and free blacks to form communities, a fundamental step in resisting oppression. Moreover, says May, this institution building was overtly political, leading to a liberal shift in mainstream Christianity and secular politics as black churches and the organizations they launched became central to local communities and increasingly influenced public welfare and policy.This important new study restores a sense of the complex challenges faced by early black intellectuals as they sought a path to freedom through Christianity.