[In the following excerpt, Thomas analyzes two nineteenth-century abolitionist texts written by ex-slave Robert Wedderburn, focusing especially on the impact and influence of his mulatto identity on the works.]

But there comes a time, as it came in my life, when a man is denied the right to live a normal life, when he can only live the life of an outlaw because the government has so decreed to use the law to impose a state of outlawry on him.¹

Now I have scarcely a drop of black blood left in me, my blood having so faded with the blood of a Minister, that I am [becoming] as white as a Mulatto.²

Whereas Equiano's narrative of spiritual redemption presents a relatively circumspect demand for political reformation, the accentuation of subversive and millenarian elements of radical dissenting Protestantism provide an overtly militant and confrontational platform for the black British author and rebel, Robert Wedderburn.³ Born in Jamaica around 1761, Wedderburn was the ‘mulatto’ offspring of the wealthy Scottish sugar plantation owner, James. Wedderburn and his female slave, Rosanna. Separated from his rebellious mother as an infant and never acknowledged by his white father, the near-illiterate Robert was adopted and reared by his African-born maternal grandmother, the Kingston obeah and smuggler, ‘Talkee Amy’, under whose charge his own prophetic and oratory powers were developed. As slave plantation societies of the West Indies endeavoured to maintain remnants of distinctly African modes of belief, Talkee's position as plantation obeah confirmed her role as transmitter of preslavery epistemologies. She was revered by slaves and indeed, by some of their owners, as a chief communicant with ancestral ‘spirits’.⁴

At the age of eleven, Wedderburn witnessed the public flogging of Talkee allegedly for ‘witchcraft’ by a young boy she had reared herself:

My grandmother's new master being a believer in the doctrine of Witchcraft, conceived that my grandmother had bewitched the vessel [captured by Spaniards], out of revenge for her not being liberated also. To punish her, therefore, he tied up the poor old woman of seventy years, and flogged her to the degree, that she would have died, but for the interference of a neighbour.⁵

Six years later, in 1778, having served as a fighting seaman in the Royal Navy aboard HMS Polyphemus and later as a privateer, Wedderburn arrived in England, aged seventeen.⁶ There, he drifted around St Giles as one of the ‘London Blackbirds’, a community of runaway slaves and immigrants who earned their living as musicians, entertainers, beggars and thieves, until he obtained work as a tailor. According to his semi-autobiographical text, The Horrors of Slavery: Exemplified in the Life and History of the Revd Robert Wedderburn (1824), in 1786 Wedderburn underwent what he claims was a profoundly spiritual experience upon hearing the words of a passionate Wesleyan preacher. Having read Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791), Wedderburn went on to become a licensed Unitarian preacher. …

‘ACKNOWLEDGE NO KING … ACKNOWLEDGE NO PRIEST’⁷

By 1813, Wedderburn had become an ardent follower of Thomas Spence, the leader of an informal political underground, whose doctrines had prophesied an earthly millennium based upon a radical redistribution of land.⁸ In 1817, Wedderburn published the first edition of his prophetic The Axe Laid to the Root, or A Fatal Blow to Oppressors; Being An Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica (1817), a text which demanded ‘in the name of God, in the name of natural justice and in the name of humanity that all slaves be set free’.⁹ Indeed, The Axe Laid to the Root advanced claims for land reformation on the plantocratic islands of the West Indies according to Spence's directive and denounced concepts of English liberty as myths expounded by priests, kings and lords. Wedderburn's text initially propounds a Spencean vision of peaceful sociopolitical transformation by the dissemination of Spencean literature amongst free mulattos—

Oh, ye oppressed, use no violence to your oppressors, convince the world you are rational beings, follow not the example of St Domingo, let not your jubilee, which will take place, be stained with the blood of your oppressors, leave revengeful practices for European kings and ministers.¹⁰

This contrasts however, with the author's demands for violent slave insurrections, following the model prescribed by the (in)famous St Domingue uprising:

Jamaica will be in the hands of the blacks within twenty years. Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St Domingo awaits you … They [the Maroons] will be victorious in their flight, slaying all before them … Their method of fighting is to be found in the scriptures, which they are now learning to read. They will slay man, woman, and child, and not spare the virgin, whose interest is connected with slavery, whether black, white, or tawny … My heart glows with revenge, and cannot forgive.¹¹

Wedderburn's call for the emancipation of slaves under the guise of divine guidance (‘Wedderburn demands in the name of God … that all slaves be set free’) and his vehement denunciation of the established church as a tyrannical oppressor, are haunted by his memory of the public flogging of his aged grandmother. For this reason, he portrays himself as a Christ-like but militantly radical saviour who must reject and disobey his earthly father (the Scottish James Wedderburn), in order to inherit the kingdom destined to be his: ‘Repent ye christians … Oh! my father, what do you deserve at my hands? Your crimes will be visited upon your legitimate offspring … A black king is capable of wickedness, as well as a white one!’¹² In subsequent volumes of his Axe Laid to the Root, Wedderburn continued his antinomian address to the slaves of Jamaica, supplementing it with drastic calls for a violent transformation of the sociopolitical sphere and advocating the need for the preservation of cultural identity within the diaspora:

Dear Countrymen, It is necessary for you to know how you may govern yourselves without a king, without lords, dukes, earls, or the like; these are classes of distinction which tend only to afflict society. I would have you know, with all the proud boasting of Europeans they are yet ignorant of what political liberty is … Have no white delegate in your assembly … Let every individual learn the art of war, yea, even the females, for they are capable of displaying courage … Teach your children these lines [from the Desponding Negro], let them be sung on the Sabbath day, in remembrance of your former sufferings, which will show you what you may expect from the hands of European Christians, by what they have practised before.¹³

In the fourth edition of The Axe Laid to the Root (1817), Wedderburn incorporated a letter to a Miss Campbell, the heiress to a sugar plantation whom he claimed had been censured by the assembly of Jamaica for freeing her slaves and distributing her land along Spencean lines. By inferring that this ‘Miss Campbell’ was a descendant of an earlier miscegenetic relationship and more daringly, that she and the author shared the same mother, Wedderburn's text endorsed the paradigm of the mulatto as a radical agent of socioeconomic transformation premised upon apocalyptic stature:

Dear Miss Campbell … I come not to make peace; my fury shall be felt by princes, bidding defiance to pride and prejudice. Truth is my arrow stained with Africans' blood, rendered poisonous by guilt, while they hold my innocent fellow as a slave … Fast bound by eternal truth, I have hold of the God of Israel, like a Jacob, and will not let him go. I will be made a prince by prevailing, though a halter be about my neck. Jacob, I will excell you in proportion to the present improved state of society. Miss Campbell, though a goddess, I have a command for thee to obey: like the Christians of old, you have fallen from the purity of the Maroons, your original.¹⁴

In 1819 Wedderburn opened a tavern chapel on the corner of Hopkins Street in Soho, London. In this chapel, which he registered as a Unitarian meeting house for a sect which he later described as ‘Christian Diabolists’ or ‘Devil Worshippers’, up to 300 people converged to listen to his potent mixture of religious zeal and popular radicalism, permeated by scriptural symbolism, prophetic rhetoric and personalised testimonies of his ‘sleeping visions’.¹⁵ In what we can assume was a unique interplay between performer and audience during his ‘farcical theological debates’ with the dwarf shoemaker Samuel Waddington, Wedderburn fused theatrical diatribe with anti-clerical blasphemy: he urged his audience to do all that was in their power to overthrow the establishment, even persuading them to participate in dawn drills on Primrose Hill and to tear up iron palisades for use as weapons.¹⁶

Wedderburn's discourse enigmatically converges with that of the poet and mystic William Blake, whose ‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (c. 1790-3), a ‘diabolic’ response to Swedenborg, prescribed the ‘Voice of the Devil’ and the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ as part of an onslaught against self-righteous members of society and orthodox Christian piety. Blake's account of the ancient poets' receptivity to the gods of nature corresponded closely to the ‘animism’ of African cults, whilst his text, ‘All Religions Are One’ (c. 1788) stipulated the prime importance of the spirit of prophecy in all religions:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive … The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy … The true Man is the source [of all Religions], he being the Poetic Genius.¹⁷

The emphasis laid by dissenting Protestantism upon the inspirational role of song, and upon images of rebirth and transformation, made easy transference to the prophetic belief systems prevalent among West Indians and Africans. However, Wedderburn's radical individualism stretched these elements to extreme limits.¹⁸ In 1820, Wedderburn was tried for blasphemy, a trial in which he represented himself, claiming that even if a barrister were to plead his cause gratuitously, ‘he would not dare to do it upon principle’. In the written script which formed his defence, and which the author had intended to be read by the preacher and pornographer George Cannon (alias Erasmus Perkins), Wedderburn ridiculed the interrelationship between ‘the state religion’, the enforcement of the ‘law of the land’, and the former's enforcement at the expense of ‘other opinions or laws’. Wedderburn claimed that the established religion propagated such archaic laws and enactments that if they were ‘now resorted to, [they] would be instantly erased from the statute-book as absurd, or inhuman, and totally inconsistent with the enlightenment of the present day’.¹⁹

In the same manner as Phillis Wheatley's ‘evangelical’ schema, Wedderburn conflated tenets of spiritual illumination with demands for the emancipation of the human mind from ‘tyrannical and intolerant laws of darkness, ignorance and the trammels of superstition’:

Therefore I trust that you will not suffer yourselves to be ensnared by that sophistical mode of reasoning which makes me guilty of a crime, merely, because I have offended against opinions or laws originating in times still more bigotted and superstitious than the present.—You will be told that, because christianity, or what they choose to call christianity, is a part of the law of the land, or in other words ‘the state religion’, that those whose opinions differ materially from it, must necessarily be punished if they circulate those opinions.²⁰

Moreover, as with the slave confessional narratives discussed above, Wedderburn promotes his oral defence as a testimony to the nature of truth, a concept which he identified with freedom of religious opinion and liberty of speech. Wedderburn therefore regarded his trial as part of his mission to expose the ‘untruths’ of legal and theological discourse:

There is no one who will deny the value and importance of truth, but how is it to be ascertained, if we are not allowed the liberty of free inquiry? Does not Paul tell us to ‘prove all things, and to hold fast the best;’ but how are we to be determined in our choice, if we are not allowed to canvas and discuss the merits or demerits of particular systems? … I cannot but blush at the weakness and bad policy of those who seek to support their cause by the persecution of an humble individual like myself, when the clergymen of the established church of England alone are 20,000, and their wages amount to two millions annually: in addition to these, there are 50,000 dissenting ministers of different denominations.²¹

In his attempts to identify his own struggles with those of Christ (‘He was like myself, one of the lower order, and a genuine radical reformer’), Wedderburn endorses a strategic disassociation of ‘genuine Christianity’ from the ‘state religion’ and posits a ‘re-vision’ of Christ as an egalitarian ‘who despised the rich for the hardness of their hearts’: ‘What did he [Jesus Christ] say, “acknowledge no king.” He was a reformer … acknowledge no lord … acknowledge no rabbi, (no priest:) no! he knew their tricks, and says, stand it no longer’.²² Wedderburn's spirited defence (which included statements such as ‘if, on the contrary, the spirit of bigotry and religious persecution prevails over you, I shall have this satisfaction, that I suffer like Christ’ and ‘I shall be far happier in the dungeon to which you may consign me, than my persecutors, on their beds of down’) ended with an outrageously ironic ‘plea’ to (or rather ridicule of) the jury.²³ Not surprisingly, his defence was rejected; Wedderburn was convicted of using ‘blasphemous and profane words’ and of impiously reviling that book of ‘great antiquity’ which, it was professed, determined not only the religion of England, but of ‘all the civilised and enlightened nations’. The judges severely reprimanded Wedderburn's refusal to repent and consequently denounced his propagation of linguistic and theological deviance as pure ‘licentiousness’, before proceeding to pass sentence:

It is our duty then to remove you, at least for a time, from society, that you may be prevented doing it a further injury by the dissemination of your dangerous doctrine. The Court do therefore sentence you to be imprisoned for two years in his majesty's jail at Dorchester.²⁴

Wedderburn's (albeit temporary) removal from society (by means of his imprisonment) reflected the serious extent to which the court feared the influential disruption that his ‘dangerous doctrine’ might cause. As such, Wedderburn's text registers a significant departure from the cultural acquiescence suggested by the slave narratives discussed above.

‘CAN I CONTAIN MYSELF AT THIS?’: WEDDERBURN'S HORRORS OF SLAVERY²⁵

Seven years after the fourth edition of Axe Laid to the Root, Wedderburn published a small pamphlet entitled, The Horrors of Slavery: Exemplified in the Life and History of the Revd Robert Wedderburn (1824), dedicated to William Wilberforce. As the subtitle, ‘Robert Wedderburn (late Prisoner in his Majesty's Gaol at Dorchester, for Conscience-sake), Son of the Late James Wedderburn, Esq. of Inveresk, Slave Dealer, by One of his Slaves in the Island of Jamaica’ explained, Wedderburn had narrowly escaped the more serious charge of high treason. The opening lines of Wedderburn's text suggest a narrative delineating an aged man's humble recollection of past transgressions:

I am now upwards of sixty years of age, and therefore I cannot long expect to be numbered amongst the living. But, before I pass from this vale of tears, I deem it an act of justice to myself, to my children, and to the memory of my mother, to say what I am, and who were the authors of my existence.²⁶

However, what follows is an intense declaration of individual freedom, hinged upon Wedderburn's denunciation of his paternal ancestry and promotion of his maternal cultural heritage: ‘To shew the world … the inhumanity of a MAN, whom I am compelled to call by the name of FATHER. I am the offspring of a slave, it is true; but I am a man of free thought and opinion’.²⁷ In a letter to the editor of Bell's Life in London of February 1824, Wedderburn identified himself as the progeny of the miscegenetic and deplorable actions of the late James Wedderburn, whom he claimed, had ‘FORCED’ his mother to submit to him ‘THOUGH HE KNEW SHE DISLIKED HIM!’²⁸ The subsequent reply (similarly published in Bell's Life) by the author's brother (who had changed his name to A. Colville) dismissed Wedderburn's claims of kinship: ‘I have to state, that the person calling himself Robert Wedderburn is NOT a son of the late Mr James Wedderburn, of Inveresk, who never had any child by, or any connection of that kind with the mother of that man’.²⁹

As part of this endeavour to reclaim his past, Wedderburn attempts to ‘reconstruct’ and ‘de-stigmatise’ his mother, Rosanna (whose memory he claimed had been reviled by his white half-brother, A. Colville), and to align his own (rebellious) nature with hers, even to the extent of endorsing her attempted infanticide:

A younger and more fortunate brother of mine, the aforesaid A. Colville, Esq. has had the insolence to revile her memory in the most abusive language, and to stigmatise her for that which was owing to the deep and dark iniquity of my father … I have not the least doubt but that from her rebellious and violent temper during that period, that I have inherited the same disposition—the same desire to see justice overtake the oppressors of my country-men—and the same determination to lose [sic] no stone unturned, to accomplish so desirable an object.³⁰

Wedderburn's disenfranchisement had been aggravated by letters to the press which had refuted his claims for inheritance and had sullied his mother's reputation. In a letter to the editor of Bell's Life in London it was insinuated that Wedderburn's mother ‘was delivered of a mulatto child’ and because ‘she could not tell who was the father, her master, in a foolish joke, named the child Wedderburn’.³¹ Consequently, Wedderburn's Horrors of Slavery endeavours to reestablish his mother's virtue and integrity; furthermore, it interweaves within the dominant network a fabric articulating the proud and rebellious nature of his mixed ancestral and cultural identity, inherited from his African mother and grandmother, and his white grandfather:

My grandfather was a staunch Jacobite … When I first came to England, in the year 1779, I remember seeing the remains of a rebel's skull which had been affixed over Temple Bar; but I never yet could fully ascertain whether it was my dear grandfather's skull, or not.³²

The text's dedication to William Wilberforce (‘Your name stands high in the list of glorious benefactors of the human race; and the slaves of the earth look upon you as a tower of strength’) appears to inaugurate an abolitionist polemic in honour of Wilberforce. However, the literary autobiography which follows presents the author as an ‘oppressed, insulted and degraded African’, whose censure of his paternal father entailed a denunciation of colonialist ideology and of the English legislature.³³ Although ostensibly an autobiographical text, Wedderburn's Horrors of Slavery locates addressees other than the ‘self’ and envisages his audience as including members of the English public, representatives of the powerful propertied class (including the Duke of Queensbury and Lady Douglas) and the legislature, the House of Lords. Wedderburn's ‘narrative’ therefore not only functions as a striking exposé of a delicate site of taboo (the disclosure of his own sexual genesis) but also as a significant disclosure of the dynamics of miscegenation amongst his audience, the aristocracy and their colonial counterparts, the West Indian planters:

It is a common practice … for the planters to have lewd intercourse with their female slaves; and so inhuman are many of these said planters, that many well-authenticated instances are known, of their selling their slaves while pregnant, and making that a pretence to enhance their value.³⁴

Wedderburn personalised his account of miscegenation by citing details of the licentious and interracial conduct of his father, whose behaviour is encapsulated by the metaphorical title of ‘male-midwife’. According to Wedderburn, as soon as his father became rich, ‘he gave loose to his carnal appetites, and indulged himself without moderation … [in] libidinous excess’. In so doing, he became ‘a perfect parish bull [stud]’ whose sexual pleasure was the greater since it simultaneously ‘increased his profits’ and whose house (or harem) was filled with female slaves, such as his mother. Amongst these ‘objects of his lust’, he strutted ‘like Solomon in his grand seraglio’, or rather, ‘like a bantam cock upon his own dunghill’, and his slaves ‘did increase and multiply, like Jacob's kine’.³⁵

Interestingly, Wedderburn's narrative wavers between an endeavour to denounce his paternal lineage and to fulfil the paradigm of the mulatto identity by reinstating his birthrights from both branches of his parentage. On the one hand, therefore, his text presents an effort to valorise his African legacy and redeem the name of the mother whom his ‘father’ had ‘made the object of his brutal lust’ and on the other, it presents a narrative of dispossession in terms of his (dis)inheritance of the Wedderburn estate:

My father's name was JAMES WEDDERBURN, Esq. of Inveresk, in Scotland, an extensive proprietor, of sugar estates in Jamaica, which are now in the possession of a younger brother of mine, by name, A. COLVILLE, Esq. of No. 35, Leadenhall Street … From him [my father] I have received no benefit in the world.³⁶

Hence Wedderburn's Horrors of Slavery can be read not merely as a vilification of slave ideology but as a developed vindication of African cultural legacy. His work registers a further stage of the miscegenetic authenticity and cultural hybridity contained in the works by Wheatley and Equiano. As such, its ‘creolised’ discourse of fluidity, heterogeneity, movement and change demarcated an illuminating revision of established (static) concepts of power, possession and identity.

Robert's ‘brother’ changed his name to Colville in order to secure his rights of inheritance on his mother's side; likewise his father changed his name to Wedderburn-Colville. Indeed, a close analysis of Wedderburn's text reveals it to be a narrative saturated with terms of proprietorship—of objects and subjects, slaves and women—and of interrupted inheritance: ‘estates … now in the possession of a younger brother of mine’; ‘my father was restored to his father's property’; ‘they [female slaves] being his personal property’; ‘[he] determined to have possession of her’; ‘from the time my mother became the property of my father’; and ‘she [my mother] was the property of Lady Douglas’. Wedderburn's claims for ‘rightful inheritance’, however, are not unproblematic, especially when one considers that his father James Wedderburn had made his fortune as a result of his status as an ‘extensive proprietor of sugar [slave] estates in Jamaica’, and more dubiously, as a result of his acts of self-reproduction by means of his ‘rape’ of female slaves, Wedderburn's own mother.

Wedderburn's tract draws loosely upon the genre of abolitionist redemption autobiography established by members of London's black literati, such as Cugoano and Equiano, yet its author could not claim to have suffered directly the ‘horrors’ implied by the title of his pamphlet. Rather, the ‘horrors’ he locates are those of cultural disenfranchisement, material dispossession and sociopolitical inequality. The narrative of persecution which follows, therefore, details his continued sufferings and injustices beyond the temporal boundaries of plantocratic societies. Whilst his narrative bears comparison with former autobiographies of evangelical conversion and spiritual illumination, it is hinged essentially upon a paradigm of intervention, exposed and manifested by the product of cultural miscegenation—the mulatto figure itself.

Wedderburn's efforts to ridicule government during entertaining public debates invoking provocative calls for his flock of ‘Christian Diabolists’ or ‘Devil Worshippers’ to do all that was in their power to overthrow established authority, undoubtedly unsettled the latter, who, as McCalman records, employed spies in order to keep him under strict surveillance. Even from prison, Wedderburn continued his resolute, radical refutation of cultural orthodoxy, evidenced by his tract, Cast-Iron Parsons: Or ‘Hints to the Public and the Legislature, on Political Economy, Clearly Proving the Clergy Can be Entirely Dispensed With, Without Injury to the Christian Religion, or the Established Church, and to the Great Advantage of the State’:

State Prison, Dorchester, July 28th, 1820:

My Dear Friend, You will naturally suppose that my solitary hours are much occupied with my favourite hobby, THEOLOGY; but a subject has at times engaged my attention, which is equally connected with political economy as with religion … I shall now give a slight sketch of the operative part of my scheme, which is as follows:—That the legislature pass an act … that the order of persons called Clergy, or Priests, Deacons, Curates, Rectors, Vicars &c. of the Establishment, be totally annihilated, suppressed, and abolished. That every parish shall, immediately after that time, purchase one of the Cast-Iron Parsons.³⁷

Consequently, Wedderburn's texts and speeches registered a radical challenge to the established authority of England's political legislature and a significant departure from the more subtle ‘creolised’ strategies contained within the earlier slave narratives.

Wedderburn's last known and most curious tract, ‘The Holy Liturgy: Or Divine Science, upon the Principle of Pure Christian Diabolism, Most Strictly Founded upon the Sacred Scriptures’, was published before his death at the age of seventy-two (one year before the abolition of slavery in the West Indies) and was partially reproduced on 21 March, 1828 by his fellow inmate, Richard Carlisle, in his journal The Lion. Here Wedderburn displayed the same radical demands and parodic anti-establishment critiques which had typified his dynamic performances in his Christian diabolist Chapel in Hopkins Street:

Startle not, gentle Christian reader, at the name DIABOLICAL CHRISTIANS; but carefully as thou valuest thine Eternal Salvation, examine the Scriptural principle of this new sect, and say, if they are not justified, by all that is held sacred, in Christian Revelation, and by the most seriously disposed Christians. It is not a profane hand, it is not the hand of the reviler, that passeth over this page: but the hand of a most sincere Christian … OUR PRAYERS SHALL BE ALL MOST PROPERLY ADDRESSED TO THE MAJESTY OF HELL, to the ‘GOD OF THIS WORLD’, to that IMPERFECT, that OMNIMALEVOLENT, though POWERFUL BEING, THE DEVIL. This it is, that will justify our assumed appellation of CHRISTIAN DIABOLISTS … THE GOD OF HELL and ‘OF THIS WORLD’ partakes in part of our character and imperfections, and is, consequently … a Being to be feared, to be worshipped, to be cajoled with prayer.³⁸

In an enigmatic, if not disquieting way, the obsessiveness of Wedderburn's ‘creolised’ antinomian rhetoric elucidated, in no ambiguous terms, the psychological effects that the traumatic processes of sexual violence, cultural disturbance, dispossession, denial of rights and displacement had upon the African (now diasporic) slaves. Whereas the Romantics had displayed varying degrees of affinity with abolitionist and political radicalism, yet had stayed, on the whole, within the confines of the law, Wedderburn took such radicalism to a site of ‘illegitimate’ anarchy. In his hands, the bicultural tactics presented within the earlier narratives by slaves such as Wheatley and Equiano, reached a volatile climax in terms of his radical negation of church/state authority and his demands for ownership and ‘cultural’ insurrection. Hence Wedderburn's determined struggle for recognition and justice anticipated the concern over citizenship and civil rights which continued to preoccupy blacks on both sides of the Atlantic. As his text completed the translation of the discourse of the spirit into the discourse of legislative power, his endeavour to extend the concepts of individual autonomy and divine election in terms of his political demands took the example established by dissenting Protestantism to a heterodoxical extreme. Accordingly, his work exceeded and, in a sense, exacerbated, the parameters of spiritual discourse contained within the earlier slave narratives and established a conscious fulfilment of the more discrete demands for miscegenetic authenticity and cultural hybridity. The ‘diabolic’ enterprise of Wedderburn's work thereby endorsed the paradigm of ‘creolised’ dynamics, not merely as a reflection of the fusion of elements of dissenting Protestantism with fundamental elements of African belief systems, but as narratives of movement, fluidity and heterogeneity characteristic of identity configuration in the black diaspora. As I hope to have demonstrated, this process coincided with the development of hybrid linguistics (such as creole and patois) and the evolution of cross-cultural epistemologies, hinged upon the dynamics of miscegenation during the late eighteenth century. Articulated within the autobiographical works by Wedderburn, Equiano, Phillis Wheatley and others, the diasporic identity emerged as a self-conscious trope of cultural hybridity, premised simultaneously upon both the assimilation and chiasmus of the dominant social and literary order. Such a process was, by its very nature, hinged upon a narrative of incessant movement, of persistent ‘translation’ and of indeterminate and ceaseless transformation. Most importantly, the conscious expression of this integral process of fluidity and metamorphosis provided a radical challenge to established concepts of culture and race. In its continuous assimilation of and divergence from diverse cultural epistemologies and hermeneutical schemas, the paradigm of identity in the diaspora provided an appropriate framework for the dynamics of discourse itself.

Notes

1. Nelson Mandela at his first trial in 1962.

2. Furbush, Dying Confessions, cited in William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1986) 49.

3. See Iain McCalman's edition, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991) and idem, The Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 5-7, 28-9, 50-3,149. See also Paul Edwards, Unreconciled Strivings and Ironic Strategies: Three Afro-British Authors of the Georgian Era: Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Robert Wedderburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992).

4. McCalman, The Horrors of Slavery, 52-3.

5. Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery: Exemplified in the Life and History of the Revd Robert Wedderburn in Which is Included the Correspondence of Robert Wedderburn and His Brother A[ndrew] Colville, alias Wedderburn. Printed and published by Robert Wedderburn (London, 1824) 11.

6. Edwards, Unreconciled Strivings, 15-19.

7. Wedderburn, The Trial of the Revd Robert Wedderburn, a Dissenting Minister of the Unitarian Persuasion, for Blasphemy in the Court of the Kings Bench, Westminster, the Sittings after Hilary Term, 1820, ed. E. Perkins (London: W. Mason, 1820) 5.

8. See McCalman, Radical Underworld. Four years later, the Government arrested Thomas Evans, the founding member of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists set up in 1814.

9. Wedderburn, The Axe Laid to the Root, or A Fatal Blow to Oppressors; Being An Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica (London, 1817) 4 parts; cited in Ian McCalman ed, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991) 81-105.

10. Ibid., Part 1, 81.

11. Ibid., Part 1, 86; my emphases.

12. Ibid., Part 1, 86-7; my emphasis.

13. Ibid., Part 2 (1817) 89-90 my emphases.

14. Ibid., Part 4 (1817): 96-7; my emphasis.

15. McCalman, The Horrors of Slavery, 132.

16. Ibid., 136.

17. William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, The Complete Poems of William Blake, ed. W. H. Stevenson (London: Longman, 1989) iii, Plate 11. Although it is not known whether Wedderburn knew anything of Blake's writings, Wedderburn's work established a relation to the prophetic example set by his Soho neighbour, Richard Brothers, a contemporary of Blake's who was sent to Bedlam in 1795.

18. McCalman, The Horrors of Slavery, 56. See also Arnold Rattenbury, ‘Methodism and the Tatterdemalions’, Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590-1914; Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure, ed. Eileen and Stephen Yeo (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981) 28-61; J. Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825-1875 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); William Hosking Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1978) 11-24, 34-5, 45-7, 50-6.

19. Wedderburn, The Trial, 9.

20. Ibid., 10.

21. Ibid., 10-12.

22. Ibid., 5; my emphases.

23. Ibid., 19.

24. Wedderburn, The Address of the Revd R. Wedderburn, to the Court of the King's Bench at Westminster, on Appealing to Receive Judgement for Blasphemy when he was Sentenced to Two Years Imprisonment in Dorchester Jail on Tuesday 9th of May 1820, ed. Erasmus Perkins (London, 1820); McCalman, The Horrors of Slavery, 141.

25. Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery, 5.

26. Ibid., 4.

27. Ibid., 4.

28. Ibid., 13.

29. Ibid., 15.

30. Ibid., 5, 9. See also Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987; London: Chatto and Windus, 1988) for an examination of infanticide in the post-slavery America.

31. Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery, 15-16.

32. Ibid., 5.

33. Ibid., 3.

34. Ibid., 6.

35. Ibid., 6-8.

36. Ibid., 5.

37. Wedderburn, Cast-Iron Parsons: Or ‘Hints to the Public and the Legislature, on Political Economy, Clearly Proving the Clergy Can be Entirely Dispensed With, Without Injury to the Christian Religion, or the Established Church, and to the Great Advantage of the State’ (London, 1820); cited in McCalman, The Horrors of Slavery, 143, 147.

38. Wedderburn, ‘The Holy Liturgy: Or Divine Science, upon the Principle of Pure Christian Diabolism, Most Strictly Founded upon the Sacred Scriptures’, The Lion, 21 March 1828; cited in McCalman, The Horrors of Slavery, 153, 154; my emphases except final sentence. Wedderburn's Christian Diabolist Liturgy found its way to New York where it appeared in The Correspondent, ed. George Houston, 4 Oct. 1828, 168-70; McCalman, The Horrors of Slavery, 34.