JMH: Special Issue on Mormonism and Race

Journal of Mormon History

Call for Articles

Special Issue on Mormonism and Race

To be published in the summer issue of 2014

Finished papers due July 31, 2013

Special Editors:

Max Perry Mueller: mpmuell@fas.harvard.edu

Prof. Gina Colvin: gina.colvin@canterbury.ac.nz

Goals of the Journal?s special issue on Mormonism and race:

This special issue of the Journal of Mormon History aims to broaden and deepen the conversation on Mormonism and race beyond the historical focus on the ban on black men from the Mormon priesthood, and its emphasis on the U.S. experience. In particular we aim to understand ?race? beyond the black-white (European-African) binary. We welcome articles ranging in historical focus from the Mormon movement?s founding to the present day. Articles exploring international encounters, race and gender, and race and politics, and race and class are of particular interest.

Requirements:

Papers should be original work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. Submissions will be judged on originality, technical strength, primary sources, significance, and interest to our readers. Papers should range from 6,000 to 8,000 words. Please submit manuscripts simultaneously to both of the Special Editors listed above. Include separately a brief CV or biography.

Neither Black Nor White: The Messiness of Racial Categorization and Black Mormon History

My Great Grandfather Antonio Alejo Aguilar with his First Wife

When I was ten years old, my great grandfather died.  He was ninety-six years old and had been one of the main objects of my affection since I was a toddler.  When we visited his house, he fed us cups of apricot nectar and regaled us with stories of his childhood in Mexico.  He told us about sucking the juice out of fresh cactus fruit, sneaking into the kitchen of his house and watching the maids cook, and attending medical school in Mexico City.  The stories from his adolescence were much darker.  When grandpa was sixteen, he had joined a regiment of federales and had fought in the Mexican Revolution.  A cannon ball came close enough to his head to shave off his hair, leaving him mostly bald for the rest of his life.  He also watched as Pancho Villa rode into one of the border towns of the United States and Mexico and shot a man he expected of sympathies with the Mexican government while the man?s wife bawled and cried for his life.  As a result of the stories that my grandfather told, I thought of him as being completely Mexican.  It was only after his death that I was realized how complicated that identity had been for him. 

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Bringing Jane Manning James into the 21st Century

Note: It is a pleasure to have Margaret Blair Young contribute to JI’s monthlong series on issues of Race and Mormonism. Margaret Blair Young has written extensively on Blacks in the western USA and particilarly Black Latter-day Saints.  Much of her work has been co-authored with Darius Gray.  She authored I Am Jane.

The first staged reading of I Am Jane was on the Nelke theater stage at BYU.  It was the climax of a playwriting class, and met some deserved criticism.  It was, as I recall, about 120 pages.  Too many words.  The first draft I wrote used a clichéd convention: rebellious teenager dreams about/ learns about/ re-enacts the life of a heroic ancestor and gains self-respect and courage.  But such a play is more about the teen than the character whose life I wanted to explore.  And I was researching it even as I was scripting the play.

After I had chiseled away at the script, I thought it ready for its debut, which happened on March 5^th, 2000.  The play was that month?s Genesis meeting.  There was no stage, so we threw a blanket over a trellis to suggest a covered wagon, used the sacrament table for Jane?s death bed, and the clerk?s table for other scenes.

I knew there was more sculpting to do, and revised several times before our performances in Springville?s Villa Theater.  During that two-week run, I played Lucy Mack Smith, who let Jane handle a bundle purportedly containing the Urim and Thummin. (This is according to Jane?s life story, which she dictated near the end of her life.)

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Food and Faith

Southwestern States Mission: Interactions with African Americans, Part 1

Note: This post contains racial epithets.

In the last two weeks? posts, I have established that Mormon missionaries in the Southwestern States Mission (especially those in eastern Texas) had occasion to interact with and observe many African Americans. This week and next I will attempt to better understand the nature of those interactions. Unfortunately, at present, all of my sources were made by missionaries, so the account is one-sided.

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HELP WANTED! International Mormon Studies Book Project

Friend of JI and all-around awesome person Melissa Inouye has initiated a wonderful project. Can you help?

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As Mormonism continues to develop internationally, so too does the field of Mormon studies. More and more foreign scholars are looking to do work in the area, but often lack the requisite resources. The International Mormon Studies Book Project is a new effort to provide critical resources for developing Mormon studies internationally by purchasing books to form a base Mormon studies collection at institutions where scholars have demonstrated a keen interest in doing research on Mormonism. Currently, institutions interested in partnering with the IMS Book Project span the globe, from Asia to Australia to Europe. The first two IMS Book Project collections are slated for donation to Jianghan University) in Wuhan, China, and the newly formed French Institute for Research on Mormonism (Institut Français pour la Recherche sur le Mormonisme) in Bordeaux, France.

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Black History Month at the JI: An Abortive Campaign Against the Folklore (Mauss)

By Armand Mauss

Note: The following is an excerpt from Prof. Mauss’ recent memoir, Shifting Borders and a Tattered Passport: Intellectual Journeys of a Mormon Academic (UofU Press, 2012), which Prof. Mauss kindly shared with the Juvenile Instructor for inclusion in our Black History Month series. The memoir (which everyone should buy and read!) has received some attention in the ‘nacle here and here.

All during this post-1978 period, I remained in periodic personal contact with many black LDS friends, especially those in the Genesis Group.27 As conversations with my black LDS friends made clear, the circulation of this repackaged folklore greatly hindered the conversion and retention of new black members. I became well acquainted personally with one case, in particular, which produced a major national news story in 1998. This was the case of a middle-aged black couple named Jackson, who lived in Orange County, California. Betty Jackson happened to be a coworker with one of my sons at the Mazda Corporation, and through friendly conversation, each discovered that the other was a member of the LDS Church. The Jacksons had only very recently been converted along with one or two of their children. Having learned of the traditional LDS racial teachings and policies only after joining the Church, the Jacksons were having considerable trouble in accommodating the new information. My son gave Betty a copy of the Bush & Mauss Neither White nor Black in hopes that it might help them understand and deal with the matter, which it did to some extent.

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Black History Month at the JI: Talking about Jane (Newell)

By Quincy D. Newell

Jane Manning James (Wikimedia Commons)

Jane James haunts me. Not in the way you?re thinking?I don?t see her ghostly specter on cold evenings, or hear her humming a tune in the other room as I?m trying to sleep. What I mean is that she just won?t let me go. Every time I learn something new about her, it seems that I go down a rabbit hole. It takes me days to return, mentally, to whatever I was doing. James, an African American woman who converted to Mormonism in the early 1840s, moved to Nauvoo after her conversion and worked as a servant in Joseph Smith?s home. After Smith?s death, she worked for Brigham Young. She was in one of the first companies to arrive in the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and she remained a faithful Latter-day Saint until her death in 1908. She left a pretty substantial paper trail, including a short autobiography, an interview with the Young Woman?s Journal, appearances in the Woman?s Exponent, and multiple petitions to church leaders for endowments and sealings. (The largest published collection of this material is in Henry J. Wolfinger, ?A Test of Faith: Jane Elizabeth James and the Origins of the Utah Black Community,? in Social Accommodation in Utah, ed. Clark S. Knowlton, American West Center Occasional Papers [Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1975], 126-172. I have a new transcription of James?s autobiography and a reprint of that Young Woman?s Journal interview coming out in the Journal of Africana Religions this spring.) 

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From the (Historiographical) Archives: Mormon Historians “are still too much merely Sunday Christians”

After the battles over New Mormon History in the 1980s and early 90s, Mormon historians (and I mean historians who are Mormon, not just historians who study Mormons) have been hesitant to discuss the relationship between faith and history. Or so I argue in a paper I’m presenting this weekend at the Conference on Faith & Knowledge (schedule here). In preparation for my paper, I’ve revisited a number of classic historigraphical texts from decades ago, and have been surprised by two things: 1) the amount of attention this thorny issue was given by earlier scholars in the field, and 2) the lack of engagement to a similar degree by today’s generation. There are, I think, several reasons for this, which I attempt to outline in the paper. But in this post I merely want to present a couple quotations from Richard Bushman’s classic essay “Faithful History” (pdf here), published almost five decades ago, and invite discussion.

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CFP: The Mormon Studies Group at AAR

The Mormon Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion is accepting paper proposals for the AAR Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, November 23-26, 2013. Proposal submissions are due on March 1. We are particularly looking for papers on the following topics:

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