Poetic License, Visual Images, and Black Knowledge Production

Abstract This chapter examines how African American communities rework biblical imagery through visual art, song, and worship to generate a distinctive mode of Black knowledge production. It begins by exploring Wilmer Jennings’s religious images and the ways Negro Spirituals adapt, transform, and often transgress the biblical canon, selectively embracing figures like Moses, Jacob, and David while ignoring or reshaping others. The chapter highlights the processes of Choice, Poesy, and Embodiment, whereby enslaved Africans and their descendants ratify images through communal selection, rhythmic orality, and embodied performance, producing a creolized religious culture. It also considers tensions within Black Christianity, exemplified by critics such as Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, and contrasts between elite literary disdain and the enduring vitality of embodied practices like the ring shout. Finally, the chapter situates these practices within the broader context of creolization, showing how the de-inscription of biblical images from the written text makes them verbal, rhythmic, and bodily resources that sustain Black communities’ resistance to imposed forms of Christianity.