HELL WITHOUT FIRES
Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellium Spiritual Narrative examines the spiritual and earthly results of conversion to Christianity for African-American antebellum writers. Using autobiographical narratives, the book shows how black writers transformed the earthly hell of slavery into a "New Jerusalem," a place they could call home.
Yolanda Pierce insists that for African Americans, accounts of spiritual conversion revealed "personal transformations with far-reaching community effects. A personal experience of an individual's relationship with God is transformed into the possibility of liberating an entire community." The process of conversion could result in miraculous literacy, "callings" to preach, a renewed resistance to the slave condition, defiance of racist and sexist conventions, and communal uplift.
“An innovative and brilliant analysis of five antebellum slave narratives.”
“Pierce analyzes each of the conversion narratives in fresh, revealing ways, and scholars should be motivated to reread the original accounts―and others like them―afresh.”
“Pierce’s analysis of these narratives help[s] to explain slaves’ conversion to the religion of their oppressors, what forms of advocacy those converts called to preach could claim, and the ways that early African American converts merged African religions and Protestant Christianity.”
“Packs a wealth of information. . . . Readers will be amply repaid for time spent reading it.”
“Helps establish black spiritual, or conversion, narratives as an important genre in its own right. It is constantly informed by much of the best recent scholarship on slavery, religion, and gender relations.”