Silent Books, Talking Leaves
Silent Books, Talking Leaves
The watershed for the scholarship on A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785), is Henry Louis Gates’s influential essay on “The Trope of the Talking Book.” But the widespread classification of the episode in which John Marrant presents his Bible to a Cherokee “king” and his eldest daughter as an instance of an Anglo-African “trope” ignores the narrative’s Cherokee ethnohistorical context. This chapter reads Marrant’s account, despite questions about its reliability, as a reflection of the encounter between evangelical literacy practices and Cherokee beliefs about witchcraft and European literacy.
Keywords: captivity, Cherokees, evangelicals, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., literacy, John Marrant, talking book, trope, witchcraft
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