Curative Recalibration in Action

Abstract

CURATIVE RECALIBRATION is a fluid religious sensibility activated by any form of degradation. Reactionary in part, curative recalibration’s fluidity is marked by its perpetual impulse to proactively show black life as worthy and qualified humanity. As such, it directly engages hegemony with the express intent of changing the falsely constructed social order. This final chapter interprets antebellum responses to the political-religious language used to buffer the enslavement of African Americans. Language is herein framed as setting the tone for actions, motivations, impulses, desires, and treatment of bodies. Renovation of harmful language helps to reinforce healthy existence. Renovation comes in the form of recalibrational thought, consciousness, and activity. Recalibration articulates the merits of religion’s function as language itself. In this way, language’s ability to facilitate abuse, especially against antebellum blacks, is but one side of this story. Stitched within black biblical appropriations, the black recalibrational narrative becomes a comprehensive religious language used to challenge maltreatment. Our gaze is now fixed on particular instances of black protestation during the antebellum period in order to investigate the primary features of curative recalibration.

I appeal to Heaven for my motive in writing– … to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!

–David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World¹