First Pure, Then Peaceable: Frederick Douglass, Darkness and the Epistle of James

Margaret P. Aymer is Assistant Professor of New Testament at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and First Pure, Then Peaceable is her published dissertation (Union Theological Seminary, New York, 2008). In part, it is a response to Vincent L. Wimbush’s call (in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures [Continuum, 2001]) for “reading darkness,” that is, “a specific kind of reading that does not just answer the biases of the guild but one that leads us into a place of ‘darkness.’ This is a reading of the world: a reading that first takes into consideration the reader’s experience of the world as a place of ‘darkness’ ” (11). Aymer’s book, a commendable example of what may be fairly characterized as ideological criticism, is courageous, informative, and important. Aymer’s model for “reading darkness” is one proposed by Wimbush. In her view, his model “shifts our focus from the arcane, irreclaimable past and from the figuring of biblical writings as foreign, ultimately inaccessible texts, toward a model that takes seriously, modern, silenced readers who read the biblical texts scripturally” (11). [Full Review]