"My Poor Soul": Theodicy and the Strong Assimilationist Origin of Black American Philosophy

The following essay engages with the assimilationist proto-theodicy articulated by Magdalena Beulah Brockden, an enslaved African woman in the eighteenth century, as recounted in Seth Moglen’s article, “Enslaved in the City on a Hill: The Archive of Moravian Slavery and the Practical Past.” While Moglen’s analysis foregrounds narrative as a genre within the corpus of slave literature, my inquiry centers on interpreting Brockden’s Lebenslauf, her memoir of Christian conversion, as a theodicy, a complex philosophical meditation on religion and politics. In addition, this essay undertakes a critical exegesis of C. L. R. James’s State Capitalism and World Revolution, focusing particularly on the concluding chapter, “Philosophy and State Capitalism.” In this section, James identifies rationalism and idealism as paradigmatic philosophies of subordination and managerial control, precisely because they misconstrue materialism, a similar pitfall of Brockden’s ontologically assimilationist theodicy.