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Signifying Jars, Resonating Like a Banjar

This chapter glosses the major couplets and inscriptions, connecting formal matters of allusion, symbolism, tone, absence—in short, the poetics of the jars and pots—to their socio-historical, political, and philosophical contexts. Beginning with an investigation of the African roots of Dave the Potter’s practice, Lawal links Dave’s pottery to the tradition of colonoware and his cryptic marks to the cosmogram of the Kongo people. He proceeds to examine Dave’s inscriptions as an illustration of “the double-edged tendency in African American signifying,” which he positions in the religious and historical contexts of black theology and nineteenth-century evangelicalism. Lawal discovers in the couplets a rich vision of Dave the Potter’s poetic milieu and sensibility, one that puts him at the center rather than the margins of antebellum American culture.