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Imagining “Sweet Fellowship”: Resisting Prejudice with Spiritual Transcendence in Jarena Lee's Imagined Community

Documenting the construction of an imagined religious community, the author of The Life and Religious Experiences of Jarena Lee, A Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel crafts a text at odds with two powerful communities: the nineteenth-century American culture of slavery and the male-dominated black church culture. In a short 20-page narrative published in 1836 that includes an untitled introduction and three chapters entitled ‘‘My Call to Preach the Gospel,’’ ‘‘My Marriage,’’ and ‘‘The Subject of My Call to Preach Renewed,’’ Lee details her struggles against racist and sexist people, practices, and beliefs that threatened to deny her the opportunity to preach. While Lee’s text affirms Benedict Anderson’s observation that new communities emerge as acts of resistance to existing values, a revealing irony persists between Lee’s spiritual perspective and didactic purpose in her narrative and Anderson’s thesis in Imagined Communities. Anderson asserts that the nation inspired by resistance is imagined as a community ‘‘because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail . . . the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.’’ Choosing not to turn a blind eye to the ‘‘actual inequality and exploitation’’ in the racist and sexist communities she encountered, Lee dedicates herself to challenging these prejudices and building a new community that would honor the sanctified spirit beneath her brown skin and female form. Spiritual transcendence would grant her social parity as an African American, as a woman, and as a God-ordained orator and spiritual authority. To convince an audience to relinquish racial or gender bonds for membership into her imagined community, Lee also employs narrative strategies to resist the cultural meanings attached to her body and unveil her audience’s spiritualized essence as well, freeing them to join her in ‘‘sweet fellowship’’ (30). Finally, the disembodied voice of God completes Lee’s rhetorical thrust, as she finds encouragement in a divine, genderless authority that inspires dreams