Thirty pieces of silver
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This creative thesis utilizes history, theory, Christianity, music, and poetry to critically discuss and creatively engage with the intersections among each of these subjects. The critical introduction chronicles the history of Ham's Curse and its usage in white Christian thought in the antebellum period to justify the enslavement of Black Africans. This ideology created a reality and social location, or assigned position in society based on intersections of identity, for whites and Black Africans in the antebellum South. Using Louis Althusser's ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and Raymond Williams' reciprocal confirmation terminology can help describe the mechanisms for how this ideology worked. Ham's Curse was disseminated and reciprocally confirmed through different ISAs by being presented as a natural order in God's creation and in Southern society. From their social location, Black Africans interpreted the Bible in such a way that rejected Ham's Curse and created an alternative grammar, what African Diaspora scholar Tiffany Lethabo King calls a shoal, to the white dominant hegemonic Christianity. This alternative grammar and Black African socially located interpretation can be observed in the spirituals, songs that shoaled white Christianity by expressing discontent, organizing resistance, declaring freedom and by maintaining distinctly African elements of worship. The creative work Thirty Pieces of Silver, is inspired by the slave price that Jesus was sold for and the powerful implication of what that would have meant for enslaved persons in the antebellum period, as well as the value that places on people of color today.
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M.A.