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This article draws on food studies, religious history, and research on Equiano's religious orientation to argue that Equiano's Interesting Narrative describes a creolized African and Methodist asceticism in relation to food and ritual practice. His introduction to the Moravian-Methodist love feast before his conversion resonates with his earlier textual recollections of commensality and feasting practices in his eastern Nigerian homeland. Equiano's early textual descriptions of feasting rituals suggest that he was attracted to Methodism because of his experiences through the Middle Passage and his memories of feasting practices, purification rites, and sacrifices and offerings from his childhood in Igboland. Equiano's experiences of sacrifice and his portrayals of hunger and hunger strikes as a form of resistance on the slave ships mark his choice of religious and ascetic orientation. His reclamation of the ocean as a free Black sailor, an Atlantic Creole, contributes to his interest to a temperate Methodist orientation and inner-worldly asceticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article probes the discourses of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the war on alcohol, prison reform, and the twin punishments of lynching and incarceration that help recontextualize Frances Harper's 1893 novel Iola Leroy. The argument between Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells frames the illusory fear of black men raping white women and the threat of miscegenation. Harper's novelistic response to this debate is to create multiple discourses for diverse audiences: white slavery, miscegenation, and the rise of a carceral state and its practice of convict leasing and the chain-gang. The article shows that the debates over women's issues, domesticity, gender normativity, and prison reform within the WCTU disrupt the discourse of the tragic mulatta that has often been assumed primary and has softened the narrative critique in Iola Leroy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the religious ideologies, literary works, and civil perspectives of author and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. The perspectives of two social theorists, Victor Turner and Marcel Mauss, are mentioned in regard to the role of religion in Du Bois' literary work and life. Literary works of Du Bois mentioned include the books "Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil" and "The Souls of Black Folk." Also discussed is the effect of philosopher William James on Du Bois.