Spotlight! Symposium: Dr. Lindsay DiCuirci

Re-forming the Dead: Abolitionist Iconoclasm and the Spirit Circle

Mediumship and the intimate practices of the spirit circle drew in some of the nineteenth-century's most prominent abolitionists in America. Spiritualism promised communication between the embodied and the disembodied through mediums and touted the continuous growth and "elevation" of the dead rather than, in the Christian tradition, the finality of judgment. This talk explores the beliefs, language and community practices that fused an interracial circle of spiritualists at 36 Sophia Street, the home of Isaac and Amy Post in Rochester, NY. It focuses on Isaac Post’s 1852 collection of spirit letters, Voices from the Spirit World, Being Communications from Many Spirits, and on Amy's extensive correspondence with Boston-based Black abolitionist, historian and editor William Cooper Nell. Hearing from dead luminaries from George Washington to Napoleon Bonaparte, Post recorded a chorus of regret and expiation, requiring a radical rethinking of the people and accomplishments that merit enshrinement in public memory and space. Post’s iconoclasm was in conversation with Nell’s own historiographic efforts to commemorate and center Black history in mid-century Boston, an effort informed by the conviction that those lionized while "in the body" were not guaranteed glory in the celestial sphere.