“The Man with Two Souls”: Paschal Beverly Randolph and the Ambiguities of Spiritualist Discourses on Race, Religion, and History

An extensive body of scholarly literature has examined the complex relationship between “race,” “religion,” and larger historical narratives. Within the American context, this scholarship has largely focused on Protestant Christianity, though there is a growing awareness of the contribution of alternative religious movements to such discourses. The mixed-race Spiritualist medium and occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875) provides a particularly rich example of the ambiguous nature of Spiritualist discourses on race, religion, and history. On the one hand, Spiritualism universalized religion, potentially legitimating non-Christian traditions, including Africana religions; but on the other, it also imposed racialist hierarchies and a progression-based understanding of religion that tied spiritual development to biological evolution. Looking across a selection of Randolph’s writings, this article will show how Spiritualism both provided a way to resist dominant narratives of Africa as a place without religion and history but also upheld the logic of white supremacy.