In Messianic Fulfillments, Hayes Peter Mauro combines art history, religious studies, and Native American history to examine four strains of evangelical Christian visual and textual representations of Native Americans, from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Each chapter covers a particular group: Puritans, Quakers, Mormons, and progressive Social Gospel Christians. Mauro walks the reader through forty-six illustrations (paintings, lithographs, engravings, life masks, and photographs), explaining the artists’ training, backgrounds, and composition choices, along with the reception and provenance of their works. He discusses the visual languages of the artists and especially their “chromatic metaphors,” which not only helped solidify racial categories but also granted them spiritual meaning (213). Because the small illustrations are black and white, the reader must find larger color illustrations to do his explanations justice. The section on Mormons curiously relies on twenty-first century reproductions of nineteenth century works. Mauro focuses on the depictions of the conversion...
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Book Review|
January 01 2021
Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America
Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America
. By Mauro, Hayes Peter. (Lincoln
: University of Nebraska Press
, 2019
. xi +258, illustrations, notes, acknowledgments, index. $70.00 hardcover.)Ethnohistory (2021) 68 (1): 157–158.
Citation
Thomas J. Lappas; Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America. Ethnohistory 1 January 2021; 68 (1): 157–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-8702486
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