Wendy Laura Belcher. Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2012. Pp. x + 285. ISBN13: 9780199793211, ISBN10: 0199793212. Hardcover, $74.00. This is the most original and provocative book on Samuel Johnson that I have read in a very long time. It offers to reframe Johnson within a neglected, almost unexamined, perspectival context. Belcher’s book discusses the Hebeshan cultural discourse emanating from the East African Highland region spoken of most often today as “Ethiopia” (and known to earlier Europeans such as Johnson as, among other titles, “Abyssinia”). This venerable archive, one, given the evidence of physical anthropology, perhaps emerging from the misty primeval origins of humanity itself, stretches from the ancient mythical matrix of the Hebrew Bible and an incipient Christianity (see Genesis 10: 6-7, I Kings 10: 1-13, 2 Chronicles 9: 1-12, and Acts 8: 26-39) to the twentieth-century millenarian ideology of Haile Selassie and contemporary influence upon popular culture of the Rastafari movement, constitutes one of the treasures of the global cultural tradition. It is among the virtues—as well as perhaps the fatal flaw—of Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson that it offers to bring a perhaps otherwise unsuspecting and/or uninformed academic readership into awareness of the venerable history and vibrant reality of this culture. Belcher’s brief is to demonstrate how this cultural tradition significantly influenced and help shape Samuel Johnson. The bulk of the book is devoted to tactical engagements, where she rereads such “Orientalist” Johnsonian texts as Rasselas, his heroic tragedy Irene, and a scattering of smaller items (including “The Vision of Theodore,” Rambler 190, and Idler 99) from the vantage of the Habeshan religious and literary archive—an archive which self-consciously and successfully engaged in a canny textual self-propagation in classical, Medieval, and early-Modern European culture. One of the boons of reading this book is to notice how thoroughly Habeshan culture is imbricated within a larger European consciousness. As Belcher notes, the Habesha energetically promoted their cultural achievements to the world beyond their borders, establishing centers of dissemination in ancient cities such as Alexandria and Rome, as well pocketing Christian Europe with monastic centers and embassies that propagated Abyssinian religious culture. Belcher covers this ground with informative lucidity; however, within the pages of Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson, this legwork intends to remind the reader of the importance of Habesha discourse in earlier centuries. We are thus enabled to understand why Johnson would have taken the Abyssinian Church—one that had a claim to being closest to the primitive Christian Church, and consequently became a conceptual football in the religious controversies of post-Reformation Europe—seriously enough to produce, as his first published book, A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), a translation and epitome of Portuguese Jesuit Jeronimo Lobo’s account of his missionary activities in East Africa in the 17th century, as redacted by the French religious polemicist Joachim LeGrand. In Belcher’s view, Johnson was intertextually “possessed” by the Habesha discourse articulated in this complexly sedimented text in a way that would have profound implications for his later literary career. However, Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson appears to have at least two larger, strategic goals. First is the promotion of the Habeshan cultural tradition to Western readers. Second, Belcher seems to be going beyond a local interrogation of Johnson’s “Orientalist” texts and moving toward a major reassessment of Johnson as writer and thinker. We see this in the very title, as well as in various incidental remarks scattered throughout the book. In Belcher’s reconfiguration, Samuel Johnson is seen in a new strange light, not as a staunch pillar of John Bull Anglo/Euro-centrism, but as a product and dispenser of Ethiopian thought and culture. For Belcher, Johnson is taken over, possessed, driven to become a cultural propagator of Habesha discourse. He is no longer “Dictionary Johnson” nor any of the other handful of recent scholarly recreations: Bate’s tormented and guilt-ridden psychological victim, Lipking and Kernan’s professional author par excellence, Greene’s political progressive. He is now become “Abyssinian Johnson.” Belcher’s maneuver is remarkably ambitious. Her effort, if successful, would demand nothing less than a large-scale reconsideration of our fundamental understanding of Samuel Johnson. This boldness necessitates a careful examination of Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson’s thesis, methodology, and arguments. The book’s theoretic foundations include the Foucauldian concept of the archive, as articulated in Archaeology of Knowledge. It also relies upon postmodernist notions of intertextuality, finessing its discussion within a fascinating analogy of intertextual influence as a form of psychic, “discursive possession”—a suggestive and helpful contribution that also resonates with the some of the supernatural belief systems native to the African continent. And of course, Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson’s dominant critical focus aligns with the latest theoretical fashion in the academy, the “global eighteenth century.” But Belcher’s book is not faddish; it is serious and deliberate work. Nevertheless, my reading has discovered troublesome reservations, particularly with regard to the book’s evidentiary support for its thesis. A few of these follow. To begin with a relatively minor point, let me say that, from my own experience in academic publishing, sometimes errors crop up between the submission of corrected final proofs and the actual printing of the book. In the present book, either the author or her editors have allowed inconsistencies in documentation. The most egregious example is found in the footnotes referencing Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Time and again, even on the same page, even two or more times, we see the unwieldy and verbose “James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. 2, 1776-1776, ed. George Birbeck Hill and Lawrence Fitzroy Powell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964; reprint, 1979). Yet at other times, an abbreviated tag, “Boswell, Life (vol.1)” is used. I see no reason why the notes fluctuate between the two—it seems random. Much more sensible would have been a short titles page so that parenthetical references or briefer footnotes could have been substituted. These instances of clumsy and random annotation betray a lack of sophistication that subtly undermines the books scholarly authority. Even more detrimental is an apparent misattribution informing all these references. Powell revised his earlier, 1934 revision of Hill’s edition in 1964, particularly volumes five and six, but also including a table or errata covering the first four volumes. None of Belcher’s references recognize this elemental bibliographical fact. The frequent references to Boswell’s Life on many of the pages of this book foreground this misstep to the point of irritation, if not risibility. An even more egregious misstep is this very frequency of Belcher’s appeal to Boswell’s Life to support her claims about Johnson. Early in the 20th century, under the initial impetus generated by Oxford critics such as Walter Raleigh, R. W. Chapman, and David Nichol Smith, later crystalizing in this country with the powerful impact of Bertrand Bronson’s “The Double Tradition of Dr. Johnson,” scholars have shifted from Boswell to Johnson’s writings themselves as the primary source for our knowledge and understanding of Johnson’s mind and art. Belcher does not totally neglect Johnson’s writings, but his primary texts are generally relegated to subsidiary status, in deference to Boswell. This is suspect. Suspicions about the validity of Belcher’s evidentiary appeals to support her argument proliferate when we move to matters of greater import. For example, in pressing her surmise about Johnson’s discursive possession by the Habeshan discursive archive, Belcher writes “I imagine this curious scene [that of a prone Johnson dictating his redaction of Lobo-LeGrand to his anxious amanuensis, Edmund Hector] as one out of a trance: the large, pale, still body draped in text and streaming language” (46). This is lovely and expressive prose. But the poetic dreaminess of the evocation lacks definitive rigor. Indeed, it is not quite clear who is the one entranced here, Belcher by her own private Johnsonian vision, or Johnson by ancestral Abyssinain voices—or both. But in any case, these “possessions” do not rise to the level of persuasive scholarship. More troubling are other claims that Belcher seeks to verify or ground with shaky, erroneous, or even distortive textual support. An example of a mere error is found on page 47 where, retailing the famous anecdote of the kicking of the stone, Belcher describes Johnson as “something of a rationalist.” More accurate here would be the term “empiricist”—it is precisely Johnson’s appeal here to demonstrable, common sense, immediate sensory verification, that makes him a follower of Locke, rather than of Descartes or Leibniz—rationalist philosophers about whom Johnson elsewhere expressed grave reservations. But even more disturbing are evidentiary appeals that in fact distort the nature of the source. Let a few examples suffice. First, on page 67, Belcher writes, “Johnson read and annotated Nelson’s Festivals and Fasts, which states that the Habesha knew best certain Christian facts—such as how many infants were killed by Herod.” In a note to this, Belcher cites from the standard Yale Edition of Johnson’s works, his Diaries, Prayers and Annals, followed by a quotation from Nelson. The implication is that Nelson was a source of important information about the Habesha and that Johnson directed his attention toward this. In fact, the reference to Johnson’s Diaries does not indicate that he paid attention to the only reference to the Habesha in the Festivals and Fasts that my own search has found. Nelson in fact is not an authoritative source of information about the Abyssinian Church, and it is not even clear that Johnson read the passage in question—he was notorious for not reading books through. The evidence is tenuous at best, misleading at worst. Second, on page 69, Belcher writes, in support of the notion that Johnson was a closet Jacobite, “Bennet Langton’s father also thought Johnson was privately a Roman Catholic.” Her source is, as we have perhaps grown to expect, Boswell’s Life; however her interpretation of the passage is questionable. She takes the elder Langton’s opinion of Johnson’s religion seriously. However, even the quickest glance at the text reveals that Langton’s opinion is being ridiculed—his is a slow, obtuse, and narrow mind. The whole point of the anecdote is to reveal how Johnson would deviate from his true opinions in order to impress his audience or overpower his interlocutor. Hence, the claim that Belcher intends us to take on the faith of her example is in fact exploded by the example itself. Third, finally, and most seriously, on page 71 Belcher cites a conversation between Johnson and Boswell (found, again, in the Life), which, she says, justifies the view that “he [Johnson] was open to alternative religious views within Christianity,” including the Coptic Church of Africa. Yet the passage Belcher cites sponsors no such view. Quite the opposite, rather. In it, Johnson expresses his strong approbation of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles. Contrary to Belcher’s conclusion, in the conversational exchange Johnson promotes the study of alternative religious persuasions not with a view to receptively embracing their truth, but in order to acquire ammunition to refute them and to support the Church of England: here are Johnson’s own words “we must not supply our [religious] enemies with arms from our arsenal” (Hill-Powell ed., 2: 151; my emphasis). If I am correct in raising suspicions about Belcher’s errant deployment of her sources, then this in turn raises more fundamental questions. Is this truly a scholarly work? Or is it an exercise in polemics, on behalf of a larger strategy, the dissemination of the culture of the Hebesha in the West? I am not seeking to be unkind or disingenuous in raising this issue; Belcher herself has voiced it. See her video at: <http://www.princeton.edu/africanamericanstudies/people/faculty/wendy-belcher/>. So, here’s the rub. Has Belcher written Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson as a scholar or a journalist? Is she striving for embracive objectivity? Or is she indulging in a partial, rhetorically impaired, tendentiousness? At present, I have no answer to these questions. But I do feel compelled to raise them, in the interests of the larger goal that all scholars consulting this book would share—the advancement of our knowledge of Samuel Johnson. Let me reiterate that I have no quarrel with Belcher’s innovative and “spirited” reinterpretation of Samuel Johnson; indeed I welcome it. I acknowledge and appreciate the many virtues of her book. Belcher pushes to the forefront a Johnsonian text that scholars have almost universally neglected. She has fresh and interesting things to say about Johnson as a writer, thinker, and person. She has added a layer to Johnson that she did not inherit—she discovered it herself and has succeeded in bringing our attention to it in a book that is lucid, engaging, and enjoyable. It would be hard to ask for more. But the very hubris of the book Belcher has crafted invites, indeed demands, careful consideration. Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson radiates flashes of genius; I feel these and share in the breathless excitement the book solicits. A book like this comes around all too infrequently; we readers of Johnson will never read and think about Johnson again without considering Abyssinia as a significant point of reference. As both a scholar and as a human being, I want this book to succeed. However, my limited platform here restricts me from engaging in a more exhaustive survey; I leave it to others pursue a more definitive assessment. Anthony W. Lee University of Maryland University College