Where are Our Tools?

Abstract

Digital Black Religion is, at its center, a celebration. Its practitioners exist in a continuous dance of digital testifying, praise breaks in the comments, conjuring, trending, divining, following, gathering followers, praying, prophesying, liking, sharing, downloading, and creating sacred content. These events and actions are enacted on the digital by African diasporic people often in an attempt to transform both themselves and the socialites which they occupy, in order to, as Fred Moten describes “produce the absolute overturning, the turning of this motherfucker out.” Such engagements with technology underscore the unique logic employed by Black users of technology for religious/spiritual purposes. From what scholarly corridors, then, do we draw tools, that is, the kind of approaches and frameworks, conducive to the study of this fantastic sort of Black digital-religious being? Moten highlights (critical) celebration within Black thought as a site of mobility, as the “fugitive field of unowning.” For those students, researchers, and readers of digitalreligious culture, our tools for its study point to this fugitive field, which is both the site and process of unowning that is discussed in this essay as freedom-seeking. While a nod to fugitivity: “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed,” freedom seeking here more fully accounts for the goal (of freedom) in Black peoples’ religious/spiritual practices. Here, religious/ spiritual freedom-seeking is discussed as a fugitive practice. Black digital users often employ the digital space in an attempt to transgress the boundaries of “proper” religion. In bringing this conversation more squarely into African American religious studies Charles Long’s description of freedom among enslaved Africans is crucial here. He describes them as those who