Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1990498
Khytie K. Brown
Legend says that River Mumma inhabits the rivers of Jamaica, and all the fish are River Mumma’s children. Sometimes, people say, River Mumma rises out of the river to sit on the rocks and comb her long, black hair. But, like they say, don’t touch River Mumma. Don’t even look at her. There’s no telling what she will do if you try. Some say if you so much as see her, you’ll fall into a trance and she’ll grab you by the heels and drag you under the river. If you try to catch her, the fish will disappear; the river will run dry. It’s best, they say, not to make trouble with River Mumma. – Amy Friedman 1
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1997167
Sarojini Nadar
ABSTRACT The purpose of this essay is to critically review the remarkably unique account of Desmond Tutu’s life presented by Michael Battle in his book “Desmond Tutu: A Spiritual Biography of South Africa’s Confessor.” The central contention of this essay is that Michael Battle shifts the paradigm of biographical research about Desmond Tutu beyond the popular trope of “political priest” to that of “freedom fighter-mystic.” Through a careful filtering of Tutu’s life via the three stages of mysticism – purgation, illumination and union, Battle makes a convincing case that Tutu’s political actions for justice were not in spite of his deep spirituality, but because of it. This ethnographic spiritual biography troubles the binaries between the sacred and the secular, between spiritual contemplation and social action, and between God’s justice and social justice, thereby inviting readers to the warm embrace of a more authentic spirituality.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1990493
Terrance Dean
Critical conversations have emerged within the concepts of Afropessimism and Afrofuturism, particularly, the future and/or non-future of Blackness and Black people in the twenty-first century. Moreover, where does Blackness and Black people situate themselves within these framed concepts as it relates to Black Religious faith tradition and Black Religious Thought? How and where does religion and theology take up these matters in relation to Blackness and Black people within their faith traditions and experiences? Scholars, mainly within Black Studies, have taken up these ideologies in an effort to locate Blackness and Black people in a white racist patriarchal system that anchors itself within white right, and white nihilism. Yet, where does the Black faith tradition situate itself in religious discourses centered in white theology, and how can it permeate the discourse on redemption and hope, or failure and the unsalvageable? It is why this special issue journal, Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and Black Religious Thought: Conceptualizing Ideologies of Race, Religion, Gender and Sexuality in the 21st Century, takes up these matters, whereas Black religion scholars consider these concepts within the study of religion and theology. One key question for consideration, where does the recovery work begin, and where does it end in relation to Black person’s race, gender and sexuality, and religious ideologies in Black Religious Thought?” Key voices within Afropessimissm scholarship, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson have made a critical juncture toward naming Blackness and Black people’s lives and experiences a unique distinction within Black suffering. Essentially, Black persons experiences within the concept of liberation or liberatory means is bound to the historied notion of slavery, which has become systemic and structural against Black life progress and liberation. Afropessimism, according to Frank Wilderson, makes the following claims, and it is worth quoting in length,
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1990494
Terrance Dean
ABSTRACT Examining the afterlife of slavery, mainly interrogating the futurity of black sexuality and contemptuous Black queer bodies as possible identities of radical futurism in a queer homiletic. I position this essay within the framework of a futuristic queer homiletic, such that, Black queer identity reimagines itself within the plane of Afrofuturism disrupting the continuum of heterosexuality, and Black respectability. The futurity of Black queerness re-turns itself into a living bound subject. I make use of James Baldwin and his gender sexual politics as a Black gay man. Drawing upon his semi-autobiographical essay, “Here Be Dragons,” Baldwin illustrates how he was eliminated from his family, primarily by his step-father, who was disgusted by Baldwin's ugliness and dark skin, and moreover, his effeminate and queer mannerisms. Baldwin, feeling “dumped” by his family, was also displaced, or, “removed” from his black community of Harlem because of his sexuality. He seeks refuge in Greenwich Village, a white community which houses many gay clubs and bars. It is here that Baldwin faces a similar reality of being isolated, neglected, and eliminated for not only his queer identity, but his Black skin and Black identity. Baldwin, in public view, renders as a site of failure in that he is unacknowledged because of his Black queer identity and is rendered, or read as disgust, an 'other.' Thus, he is bounded “out” of society, “out” of sight, and ultimately left searching for a place, a home to call his own. Baldwin reimagines himself, a living subject, bound for life. As such, a futuristic queer homiletic enables Black queerness to the center of Black sexuality and Black identity.
考察奴隶制的来世,主要探讨黑人性取向的未来和黑人酷儿身体作为酷儿说教中激进未来主义的可能身份。我把这篇文章放在未来酷儿说教的框架中,这样,黑人酷儿身份在非洲未来主义的平面上重新想象自己,破坏了异性恋的连续性,以及黑人的可敬性。黑人酷儿的未来重新变成了一个活生生的被束缚的主体。我利用了詹姆斯·鲍德温和他作为黑人同性恋者的性别政治。鲍德温在他的半自传体散文《龙来了》(Here Be Dragons)中描述了他是如何被家庭抛弃的,主要是被他的继父抛弃的,他的继父厌恶鲍德温的丑陋和黑皮肤,更讨厌他的娘娘腔和奇怪的举止。鲍德温感觉自己被家人“抛弃”了,也因为自己的性取向而被迫离开了他所在的哈莱姆黑人社区。他在格林威治村寻求庇护,这是一个白人社区,那里有许多同性恋俱乐部和酒吧。正是在这里,鲍德温面临着一个类似的现实:不仅因为他的酷儿身份,而且因为他的黑皮肤和黑人身份,他被孤立、被忽视、被淘汰。鲍德温,在公众眼中,被描绘成一个失败的地方因为他的黑人酷儿身份没有得到承认,被描绘成,或者被解读为厌恶,一个"他者"因此,他被束缚在“社会”之外,“视线”之外,最终离开,寻找一个地方,一个属于他自己的家。鲍德温重新想象自己,一个活生生的主体,为生活而奋斗。因此,未来的酷儿说教使黑人酷儿成为黑人性和黑人身份的中心。
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1990497
Courtney Bryant
ABSTRACT This essay interrogates the Christian concept of incarnation as a salvific device through an womanist/feminist, ethical analysis of the gender/sexuality/race bending storyline and romance of Ruby Baptiste and Christine Braithwaite, in HBO’s cinematic speculative fiction Lovecraft Country. Pressing at the meanings of salvation and ontology, it considers how Lovecraft Country’s queering of incarnational power, gender/sexuality and race critiques, complicates and reimagines the religious, socio-material and erotic significance of “the flesh” and its implications on redemption.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1990496
Christophe D. Ringer
ABSTRACT This article argues that Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism as a analytic contains philosophical contradictions that can be resolved through currents in Afrofuturism. The article argues Wilderson's use of Orlando Patterson's concept of social death results in a performative contradiction as its claims deny the very possibility of their justification. The result is the inability to substantiate that Blackness as coterminous with Slaveness. The article then argues that Wilderson's Afropessimism is better understood as a mythology rather than an analytic. Interpreted as myth, Afropessimism can articulate the grammar of Black suffering through a religious consciousness rather than scientistic or philosophical reason. Afrofuturism serves as a resource in this task by creating images of the past and present simultaneously within consciousness. The claim is evidenced through engaging Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Octavia Butler's Kindred.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1990495
W. Hart
ABSTRACT If stars appear to change position, to be displaced when viewed from different point in the earth's orbit, then by analogy we might say that Afrofuturism and Afropessimism are parallax angles on the afterlife of slavery. Afrofuturism and Afropessimism inhabit forms of imaginative spacetime that are both congruent and incongruent. I will call the triangular relations among the afterlife of slavery, Afrofuturism, and Afropessimism, a “black mood.” While this mood certainly has psychological meaning for individuals, I primarily point toward a sociological phenomenon that shapes the collective mood long term. This black mood is an intellectual disposition with emotional resonance. It produces both empowering joyful affects and disempowering sad affects. Though it is hardly the only black mood, this one is influential in sectors of the Blackamerican intelligentsia both within and beyond the academy. In this article, I explore a few points of contact among Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and black religion.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1949143
Anthony G. Reddie
ABSTRACT This paper arises from a pilot project of the Council for World Mission (CWM) that is seeking to explore the Legacies of Slavery via the archives of the London Missionary Society, the forerunners of CWM. Arguments around the justification of European Christian Mission often focus on the efficacy and utilitarianism of missionary activity, in terms of education, medicine or the removal unethical indigenous religio-cultural practices. This paper seeks to move beyond these justifications to focus on the representational damage imposed on the descendants of enslaved Africans that have traduced Black bodies to “less than” in the body politic of many Western nations in the global North. The denigration of Black bodies has continued beyond the epoch of slavery and finds expression in the absurdity of Black people needing to assert that “Black Lives Matter”.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1954372
Madipoane Masenya (Ngwan’a Mphahlele)
prayers. One example is “Benediction for Stepping out into the Empire” [57] with the deploying of “the light, the salt, the hand, the water”. How about being light that liberates, salt that savours, hands that carry, water that washes. Grammar, empire’s tool, is not neutral. In this regard I would have loved to see more prayers in local “tongues in order to ‘mash-up’ empire’s White English grammar”! A “betraying of tradition” has to be pushed to greater lengths. For instance, the able-bodiedness of some of the imagery is striking whether eyes, hands, head, hearts, feet, etc. Then there is an internalising deployment of “light” over darkness [light-bearers, 63] which is troubling. There are some excellent materials around baptism and eucharist, though we seem to be stuck to the inherited sequences of the rituals. I wonder what a full “break-out” from the liturgical empire would look like.
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Pub Date : 2021-05-04DOI: 10.1080/14769948.2021.1955180
Nathan D. Wood-House
ABSTRACT This essay explores Conjure, a magical tradition unique to the African American Diaspora in the United States. Conjure exemplifies the religio-ethical significance of what this essay names enfleshed memory: remembering and rearticulating sacred knowledge at the intersectional site of the human body. Enfleshed memory is integral to Conjure for healing and resistance as a dual means of survival among the African American diaspora to the present. Therefore, enfleshed memory is evaluated as a critical locus in which echoes of this magical tradition resound in contemporary African American Christianity. The origins and characteristics of Conjure are explored, with an emphasis on the role of enfleshed memory. Reverberations of Conjure are then identified in African American Christianity in the ethnohistorical and religious scholarship of LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant’s research on Gullah/Geechee women (2014). Finally, these echoes are elucidated in the terms of “microhistory” and “countermemory,” categories developed by womanist theo-ethicist Emilie M. Townes (2006).
摘要本文探讨了散居美国的非裔美国人特有的一种魔法传统——“招魂”。《召唤》举例说明了这篇文章所称的血肉记忆的宗教伦理意义:在人体的交叉点上记忆和重新表达神圣的知识。作为非裔美国人散居到现在的双重生存手段,植入的记忆对于愈合和抵抗是不可或缺的。因此,在当代非裔美国人基督教中,这种神奇传统的回声被评价为一个关键的地点。本文探讨了《Conjure》的起源和特点,并强调了植入记忆的作用。随后,在LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant对Gullah/Geechee妇女的研究(2014)的民族历史和宗教学术研究中,发现了召唤的回响在非裔美国基督教中的作用。最后,这些呼应在“微观历史”和“反记忆”的术语中得到了阐释,这是由女性主义神学伦理学家艾米丽·m·汤斯(Emilie M. Townes, 2006)提出的范畴。
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