Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079064
Erika D. Gault
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
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079066
M. Guillory
Media is best viewed as an organizer. While newspapers, magazines, television and radio inform and entertain, they first and foremost shape and collectivize an audience. Whether we watch BLACK JOURNAL or the 6:00 o’clock news; read the CHICAGO DAILY DEFENDER or PLAYBOY, we are involved in a collective experience with thousands and in some cases, millions of other people. Messages, attitudes, emotions, information, lies and distortions of all kinds permeate our consciousness... 1
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079071
C. Randall
In Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, leading public intellectual and Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, traces African Americans’ relationship with the real estate market. Taylor uses the paradigm of “predatory inclusion” to illustrate this history. In so doing she departs from racial liberalismwhich sees the fight for equal access, especially into consumer markets, as an engine for the liberation of Black people. Similarly, Taylor also avoids the present liberal reflex to center the psychological or non-material elements of whiteness in histories of housing, as has become common. Through the frame of predatory inclusion she argues, and then analyzes the ways in which, racism and its history, have categorically altered the terms on which African Americans were able and incentivized to enter these consumer markets. Race for Profit joins works like Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Antero Pietila’s Not in My Neighborhood, and Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, by highlighting the federal government’s role in providing and segregating housing in the United States. But Taylor’s book notably breaks from Rothstein’s best-seller by deflating the idea of a separate public and private sector in housing. Race for Profit clarifies time and again that the state “did not act in a vacuum” (10). By focusing instead on the political economy of housing, the book delivers a brutal assessment of the public-private construction of the market itself. With her attention to political economy, Taylor is in critical discussion with a wave of recent books like Rachel Rolnik’s Urban Warfare, Samuel Stein’s Capital City, and In Defense of Housing by Peter Marcuse and David Madden—all of which situate real estate and housing through the lens of empire and racial capitalism. The book is divided in six chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Whereas other scholars have documented the discriminatory practices of the FHA and VA between 1934 and 1968, Race for Profit chronicles the postCivil Rights shift from redlining and racist exclusion towards predatory inclusion and exploitation. In the introduction, “Homeowner’s Business,” Janice Johnson is introduced as “an atypical homebuyer” in 1970s Philadelphia. As a Black single mother and welfare recipient, Johnson’s profile is emblematic of those who have been traditionally excluded by the FHA’s homeownership programs and the private real estate industry. Taylor writes that city officials condemned Johnson’s apartment and she was looking to rent elsewhere. After being denied tenancy multiple times due to her welfare status, her landlord recommended that she buy a home using a new program at HUD. Johnson’s skepticism was eased only by her lack of options. Quickly, Tayor shows
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079067
Marcelitte Failla
The Black witch and her multiple presences are quickly expanding across the internet. For example, the Hoodwitch’s Instagram account, curated by Bri Luna, boasts 473 thousand followers. Her website features tools for modern witches, including crystals, cleansing herbs, and information about the Vodou deities, the loa. Jessica, owner of BehatiLife Apothecary, has 100 thousand Instagram followers and identifies as an intuitive witch “with a gift for empowering people to break into the biggest shifts of positive change in their lives.” TikTok videos with Blackwitch hashtags, such as #blitch, #blackwitchesoftiktok, and #blackwitch total over 32 million views. While studies of the cyber activities of witches have occurred since the mid-1990s, they have primarily focused on Neopagan and Wiccan practices. The last decade, however, has seen an increased presence of North American Black womxn and femmes identifying as witches who are approaching their craft through an Africana religious orientation. Whereas Neopagan studies are helpful for understanding how witchcraft operates in digital space, they cannot account for the African originated practices and beliefs that shape both Black witch ritual activity and notions of self. This article addresses this gap by attending to two facets of the Black witch’s online presence: her concepts of ontological power and her Black worldmaking endeavors. In Black Aliveness or a Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie opens with the following request to the reader. “Imagine a Black world... a world where blackness exists in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness...where every human question and possibility is of people who are black.” Worldmaking, as Quashie describes it here, creating spaces where Blackness can just be, is a co-creative activity for Black witches, enabled and enhanced by digital media. I argue that the Black witch—whom I identify as someone with innate abilities to harness divine energies such as the ability to see or hear spirits —effectively fosters personal agency through a repetitive online discourse encouraging other Black womxn and femmes to tap into their ontological power. As the Black witch recognizes this power, a power independent of whiteness, she cultivates multi-religious Africana-orientated Black spaces that further affirm her power. Because online religious spaces serve as microcosms for more general shifts in religious belief and practice, the Black worldmaking currently produced by Black witches translates to broader offline notions of what I call an Africana religious orientation. My research consisted of digital online media inquiry and ethnographic semi-structured interviews with leading Black womxn and femmes over video chat and in-person. I reviewed podcasts, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, Facebook group engagement, and TikTok videos and attended copious
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079065
N. F. Castor
“I fá/Orisha Digital Counterpublics” offers an ethnographic reflection on post-Ferguson social justice initiatives in African Diasporic religions (ADRs), organized largely on social media, viewing them as part of a digital counterpublic. The opening section includesmethodology in digital ethnography, touches on the literature on the digital and ADRs, and introduces an interpretive framework of spiritual citizenship in action. The second section recounts my experience of joining a Facebook initiative to “wear white” while praying for peace and social justice through an organization called Oloshas United. Following that I explore an Ifá Temple that uses multiple social media modalities, including live streaming, to organize across the US and beyond, forming a virtual collectivity that supported in person rituals towards collective social change. Together these examples speak of a spiritual praxis, that is, the deployment of ritual to affect change. The closing section raises questions directed at ADRs contribution to social justice organizing and digital counterpublics as an example of spiritual citizenship in action. When speaking of African Diasporic religions in digital space I mean specifically computer-mediated-communication and other technologies in the building, experience, and expression of African diaspora religious communities and their attending ritual practices, with a generous and expansive category that includes various forms: Yorùbá informed religions, Vodoun, Akan, Kumina, and Rastafari, among many others. To inform my discussion of ADRs online I draw on the growing body of scholarship in Digital Religion Studies and Black Digital Humanities (including Black cyberspace studies and Black code studies) and put these literatures into conversation with an ethnographic analysis grounded in the scholarship of Black Studies, Caribbean and African Diaspora Studies, and Black Feminist Studies. These scholarships led me to view ADR online organizing through the conceptualization of digital counterpublics, defined by Hill as “any virtual, online, or otherwise digitally networked community in which members actively resist hegemonic power, contest majoritarian narratives, engage in critical dialogues, or negotiate oppositional identities.” I find this definition to be useful in this context for linking online social activism with organizing in the ADR community over the past decades.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079070
P. Butler
This essay will explore, albeit briefly, the potential for digital spirituality to function as a technology of resistance. Let me be clear, this essay does not rely on a thin or romanticized approach to, or understanding of, resistance. It takes seriously the nuanced and multi-dimensional planes on which people engage in resisting. Part of this essay’s underlying assumption regarding resistance is that being alive is a form of resistance. Similarly, life is comprised of relational systems (i.e. societies, ecologies, bodies, etc.). So, the maintenance or evolution of any system (including biological systems) in the midst of the variability associated with ever changing environments is a form of resistance. Avoiding death and decay is resistance. Being an organism composed of interwoven and interlocking systems would also count as resisting entropy, let alone the type of intentionality that goes into countering invisible systems which perpetuate antiBlack disproportionality in socio-political landscapes. In writing about digital spirituality as a form of resistance I will draw connections between resistance and spirituality and technology and spirituality. From there I will explore digital spirituality as a technology of resistance. I think it is important to demystify spirituality from the beginning of this discussion. In 2018 Ahmet Göçer and Habib Özg ̆an performed a literature analysis on multiple definitions of spirituality. Their general consensus alludes to “four themes in explaining spirituality: (1) rising above the self and/or one’s context (transcendence), (2) a deeper connection with others (interconnectedness), (3) finding purpose in life (meaning) and (4) a developmental aspect (innerness).” Previously I have defined spirituality as “the felt and unfelt connection one has with God OR that which is beyond the self, through the physical world (both seen and unseen).” However, I would like to redefine spirituality a bit more succinctly. I define spirituality as a way of life, a lived epistemology—a code. In doing so I collapse the compartmentalization of McGhee and Grant while shifting the focus toward the internal constellation that comprises one’s perception, resulting in one’s behavior. Simultaneously undergirding one’s identity and reality. In this sense, spirituality is not reduced to transcendence, sociality and meaning. Spirituality is part of the murky and mundane elements of life where transcendence, muck and mire meet through embodied behavior. Here, spirituality is not a tool of escape, but immersion in the dynamics of life. Simplistically, spirituality can be framed through questions such as: What does one do every day? What does one believe about one’s self? What does one believe about the world? How do these systems of thought and belief influence the way one carries themselves on a daily basis? What does one believe is possible, and how does one understand the trajectory of one’s reality? Additionally, wrapping spirituality
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079068
James Padilioni
I t is an undeniable feature of twenty-first century life that our robust digital sphere has shrunk the vastness of spacetime, enabling information to traverse the globe at the speed of light, necessitating reorientations to the way social groups relate and sustain themselves across physical and cyber domains. These transformations have impacted the arena of religious practice as well, where “online and offline” sites of gathering and worship “have become blended or integrated,” particularly driven by the proliferation of social media and streaming video services. As such, discourses of the Digital Age often highlight the “newness” of digital cultures in distinction from “outdated” analog cultures. But scholars addressing the intersection of Black religion and digital religion must take care not to replicate the overarching presumption that digital technology is actually something new. The sensibility that likens technological novelty with improvement is nothing other than a reinstantiation of the technoscientific myth of progress, which first emerged during the Rationalist Revolution of the seventeenth century and reached a zenith during the Industrial Age of the nineteenth century. Positing the West as the terminal direction of Time’s flow, the chronotopic focal point where History’s dialectical struggle would culminate with Enlightenment, this Eurocentric imagination justified the colonial subjugation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia on account of their “primitive” nature. And while the literal and figurative fallout from mid-twentieth-century nuclear warfare greatly reduced the persuasive power of this myth, the emergence of Internet culture at the dawning of the new millennium revived humanist hope that technology might save us from our postmodern condition. In his landmark critique of historiography, James Snead revealed the colonial stigma of deeming Africans “outside” History has no meaningful coordinate without a linear temporal frame of reference that separates time into discrete units, and cordons off those time units already-experienced as the past, from those units of ongoing time we acclaim the present, and the succession of anticipated-impending time units called the future. The Africanist disavowal of historical time makes it impossible to declare the faculty of African temporal perception as behind that of the European. Rather, “the African is also always already there, or perhaps always there before, whereas the European is headed there or, better, not yet there.” Thus, while Enlightenment conceit espouses “there is no repetition in culture ... only... difference, defined as progress and growth,” Black culture contains an “organizing principle of repetition” that structures one’s “perception of repetition, precisely by highlighting that perception.” From Snead’s description of Blackness-as-organized repetition, I generate the corollary notion Blackness-as-algorithmic. Specifically, I argue that Hoodoo
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079069
M. McCormack
I n her work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, literary scholar, Christina Sharpe, describes disturbing scenes of anti-Black violence and death and poses questions of how we live in a world that demands our death. These questions take on additional urgency as Sharpe considers their significance for Black “urban youth,” who have been condemned, abandoned, and “left to their own devices.” Thinking with Sharpe, a central question of this article is: how do Black youth, who have often been abandoned, or “left to their own devices” (both metaphorically and quite literally), deploy various technological, digital, or virtual devices in order to not only “live in a world that demands their death,” but also to foster greater freedom, meaning, and cultural fulfillment in life? A second question also animates the article: how might the interplay between Black religions and/as technologies open greater possibilities for intervention in the anti-Black violence and death that often characterizes the lives of Black youth? Thus, this article focuses on the religio-cultural and socio-political uses of technolog(ies), in response to experiences of vulnerability to anti-Black violence and death, among Black youth coming of age in the hyper-mediated new millennium. The article is also concerned with how Black cultural production, emerging social media, and other new technologies, facilitate the cultivation of reimagined Black identities, communities, and spiritual practices that re-present Black youth to themselves and the broader publics in which they live.
文学学者克里斯蒂娜·夏普(Christina Sharpe)在她的作品《在觉醒中:论黑人与存在》(In the Wake: On black and Being)中，描述了反黑人暴力和死亡的令人不安的场景，并提出了我们如何生活在一个要求我们死亡的世界的问题。当夏普考虑到这些问题对黑人“城市青年”的重要性时，这些问题变得更加紧迫，他们被谴责、被抛弃，并“自生自弃”。与夏普一起思考，本文的一个核心问题是:黑人青年经常被抛弃，或“自生自灭”(无论是隐喻还是字面意思)，他们如何部署各种技术、数字或虚拟设备，以便不仅“生活在一个要求他们死亡的世界”，而且还能在生活中培养更大的自由、意义和文化成就?第二个问题也激发了这篇文章的活力:黑人宗教和技术之间的相互作用如何为干预经常成为黑人青年生活特征的反黑人暴力和死亡提供更大的可能性?因此，本文关注的是技术在宗教文化和社会政治上的应用，以回应在高度中介化的新千年中即将成年的黑人青年中易受反黑人暴力和死亡侵害的经历。这篇文章还关注了黑人文化产品、新兴的社交媒体和其他新技术如何促进重新想象的黑人身份、社区和精神实践的培养，这些身份、社区和精神实践代表了黑人青年自己和他们所生活的更广泛的公众。
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2079072
Smaran Dayal
1. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017); Antero Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, Inc, 2012); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 2. Raquel Rolnik,UrbanWarfare:Housing under the Empire of Finance (London: Verso, 2019); Samuel Stein, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (London: Verso, 2019); David Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, Cop, 2016).
1.Richard Rothstein，《法律的颜色：我们的政府如何隔离美国的被遗忘的历史》（纽约：Liveright出版公司，2017）；Antero Pietila，《不在我的邻居：偏执如何塑造了一个伟大的美国城市》（Not in My Neighborhood:How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City）（芝加哥：Ivan R Dee，Inc，2012）；肯尼斯·T·杰克逊，《克拉斯边疆：美国的郊区化》（纽约：牛津大学出版社，1985年）。2.拉奎尔·罗尔尼克，《城市战争：金融帝国下的住房》（伦敦：Verso，2019）；Samuel Stein，《首都：绅士化与房地产国家》（伦敦：Verso，2019）；David Madden和Peter Marcuse，《捍卫住房：危机政治》（伦敦：Verso，Cop，2016）。
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