Blackness at the End of the World: A Theological Ungrounding (original) (raw)
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The Future of Black Theology of Liberation
Verbum et ecclesia, 2024
The death of Black Theology of Liberation (BTL) has been announced, and many were invited to the funeral. This article rejects vehemently such a death as a myth, and provides two reasons why such a theology would have a place to address theologising in the world. It firstly argues that BTL attributes its birth through stories. These stories are captured in history; embodied stories that are told. Secondly, it is found in a broader epistemology than that provided by the Enlightenment paradigm. Therefore, it is not only found in conceptual, argumentative discourses, but other forms of knowledge systems, including stories, poetry, and personal storytelling. However, this has still not been equally appreciated and explored. Taking the above two reasons into account, the death of BTL cannot be announced by academics, since they were never the sole custodians thereof, only recipients of the tradition of an oppressed people
Black Theology: An International Journal, 2010
In this essay, I posit that the original way in which the concept, heuristic, and signifier "liberation" functioned in U.S. Black Liberation Theology has by both form and content been un/consciously resignified into a discourse of cultural legitimation. The signifier "liberation" has become decontextualized (politically, economically, and culturally) in the second and third iterations of U.S. Black Liberation Theology, causing the discourse to become perpetually oriented towards past, not present or future, alternative dreams of social transformation and sites of strudle informed by the Black Christian radical tradition. In order to accomplish such work, this article employs a postcolonial perspective to the sources and discursive strategies within U.S. Black Liberation Theology. The second section ofthe article examines the historical and social processes involved in the slippage between liberation and legitimation, probing key moments and issues of class difference that led to (1) the disengagement of U.S. Black Liberation Theology with the cries ofthe living poor and marginalized and (2) the development of evasive discursive strategies within U.S. Black Theology that render Black Liberation Theology into a middle-class theology.
Scriptura, 2012
The article argues that there is still need of black theology. Although apartheid is believed to have died and blacks have political power, the socioeconomic and cultural realities and conditions that necessitated black theology are still prevalent. For as long as the black experiences involve pain and suffering there will be need to reflect theologically on what it means to be black in the South African context. This time around, as black theology is resuscitated, it should not merely be an academic-intellectual enterprise of the elites but it should seriously be in such a way that it has an organic relationship with the poor and oppressed. For black theology to be sustainable it has to be done in the context of theological reflection not from the Ivory towers such as academia but together with and alongside the poor and the oppressed, as well as their ecclesiastical and social movements
In this essay, I posit that the original way in which the concept, heuristic, and signifier ‘liberation’ functioned in U.S. Black liberation theology have by both form and content been un/consciously resignified into a discourse of cultural legitimation. The signifier ‘liberation’ has become decontextualized (politically, economically, and culturally) in the second and third iterations of U.S. black liberation theology, causing the discourse to become perpetually oriented towards past, not present or future alternative dreams of social transformation and sites of struggle informed by the black Christian radical tradition. In order to accomplish such work, this article employs a postcolonial perspective to the sources and discursive strategies within U.S. black liberation theology. The second section of the article examines the historical and social processes involved in the slippage between liberation and legitimation, probing key moments and issues of class difference that led to (1) the disengagement of U.S. black liberation theology with the cries of the living poor and marginalized and (2) evasive discursive strategies within U.S. black theology that turn black liberation theology into a middle class theology.
The Buried God: Toward a Theology of Black Lives Matter
Enlightenment progress and liberal harmony have found little realization in the black community. Amid a nation of democracy, in the era of the first black president, police brutality, mass incarceration, and poverty still plague black lives. The Black Lives Matter movement which formed as a response to this condition cares nothing for bold political promises. There is a commitment in the Black Lives Matter movement to breaking down idols and false prophets in the fight for liberation. Stirring is a theology of liberation, one which ignores the idealism of secular culture and empowers black people to pursue black freedom. In this paper, I will offer a portrait of a God who refuses to be domesticated by white supremacy and is relentlessly concerned with black lives who suffer. This God blasts the idolatry of liberalism, defaces false prophets who preach peace but perpetuate oppression, challenges orthodoxies which reinforce injustice, and demands the liberation of black lives. This theology will have for its point of departure the material experience of real black lives, particularly as recorded in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Mary Buser’s Lockdown on Rikers, and as expressed by the music of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. For too long have white theologians neglected the matters of black lives.
Conversion to the Rhythm of Blackness: Final Reflection Paper for Black Theology
2015
One of the blessings of being a student at Union Theological Seminary, and also of the blessings of being able to continue on here as a doctoral student, is the living encounter with Black liberation theology. This is a hard blessing, and a challenging blessing, especially for someone like myself who is wrapped up in numerous layers of hypocrisy and privilege. My encounter with Black theology forces me to wrestle not just with my integrity as a theologian in the 21 st century academic world, but more so as a human being on this Earth at a time in which our civilization is faced with an unprecedented moment of crossroads. It is not just that the murder of the body of the Earth herself makes the status-quo untenable. It is the murder of the black body and the murder of the Dalit body, and the murder of anybody who is oppressed under the heels of a global hegemony controlled by white supremacy and the rampant, immoral, unfeeling mechanisms of capitalism which makes our current situation one that cannot last. The warning of James Baldwin of a "fire next time" in the 1960's, if the boot heels of the oppressor are not lifted, are even more urgent today. Those of us who claim to speak from faith and for faith have no choice but to respond to this urgency, and in this sense the contexts of Black theology, both broad and particular, speak to us with an ever-new urgency today as well.
Anthropology and ethnology opean access journal, 2024
This work argues that the White Christian Western world ended Black history as a distinct form of system and social integration unfolding unto the world by integrating them into the dialectic of their (neo) liberal (Protestant) capitalist means and modes of production. This process, contemporarily, in postindustrial America, has led to the queerification and feminization of the socalled Black American community, which serves the imperial agenda of the White Western (Protestant) Christian world under American hegemony by promoting their neoliberal identity politics to the black diaspora and the African continent under the guise of neoliberal identity politics and capitalism.
Chiasma: A Site for Thought, 2023
This essay extends my ongoing elaboration of what I call the Black messianic as a paradigm that emerges from the constellation of Afropessimism and political theology. The iteration at play here enfolds and intensifies the deconstructive quasi-transcendental structure(s) of the apocalyptic, hauntological, and messianic by attending to modernity's singular specter: the Black-Slave. I deploy these "hyperconceptual" ideas from Jacques Derrida's late "theological turn" to speculate on how the Human can accept the modern Slave's invitation to what Frank Wilderson calls the dance of social death. The exigency of this invitation is marked by Afropessimism's contention that Humanity cannot simply undo its anti-Black structural positionality/capacity as long as the World persists. In another attempt to inhabit this aporia, the apocalyptic hauntology of Black messianicity names a vertiginous experiment in which the Human can perhaps begin to deconstruct its parasitic capacity for presence through an iterable mode of "dying" to the World in an impossible fidelity to Black social death's nonbeing-in-worldlessness.
The Unthought Modality of Blackness: On Demanding the End of the World
Society of Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy, 2019
This paper is a meditation on the unique modality of demand—which is not only situated in contradistinction to the standard modalities of possibility, necessity, and contingency, but as a modality that precedes and short-circuits their metaphysical construction. I draw on Agamben’s elaboration of this modality to contemplate Afro-pessimism’s singular demand for the end of the World. Afro-pessimism is defined by this demand because its paradigmatic analysis of anti-Blackness renders intelligible the conditions of impossibility for Black Lives to Matter in the World, conditions which are defined by civil society’s Human(ist) coordinates. I argue that while Afro-pessimism’s demand is conceived as impossible within the World’s anti-Black grammar/horizon, Agamben’s elaboration of this modality can help one better understand how this impossible demand gestures toward an unthought potentiality that Blackness incarnates and the World, accordingly, forecloses.
American Academy of Religion, 2022
This paper’s title takes its inspiration from Jean Vioulac’s, Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian Meditations (2021) [Apocalypse de la vérité (2014)], which is his first book translated into English. Vioulac mobilizes the biblical conception of apocalypse as revelation (apokálypsis) against the Greek conception of truth as disclosure (alētheia). For Vioulac, the Pauline thought of apocalypse entails a leap into a wholly other thinking—marked by the modalities of faith, flesh, mystery, abyss, and absence—wherein which nothingness is no longer held at bay as mere privation but instead indexes “the Undisclosable’s positivity.” While this contemporary French philosopher does not discuss how our modern epoch of anti-nothingness is shaped by racial slavery, I propose that Vioulac's text can be read in part as an unconscious allegory of anti-/Blackness. In particular, Vioulac’s thinking of apocalypse as an attunement to abyssal absence deeply resonates with Afropessimsim’s political ontology of social death and its attendant demand for the end of the World. I thus propose this constellation as a means understanding and elaborating Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought as a poetics of revelation.