Review: Maximos the Confessor: On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, The Ambigua, Nicholas Constas (ed. and trans.), Harvard University Press, 2014 (volume one: ISBN 978-0-674-72666-6), xxxii + 501 pp., hb $19.95; (volume two: ISBN 978-0-674-73083-0), 388 pp., hb £19.95 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Toward a Black Feminist Criticism
I do not know where to begin. Long before I tried to write this I realized that I was attempting something unprecedented, something dangerous, merely by writing about Black women writers from a feminist perspective and about Black lesbian writers from any perspective at all. These things have not been done. Not by white male critics, expectedly. Not by Black male critics. Not by white women critics who think of themselves as feminists. And most crucially not by Black women critics, who, although they pay the most atten-tion to Black women writers as a group, seldom use a consistent feminist analysis or write about Black lesbian literature. All segments of the literary world-whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian---do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist.
Black Theology
Black feminist Jennifer Nash proffers a critical interrogation of hardcore film pornography as an entry point for theorizing ecstasy, 1 which is not only plural, but both social and personal, and more, transcends what she refers to as the "twin logics" of Black feminist discourse on Black women's sexual lives and representations: injury and recovery. Pushing against notions of pleasure mediated by grammars structured in woundedness, Nash deploys racialized porn as a prism through which she can query about the complex and intersecting relationship between race, gender, and pleasure. She inquires whether or not Black feminist work on pornography and sexual representations of the Black female body might articulate a theoretical and political stance that refuses condemnation, racism, sexism, objectification, and injury as the primary reading. And, what might it mean to read racialized porn not for evidence of the wounds it inflicts but rather for moments of racialized excitement and pleasure? Nash ponders, why not first explore the texts as sites where Black women experience pleasurethrough performance, disruption, watching, being watched, and play? She writes, "Rather than assuming that Black pleasures center on cultural 'ownership,' I instead ask how Black pleasures can include sexual and erotic pleasures in racialization, even when (perhaps precisely because) racialization is painful … ." 2 Nash posits, second wave Black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, and others, practice a "visual defense and recovery in hopes of shielding Black women from further injury" while simultaneously enforcing "a view of visual culture that makes it impossible to theorize Black female pleasure from within the confines of the Black feminist archive, however. 3 The deep investment in foregrounding woundedness, renders
Erotica or Thanatica?: Black Feminist Criticism on the Ropes
Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, 2012
Upon my first reading of Shayne Lee's Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture, I couldn't help but think that this self-anointed "prince of third wave feminism" set up a straw woman, namely, black feminist academics, as the sex police, adherents to a conservative and repressive politics of respectability. Is this "prince" who dispenses advice about subversive scripts for black female sexual agency really a leering "frog" in disguise? Full disclosure here. Shayne Lee and I have a gnarled history. As a secondyear graduate student in Religious Studies, I critiqued his reading of T. D. Jakes as a feminist (more on that later), a critique that he vigorously challenged. And more recently he sent me a text message after he was allowed to preview this review in order to offer an author response in this forum. Needless to say, he didn't like the contents and so cautioned me: "I strongly suggest u read the book carefully to rewrite the review. My response will expose each and every hole.. .. It won't be pretty, I can promise u that. It's obvious no one taught u the format of good book review. I hope u learn it fast bc my response will indicate your gross flaws." Presumably, a "good book review" is one that praises rather than thinks critically about Lee's work. Nevertheless, the zeitgeist of black feminism and my fondness for bell hooks's important text Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black, propels me to choose the latter. Erotic Revolutionaries, coupled with Lee's first book, T. D. Jakes: America's New Preacher, presents an interesting
THE COLOR OF EXPERIENCE. SEXUALITY AND POLITICS IN BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT 1
Soft Power. Revista euro-americana de teoría e historia de la política y del derecho, 2021
The essay investigates some aspects concerning that 'economy of practices' called into question by Hortense Spillers to indicate the symbolic and material process that has determined the concept of Colored Woman and has configured the subordination of the black female body, excluded from gender and, at the same time, slipped into the interstices of that peculiar colonial order of the discourse originating from capitalism. Starting from the historical partiality of 'Blackness' , Black feminist thinkers have shown the interrelated functioning of male and racial domination within modern discourse, laying the foundations to reorganize the practical field of truth produced by scientific reason in order to the principle of human classification.
2011
This dissertation emerges from several critical discourses in History and Critical Theories of Religion, namely post-modern analyses of "religion" by those such as Daniel Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, and J.Z. Smith, and post-structuralist criticisms of language and gender by those such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and several others. However, this dissertation also builds upon the scholarship of those working specifically in the area of History and Critical Theories of African America/Black Religion, for instance, Charles H. Long, Victor Anderson, and William D. Hart, whose analyses on race and "black religion" not only present iconoclastic rigor, but also aim to disorient sedimented and controlling ideas about both race and religion in African American discourse and scholarship. This dissertation takes the analyses of these scholars and deploys them in a new context: "African American popular religion," with the aim of disorienting the prescriptive totalities of religious and cultural media that reproduce, maintain, circulate, and exchange historical myths on black womanhood so that black women and girls may be seen less pornotropically. In 2010, in an interview with Playboy Magazine, pop musician, John Mayer, well known for his collaborations with B. B. King and Jay Z, was asked if black women threw themselves at him. 1 Mayer replied, "I don't think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I've got a Benetton heart and a fuckin' David Duke cock. I'm discourse of "black womanhood" and its circumscription to the yokes and jolts of "America's Grammar Book" 4 on race and gender. Each highlights the continual entanglement of North American black women and girls 5 with dominant meta-narratives on unscrupulousness and perversion. The question mundanely positions both black femaleness and black female sexuality within a context of innate unbridled freakery, and the response (both the verbosity and the silence) constructs both womanhood and sexuality as concomitantly hyper, non-existent, savage, inconsequential, abominable and grotesquely fascinating. Both the question and the response evoke "stocks of knowledge" 6 that rob black women and girls of complex subjectivity, captures them in a script, overdetermines 7 their multiplicity by a hodgepodge of mass-produced mythical narratives, turns them into undistinguishable public enterprises, and subjects them to representational and material terror, discursive and non-discursive. 8
This essay provides a robust introduction to the vexed and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms and black feminisms. Taken together, the essays reviewed address what each tendency says about the nature of black positionality and the significance of the meanings and histories attached to black female flesh and the slave polity—the “arbiters of blackness itself”—via considerations of deep literacy, psychoanalysis, sound theory, black m/othering, drama, ethnography, material conditions of knowledge production, canon formation, intellectual appropriation, coalition politics, state and vigilante murder and sexualized violence, and the risk of repeating Euro-American Enlightenment through mischaracterizing the relationship between colonialism and slavery.
American Anthropologist, 2004
I rma McClaurin and her eight colleagues have written a very important and provocative book. This volume studies the meaning of black feminist anthropology and challenges the assumptions of anthropological theory-making and feminist theory in anthropology. This Black feminist anthropology "constructs its own canon that is both theoretical and based in a politics of praxis and poetics" and "it seeks to deconstruct the institutionalized racism and sexism that has characterized the history of the discipline of anthropology in the United States and Europe" (2). McClaurin sees this book as an intervention, a form of cultural mediation between the world of Black scholars and the entire Western intellectual tradition. She views the intervention as a strategy to halt or resolve conflict. The anthropological intervention, in this case, is to: "interrupt/disrupt the elitist, sexist and racist dynamics that have plagued anthropology historically and that continue to inform its training, research funding, scholarly recognition, professional networks and publications-in a phrase, all anthropological knowledge production and reproduction" (2).