Convened by Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at HDS, this colloquium bridged connections between the critical study of Black religion and studies of race, gender, and sexuality in critical theory and philosophy, among many other fields. The aim of this gathering was to support research and sustained dialogue about the ways in which religion and race are co-constitutive and function as governing categories of analysis at the helm of both religious studies and Black studies, respectively. This panel discussion featured Joy James (Williams College), Keri Day (Princeton Theological Seminary), and Paul Anthony Daniels (Fordham University).
This event took place on October 5, 2023.
Transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Black Religion and Critical Theory Colloquium Panel II, October 5, 2023.
AHMAD GREEN-HAYES We are resuming our Black Religion and Critical Theory Colloquium with our second panel. We have Dr. Keri day, who will be our first speaker. She is professor of constructive theology and African-American religion at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned a BS in Political Science and Economics from Tennessee State University, an MA in Religion and Ethics from the Yale University Divinity School, and her PhD in Religion from Vanderbilt University.
Her teaching and research interests are in womanist/feminist theology, social critical theory, cultural studies, economics, and African-American Pentecostalism. She has authored four books, most recently, Azusa Reimagined-- A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging.
She has been recognized by NBC News as one of six Black women at the center of gravity in theological education in America. And that is the shortened version of her bio, which is beautifully extensive, and we are so grateful to have her here for this gathering. Her paper is entitled "Joy, Care, and Wonder in Black Thought, A Conversation Between Black Feminism and Black Religion."
Our second panelist is Dr. Joy James, who is the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College. Her most recent book is In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, Precarity, Power, Communities. Her recent articles include, "A Letter of Concern to Black Clergy Regarding Cop City" with the Reverend Matthew V. Johnson, Jr., and Logos, and a four-part series on "Abolition Alchemy in Inquest."
She is the author of Resisting State Violence, Shadowboxing, Representations of Black Feminist Politics, Transcending the Talented Tenth, and Seeking the Beloved Community, A Feminist Race Reader. She is also the creator of the digital Harriet Tubman Literary Circle at UT Austin, and the editor of the New Abolitionists, Neo Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings.
And she is currently working on a book entitled New Bones Abolition, Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Eric Garner. And the second text is contextualizing Angela Davis. Her talk today will be from one of those forthcoming projects, and it is titled New Bones Abolition, Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Eric Garner.
Our third panelist is Paul Anthony Daniels, who is a PhD candidate in theology at Fordham University, the Rector of Saint Mary's Episcopal Church in LA, and a 2021 recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship. His dissertation "Impossible Glory, The Mystical Life of Black Study," tracks the structural affinities between Black Studies from the late 20th and early 21st centuries and mystical science from the late medieval to early modern periods.
He has forthcoming journal articles and book chapters, "Exploring Sacred Eroticism," "Negativity, and Political Disassociation," "The Cosmological Turn in Black Studies," and "The Queerness of Howard Washington Thurman." Reverend Daniels is a 2012 graduate of Morehouse College, and a 2019 graduate of Yale Divinity School. His talk today is entitled Black Religions Impossible Work. If we could please welcome these three scholars with around of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
Good afternoon. It's a joy to be a part of this conversation. Thank you again for the invitation Professor Ahmad. And it's just been wonderful to hear our colleagues from the previous panel. And I actually asked to go first, which is rarely asked by panelists because I thought there was a lot of continuity between my paper and the two panelists as well, some of the questions that were posed in the conversation.
So my talk attempts to capture what Black feminist scholars who work in Black Studies might contribute to the study of Black religion and how Black religious theorizing might be useful for Black studies in discussing futures of possibility. And particularly, when I'm thinking of possibility right now within a current project, I'm wanting to think about the themes of practices of wonder and care.
Drawing on Black feminists such as Zakiya Iman Jackson, Christina Sharpe, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and in the back of my project is Sylvia Winter, which has already been talked about. I maintain that part of any possibilities of care in the midst and despite Black death is rethinking Black existence away, particularly within my field, rethinking Black existence away from religious ontologies, or what might be described as the ontotheological.
And what I mean by the ontotheological here is a ontology of God that gave rise in the modern period to a theology of being. And we've already had some discussion about the question of being. And the question of being index to the ontological framework of anti-Blackness.
And so in many ways what I'm trying to do in this project-- and it's called a decolonial theology of spirit-- is to theorize any possibilities of care in the midst and despite Black death is rethinking Black existence away from religious ontologies then or the ontotheological and toward apocalyptically-oriented apophatic cosmologies.
So I'm going to spend some time unfurling, qualifying this very long phrase that I have here-- what I'm trying to work toward because the apocalyptic was also mentioned in the conversation. So again, wanting to move toward an apocalyptically-oriented, apophatic cosmology.
So through Black religious theorizing I desire to develop and experiment with apocalyptically-oriented apophatic cosmologies, what I'm referring to as spirit that can inform and shape practices of wonder, care, and joy. I briefly mentioned my work on the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 out of Los Angeles, the Azusa Movement, as an example of apocalyptically-oriented apophatic worlds of care and joy in, under, and despite an anti-Black Order.
And I think it's important again for me to qualify the in, under, and despite in anti-Black Order because I think within much of my field there is an appeal to the language of transcendence. And with transcendence-- I think this is something that was mentioned Joseph with you-- is these triumphalist narratives of overcoming as such. There's a real queasiness and anxiety of talking about death and there's an immediate move to life.
And part of my discussion really-- I'm going to say this because I think that thinking is a collaborative enterprise-- has been in conversation with my doctoral student Rebecca Wilcox, who's in the room. So in my current work I foreground why attention to the materiality of the world-- and when I say materiality, I'm just not referencing physical matter as such but imaginations of matter. We were all just talking about that.
And here I don't mean-- I think within religious discourse, imagination is an inherently moral category. It's often used in that way. And I want to steer away from that. I also want to attend to the ambivalences of the imagination because we also talked about world and worldly. There's a sense in which the anti-Black Order is a an imagination of matter, which J. Cameron Carter takes up in his new book, The Anarchy of Black religion.
So I foreground my attention to the materiality of the world which involves both ruin and regeneration cycles of death and aliveness helps one reimagine the possibilities of existence. What I also mean by materiality is that I reject traditional ontological hierarchies, especially those that seek clear, categorical distinctions between spirit and matter, body and soul. Soul many people talk about within theological discourse is a vitality. The sacred and profane, which we've been talking about, sentience and nonsentience.
I think it's important to quote Black religious scholar J. Cameron Carter here. Since he couldn't come, I'll quote him. Quote, "matter is a gathering space in the sense of an otherwise cosmology of a vitalistic being. Not ontology or static state but on the gerund being-- being as verb-- as the eventfulness of existence as such. The vitalism of matter. Matter spawns worlds that constantly begin again-- constantly and fleshes itself as entangled, unpredictable, multiplicities," end quote.
I infer from Carter that because matter is dynamic, kinetic, unpredictable, and marked by entangled otherness, it is a source of vitalism and aliveness. I want to be clear, not to be confused with the moral and ethical category of life. Within religious and theological discourse, the moral category of life is often deployed in a way that tries to secure a unity of meaning in terms of experience.
And again, some of those transcendent, triumphalist narratives are repeated and replayed. And so that's not what I'm talking about but matter again as a source of vitalism and aliveness which can ground, I think, how we think of existence in all of its dynamic, unpredictable, and relational dimensions.
This dynamic view of materiality also emphasizes the liminality of existence and existing between death and aliveness, which refuses to reduce existence and its multiple meanings simply to death. My theorization of Black religion, and theologies included in that, substantively focuses on why materiality is essential to understanding social formations such as Blackness as existing between both death and aliveness and abjection but something more and in excess to such abjection.
Black feminist studies scholars like Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs offer, I think, Black religious theological discourses-- and I work a lot at the site of Black feminist and womanist theological and religious discourses. But I think that these particular feminist in Black studies, Black feminists offer the work that I'm doing, the area that I'm working in, a way to think and talk about Black female sexuality, and as an analytic that is, within, against, and beyond identitarian politics.
Offering instead a conversation on how Black female sexuality is deployed in securing the material conditions of an anti-Black world. And what this means in not only understanding Blackness as abjection but also discerning possibilities for disruption, defiance, and I would argue care and joy not singularly determined by such abjection.
So I'm drawn to Zakiyyah Jackson's observation on the turn in Black feminist discourses towards mathematics and physics metaphors in theorizing Blackness its perils and promises. So for instance-- and this is to the conversation that we were having about the sublime it's sort of anticipated what I would be talking about-- for instance Jackson's discussion of the sublime in Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant is important in examining how Black female sexuality conceptualized as demonic ground or abject ground offered the conditions for the possibility and guarantee of the sublime in the modern anti-Black world.
In Kant and Burke's aesthetic accounts of the sublime, the Black woman is not simply a figure of personhood that is identity or individuality, but a historical a priori. The Black woman is not then a material referent of personhood, but to quote Jackson-- but quote, "a signifier of ultimate chaos and disorder," end quote.
A chaos that had to be contained and civilized through Western aesthetic sublime accounts of truth, beauty, and order. This Black woman compels sublime visions through her inherent terribleness or as a terror-inducing threat. The Black woman is associated with darkness, irrationality, and opacity, which both secures and legitimates the terms of order that includes, of course, accounts of the sublime, but simultaneously threatens the power and integrity of the racially gendered terms of order.
So I'm going to return in a second within Jackson's work to the paradoxical capacity, so to speak, that she's trying to pull out in her work concerning Blackness and particularly the Black maternal. So for Jackson then, the Black-- and I'm pronouncing it this way for a reason-- the Black [SPEAKING LATIN] because again, for Jackson, the Black [SPEAKING LATIN] is this theorization between [SPEAKING LATIN]. And the Latin word [SPEAKING LATIN], the mother.
But in some ways she's not really talking about for the Black maternal. Again, simply the referent of material referent to the Black woman as identity and personhood, but this entire process of blackening that comes with the modern period. The process of blackened matter of which through the processes of ungendering Black female flesh as Black and matter comes to express the limit of the human.
But I probably shouldn't note that even though Jackson is talking about Black female flesh as a limit of the human, there's also this simultaneity that's within her work through her idea of ontologies plasticity. I mean, the argument is that it's not about inclusion or exclusion that's at stake in anti-Blackness, but it's rather about selective incorporation.
It's about this way-- so it's not just about abjection, it's about a endless malleability to Black flesh and the way in which it's remade over and over again as unhuman, subhuman, and so forth as a way to serve the anti-Black Order. But that in this way so Blackness and it's gendered in sexual dimensions and consequences. I think is really important to the conversation of the Black maternal.
And I think this also gets to a conversation we're having about the underneath that for Jackson is this larger conversation about the Black maternal and Blackness as indexing a epistemic nonrepresentability because of this paradoxical latent power that I'll say a bit more of. So it's simply not-- Blackness is not simply about abjection, but in Jackson's words, an abject generativity.
What I find compelling about Jackson's discussion here is how the Black maternal as ultimate chaos is not simply a quote unquote, "a subjectivity or identity standpoint but a sublime function, or the sublime anti-Black sexuating conditions of discursivity itself," end quote. The Black Maternal is a demonic ground or situational ontological ground that an anti-Black model of being is given material existence.
While much of Black feminism, and I will say even for myself, I can hold myself complicit in some of my previous work in Black womanism as well, while much of Black feminism and Black womanism I would argue for this matter has been preoccupied with representation because of how it does perform in the discursive material terrains of anti-Blackness and empire-- and I think there are actual arguments for that. We can talk about that. There are actual good arguments for that.
I also agree with Jackson that the Black maternal is not merely a standpoint like cis, trans, so forth, but it is the foreclosure of standpoint. It is that which is denied standpoint because it functions as the ground of immeasurable terror. Going back to these accounts of the sublime, these aesthetic accounts that help to fashion and concretize Western ontological projects in the West.
It is the ground of immeasurable terror that which needs to be civilized, tamed, and overcome. But this ground of immeasurable terror is simultaneously the conditions that can threaten and disrupt the anti-Black terms of order. This is Jackson's argument. So then for me, this entire discussion opens another moment in the theorizations of anti-Blackness.
The Black woman or Black maternal as abjection is more like-- again to use Jackson's word-- an abject generativity in the sense that it evokes a paradoxical latent power of capacity to potentially activate a threat to visions of totality that might be described as-- so I'm also thinking here of Charles Longsworth, the category of opacity it can threaten visions. It can be a threat rather to visions of totality. Totality being about orders of coherency or transparency and so forth.
So returning to Black feminists who employ physics metaphors in thinking Blackness or the Black maternal as abject generativity within an anti-Black world, one of my questions, I wonder how this approach helps us develop reading strategies and critical practices that allow us to theorize Blackness as well as, of course, the Black maternal as that which might resist and exceed anti-Black representation in, under, and despite Black death?
So I want to be clear with this question. It's not just about how we think about the terms of anti-Blackness and what's possible. So in terms of anti-Blackness, is it only abjection ultimately-- Blackness-only objection? Can we exceed and therefore resist the representations associated with it?
But I also think it's fundamentally a question of language as well that attends to this. And that is, if we take seriously our analytic frameworks as representations and interpretations of the world that mediate reality always imperfectly, then how do we think then about our representational and interpretive systems? The possibilities of those systems but also the limitations of those systems.
So I want to be clear, this is not just about the content of anti-Blackness. I'm asking an epistemological question about the form of knowledge. For instance, how does Black feminist Katherine McKittrick usage of mathematics and physics metaphors help us understand Blackness as something but not necessarily reducible to the Western metaphysical and political ontological terms of anti-Blackness? Blackness as something marked by opacity paradox, indeterminacy, and incalculability.
I'd also like to continue having the discussion between the relationship of anti-Blackness and Blackness as well. That's where that question comes from. So I think Jackson and Mckittrick resonate with Christina Sharpe. As Sharpe wants to insist that, quote, "even as we experience, recognize, and live subjection, we did not simply or only live in subjection and as the subjected," end quote.
In the midst of death, Sharpe wants to, quote, "attend to the physical, social, or figurative death, and also tend to the largeness that is Black social living." Or in the words of Kevin-- and that's, end quote-- or in the words of Kevin Quashie, "Black aliveness," or I'm thinking about Katherine Mckittrick's language of Black livingness.
And I take it that all of these concepts are-- this argument of Black aliveness insisted from death. So even again, the relationship between death and aliveness, are these mutually exclusive? Should we understand these as polarities? I mean, again, within Western metaphysical constructions, this is precisely how these categories have been used. And how do we reimagine and rethink these categories, especially based on the challenges and conversations that these Black feminists are having.
I see Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives as an enriching testament to this precise insistence. Blackness as abjection yet aliveness that is marked by rich social living that is structured by and yet may elide and exceed anti-Black orders and its forms of social death. I am currently thinking with these Black feminists as I think their theorizing of anti-Blackness and Blackness as not necessarily coterminous opens to questions of possibility and care.
I am after an articulation of a Black feminist study of religion. And this is not my language here. This is the call that Dr. Tamura, a Black feminist and Black cultural theorist, Dr. Tamura Lomax issues in her book Jezebel. So I'm after crafting again a Black feminist study of religion, which for me would include a conversation of theology that thinks of Black existence as a wrestling with and between abjection and care.
An abject generativity-- to go back to Jackson's words-- that acknowledges social death as well as-- so it does acknowledge social death-- but as well as possibilities of care and other worlds of which Black religion might serve as a source in such a critical reading practice and strategy. Again for me part of any possibilities of care in the midst and despite Black death is rethinking Black existence away from religious ontologies and toward apocalyptically-oriented apophatic cosmologies.
And when I say apophatic cosmologies, I am speaking about an interpretation of cosmos as not pointing to a singular world in terms of a singular meaning, such as abjection in an anti-Black world but interpretations of multiple cosmos marked by a [SPEAKING HEBREW] depth.
So I want to be clear when I again cosmological, cosmos, one could say-- although I think there are critical distinctions between the language of world and cosmos. There's some continuity but discontinuity. But when I speak of cosmos right here, I really am talking about if you want to talk about world, worldling. And hopefully, again, we can have further conversation about that.
But that this worldling or multiple cosmos is marked by a [SPEAKING HEBREW] depth. And this is borrowed, cited from Catherine Keller's work. [SPEAKING HEBREW] in Hebrew is a word for chaos, darkness, and incalculability in our material world that-- and I quote her here-- that quote, "manifests as a bottomless covered by the surface level skirt of the ocean beneath which our currents of rhythms vibrating with animating entangled fleshly incarnating spirit depth," end quote.
Here matter-- That is when I say matter again, I'm already talking about aliveness and existence, rejecting ontological hierarchies that would divorce matter from spirit-- it is about mystery, opacity, ineffability of spirit and spirit, but it does have at the center of it a kind of grotesque sensibility. And I can say more about that in the conversation.
So this is not a romanticized understanding of cosmos as such and even of worldling. It has a protest sensibility at the center of it. Matter is never about stasis. It is always unfolding in flux, constantly undergoing change. Marked between death and aliveness, presence and absence, imbued with spirit.
As such Blackness in all of its material and ideational dimensions is also an issue of physics, of the materiality of the world, and the meanings we shape from matter again, the imaginations of matter. The statement offers a broader cosmological vision, not ontological of the world of existence and of possibilities in the midst and despite anti-Blackness.
Through Black religious theorizing I desire to develop and experiment with apophatic cosmologies marked by spirit. And again that [SPEAKING HEBREW] depth, which might enable a reimagining and inhabiting of relations of care and joy. Right now I am writing about an idea of Black apocalypticism that grounds notions of care and joy not beholden to the state in the way that Dr. Joy James rightly names as problematic in her essay on "Womb Theory and The Captive Maternal."
I focus on the apocalyptic at the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 and their religious rituals and material practices. And I try to read with, against, and beyond Azusa. So I'm reading with Azusa in terms of centering their material practices, but I'm also reading Azusa against Azusa-- OK, I want to be clear about that-- in discussing how these rituals often reinforce the abject terms of an anti-Black order yet simultaneously challenge or at least attempt to challenge the ontotheological ideas that funded the anti-Black capitalist order at the start of the 20th century.
The apocalypticism of Azusa attempts to register the end of the ontotheological, anti-Black capitalist world, but simultaneously is about unveiling something more, an apophatic dimension of Black existence that speaks to possibility. The capacity for a world of care, joy, and wonder within and yet beyond the present order.
For Azusa, then Blackness is not just about the problem of abjection, although it is the problem of abjection but not solely, but it's also already in excess to the anti-Black regulating order of meanings. Through their religious rituals, say, of tearing and their material practices, Azusa enacted otherwise worlds of wonder, joy, and mystery, a way of being alive, and insisting care in community despite an anti-Black order.
When turning to Azusa, there is a mystery and opacity to Blackness that might allow us to think in the gap between abjection and excess. A space that can signal "the more" to use Charles Long's words. "The more" being about aliveness and worldly.
Finally, by employing Azusa's practice of the apocalyptic in and through their rituals, I desire to raise how apophaticism has consequences for how we talk about Black subjectivity, agency, and desire. Moten, Gumbs, and Carter have written about Blackness as a kind of mystical ground that can function as a pathogen that has potential to end the anti-Black world because Blackness itself refuses or resists ontology.
Speaking of Blackness as mystical ground, Moten attempts-- and I want to quote Warren here because I think that Warren concisely in one sentence gets at in the phenomenology of spirit that he writes interpreting Moten-- that speaking of Blackness as mystical ground, Moten attempts to quote-- and quoting Warren-- quote, "to capture a certain majesty, terror, and wonder of Blackness. Not that Blackness does not present as abjection and terror in an anti-Black world, but that Blackness simultaneously exceeds naked abjection," end quote.
Again, as Jackson and McKittrick reminds us, Blackness as a kind of abject generativity. As a Black feminist and womanist religious scholar, I want to make room for the social and all of its plenitude of meanings. One question that I do have is, how do we distinctly think about some of the categories I feel that have been floating with respect to talking about anti-Blackness and Blackness a category of the social, the category of the political, the category of the economic?
So I'm curious. It seems to me oftentimes in discussions that the political is collapsed into the social. And I'm and I'm just wondering, how do we get at some critical distinctions among these categories while showing at the same time the way that these categories are mutually constituted at the same time?
So I want to make room for the social and all of its plenitude of meanings. And I understand the social to be a complex ground that might refuse complete enclosure by forces of anti-Blackness, that is its anti-Blackness is political ontology and libidinal economy allowing for complex, even ambiguous signs of Black agency and desire not completely colonized by anti-Blackness.
And so as you can see, another question that I'm raising is, how do we talk about agency? I've been deeply influenced by the hermeneutical phenomenology of law. And thinking about from a phenomenological approach how to think about agency that is responding to within Western philosophy a content approach where you have idealized abstract subjects, idealized account of subjectivity already imbued with capacities that have predescribed ways of thinking about moral judgment, moral deliberation, and moral action?
So again, I think thinking about what do we mean when we talk about agency? How does method matter? Why does method matter between religious studies and Black studies on this count? For me, a Black religious apophatic as seen through Asuza's rituals is a reading strategy or interpretive framework for discussing mystical, unpredictable, even excessive realities that move within and yet escape and elide our systems of representations in an anti-Black world and it's gender sexuating conditions and consequences.
And this apophaticism for me is a spirit grammar. And I think that for me, it is fundamentally it's religious in shape that seeks to describe Black existence within, against, and despite anti-Blackness and its Western metaphysical significations opening up opportunities for alternate perhaps apophatic cosmologies through which to track what I take to be the largeness and richness of Black social living that transgresses, refuses, and may even subvert our anti-Black climate. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
JOY JAMES: All right. Thank you so much. I love fire particularly at my age because it's very warming. Thank you to Ahmad Green-Hayes, Soo Min Kim, and for everyone who made this opportunity to be in dialogue together possible. And of course, just the richness of the thought from the contributors earlier today, folks here.
And I'm going to do a combination of a talk read. I'm not going to get up so-- oh, can you hear me? OK, bring it closer? OK, thanks. So sorry about that. So the thank yous again that might have been missed. That was really rich. I want to make connections to what's been said and also point a bit to what's following.
So first I want to think about Black feminisms and the captive maternal in terms of agency. So there's a lot that you said to just set the table. And I want to see what I can bring to it. There are some parts though that I want to put in place. Not that it's going to be clearly aligned, but there are concepts that I think are indispensable for where I'm going.
And where I'm going is actually to agency. But I'm also trying to point out our fear for agency if it veers towards the revolutionary. So if as Jason Stanley at Yale has said, as Robin Kelly has said as a historian, Stanley as a philosopher, as Bernie Sanders has said as a senator, in talking about different parts of the world, global politics, and national politics that we are moving towards a protofascist phase.
That I'm very curious about how religion stands up to that and can articulate the reality. And so I appreciate so much about the material world. My personal opinion is that our language is failing. And that it not so much that does not have capacity, it does not have desire.
And so in the absence of a desire to articulate the material realities and our inability to have a God-like wand to fix things and to push white nationalists, mass shooters, there's a whole list. You've already got the list back-- then I think then what we have to decide is what will be our emotional, intellectual religious, theological, spiritual, relationship to revolutionaries. And I actually believe that we fear them, so we're basically screwed.
All right. So Black feminisms and Captive Maternal agency, so a bit of the puzzle pieces I wanted to line out and put out. One is about epistemology from the Canadian Jesuit priest, Bernard Lonergan, his 1957 study, which I had to learn in grad school decades ago inside the study of human understanding, where he discusses epistemology as a three-part process. There's experience, judgment, and reflection. But I find that insufficient.
So then I need another aspect beyond Jesuits in terms of the contribution to intellectual capacity, and then that's when I go to the ancestors. And the ancestors came up earlier today. I actually see them as part of religion, whether you're in Yoruba Santeria, because mostly, we're just talking Christian here, I'm assuming. No? I know you shook your head no, and maybe I projected that from having been in Catholic school for way too long and in seminary. But when I hear us speak collectively, I don't hear the African religions appear clearly. So that's what I'm saying. I'm maybe mishearing, but I feel like there's a gap here, a void.
So when I go to Ida B. Wells, what I find so striking about Wells, 1892, anti-lynching crusader, a mother herself, a godmother who's the father of two-year-old is Lynch Maurine Moss, the father was Thomas Moss. That becomes a catalyst that pushes her towards spirit in which she realizes through physical struggle that what she had inherited or internalized in terms of anti-Blackness that Black males are serial rapists, that they only desire White women as parade, cetera, et cetera, that it's with the loss of family. And you can fast forward. This is what we've been doing for the last number of years.
Samaria Rice loses the 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Sybrina Fulton loses Trayvon. It's the public spectacle of lynching and murder of Black kin that alters the mother. And when I argue about-- or it doesn't have to be an argument. When I talk about the Captive Maternal, I'm seeing this as a non-gendered formation. But for Ida B. Wells, the catalyst is the trauma, the grief, the despair, and then what follows is rage. And I often don't hear us talk about rage.
So I know revolutionaries who did years, Panthers, Black Liberation Army in prison or who managed to stay out. I hear from the activists on the ground who are radicals or who had fought in revolutionary struggles, I hear the articulation of rage more clearly than I hear it from academics. And I don't know if we're allowed to rage, but I mean, it's a real emotional skill. And so I would think that we would be able to comprehend and to speak about it.
So what does Wells bring to Bernard Lonergan? The fourth component, which is action. An action is a form of militancy. So remember Lonergan starts with experience, reflection, and judgment. When action appears as the fourth, you have new experience. So I want to argue to present the possibility that in the absence of action in a militant zone or a zone of resistance, your experiences are reductive and repetitive because it's only when Ida B. Wells will say, wait, you just lynched some people who were just opening a grocery store that the White competitor wanted to close.
And so that becomes a transformation of person who goes to Britain who's able to organize with White British women to have a boycott to cripple the economy of Memphis, Tennessee. And of course, they put a bounty on her head, so she's going to end up in Chicago. But there's a way in which despite-- or maybe because of the suffering, that spirit appears. And so epistemology shifts, and the way in which it shifts is not without a cost.
So let me go to this third part, and then I'll do a little reading, and I'll stop. So I talked about epistemology as we learn about it in the Academy. Then I talked about the development of epistemology to reflect the material world as we learn about it through our ancestors. You can add Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Nat Turner, David Walker. I mean, we have a long list. We also have a long list in the 20th century of assassinated leadership, and that is global. Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral.
And this is tied to where we live in this moment, where Wells was living her version in another century, we're actually in an imperial zone. So what does it look like to have something an entity recognized as having imperial status around the globe and to also recognize that it has been a zone of terror, not obviously against people of African descent, but also Indigenous people. So the very zone is built on genocide. But if we lack a language-- and also the language is being banned because the books are being banned and DeSantis is very active, and we'll probably live forever in the terms of closing down important discussions.
So from the ancestors zone, I go to the contemporary zone, and then I'll start talking a bit about the book, New Bones Abolition, Captive Maternal Agency in the Afterlife of Erica Garner, which will be out next week. The third zone I'm puzzled by, this is the zone of revolutionary politics. And I wonder if religion actually avoids revolutionary politics because it becomes a safety route but also the repetition and the promise of salvation. Because I think if you actually get close to revolutionary politics, the whole notion of salvation gets very muddied.
I appreciate Cecilia's work in those images of what the demonic is, but I'm not saying but is against, but I would add probably you already said it. For me, the demonic or the demon on steroids would be the Black revolutionary because there's nothing more lethal to the imagination, to the psyche, to the emotional drive of an empire built on captivity and White nationalism than a Black insurgent. So the Black insurgent is the over devil or the ultimate devil. And I wonder how much we've internalized this culture that we also see the Black revolutionary as demonic.
So when I think about the way we've been talking about religion, or that I've been trained to talk about it, going to chapel on military bases where I grew up, being taught by Jesuits, going to seminary to learn from luminary Black liberation theologians, there's an aspect of the revolutionary that never appeared in any of those zones. And so when I think of Malcolm X, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, where others, I see where the religion of Islam comes in. It seems to be rarely spoken about or addressed.
So if you notice my theme is-- there are these absences or voids and then we're supposed to be talking about reality, but there are these gaps in it. So half the time, I don't know what we're talking about because there are these large gaps. So an example-- a couple of months ago, I was at a conference at Yale. It was called Imagination and Incarceration. And people on the panel were saying there's too much the praying that the Christianity can be like a drug. The promissory note, you'll be rehabilitated. Don't fight too hard in prison. Just do your time and get out.
And then I was thinking about prayer, though, coming from Muslims who were revolutionaries and political prisoners. And I realized that there was no language. And I started saying from the panel, wait, who is a Shadeek Shakoor? That's a Muslim name. Who's Dhoruba bin Wahad? That's a Muslim name. Safiya Bukhari, Muslim name. Stokely Carmichael became Kwame Ture. H. Rap Brown became Jalal Al-Amin.
And when you talk to folks, and there's their critiques. I know some Afro pessimists who will criticize people for embracing Islam, and they will say that they lost their revolutionary edge when they went toward the religion. I can't make that call on anybody. But when I think about it, I feel like the spirit that you called out that the spirit is understood by revolutionaries. And for whatever reason, a sizable number of people who were in the Black Panther Party, who were hunted by COINTELPRO, who understood when Fred Hempton and Mark Clark were assassinated December 4, 1969 after they'd been drugged by a joint venture between the Chicago Police Department and the FBI, and nobody did a day in prison for those murders.
That if they moved towards religion and spirituality, it was a stabilizer, and their understanding of being stabilized was to secure themselves so that they could go further into revolutionary struggle. They weren't retreating by going into religion. They were going further. They actually went into the underground. And again, I don't have any language to explain that.
And when I talk to people who they would be considered Panther vets, they're not going to share the language with me for me to comprehend it. But then I wonder how we understand phenomena when nobody's talking to us and we're not talking about it.
All right. So moving on quickly. And again, this is my patchwork quilt. My grandmother's did patchwork quilt, so I can do it here, too. Ida B. Wells, I said, brings a fourth component. She's not the first, but she does set a standard that is followed. I would never consider Ida B. Wells a revolutionary. And so again the revolution-- even though she believed in armed self-defense, had a pistol in her handbag, when they thought she was a man, they were saying, we're going to castrate you and just stake you out in the road, because they couldn't conceive that a Black woman would have that level of militancy.
But there is also the Black bourgeoisie that shunned her W.E.B. Du Bois basically in the founding of the NAACP, which Mary White Ovington, a white? Philanthropist like-- that all of our movements are paid for by wealthy philanthropists now, right? They shunned and pushed Ida B. Wells out of the NAACP because they found her too militant, because she was so close to the ground.
So you get what you paid for or you get what people purchase. And so that, actually, is a cycle that goes through generations. Now how we would break that? Obviously, I'm not a revolutionary. I'm not claiming to know how they do stuff or that I would do stuff. But I think if we could articulate, it would be helpful.
All right. So quickly a little bit. I think I've got about 10 minutes or less. I want to go to the first chapter of the book. It's titled Black Feminists Can Be Captive Maternals, But It's Complicated. Feminism has no gender. To be a feminist is to advocate for equal rights and equity and resources for women and men and non-binary. This would or should include trans women and non-binary people. If Black people lack equal rights and equity with bourgeois Whites, nobody's trying to be like poor White people.
So even though we're talking about class and race, look where we are. I think in certain settings, we may not clearly scrutinize our standing and our proximity to wealth and power. So if Black people lack equal rights and equity with bourgeois Whites and are not considered to actually be human and suffer disproportionate violence, severed natality, exploitation, and incarceration, administered through the state and vigilante police forces, then this discussion is about more than gender. It is about empire and colonialism, the ungendered abd queered Black.
The Captive Maternal as extension companion or alternative to Black feminisms is not inherently antagonistic to radical centrist liberal Black feminisms. Yet unlike the majority of Black feminisms, the Captive Maternal is positioned as an antagonist to the imperial state. Any forms of state feminisms that promoted Black feminisms from Hillary Clinton to Gloria Steinem would also have to be critiqued in order to gain greater clarity. And I want to just be very clear about this moment or at least my relationship to Black feminisms.
Because years ago, it did anthologies. I did the Angela Davis reader so on and so forth. I believe that the majority of Black feminism today is an expression of state feminism. And if you have state feminism, you're going to get empire because that's what they pay for. And so even if you tracked it back in decades, if Gloria Steinem, knowing that she had worked for the CIA several years earlier, if the people defending the Angela Davis Defense Committee hire Gloria Steinem to head the fundraising committee for Angela Davis, they knew who they were hiring because the point is to align with the state in order to be protected from state violence.
If revolutionaries refuse that alignment, then you will have to abandon them. You can't be in two houses at the same time.
And so the Captive Maternal, it took me years to get to it. And this is when I was talking about how does despair work because when you work with vulnerable populations and you can't save them, that does open the door to depression on a regular basis. But then maybe we demand too much of ourselves, or maybe we can't adjust to the fear. I don't know how Ida B. Wells did what she did in the 1800s, and it was the 1800s.
So this is a 21st century, So I feel like she'd cope better. Because I'm doing less, and it is the 21st century, and I have a job basically with a large corporation like other people. But there is a desire maybe. OK, I'm freelancing right now. I'm not reading.
There is a desire I wonder if there is a desire-- make it a question-- that we want to be safe more than we want to be free. And if that's the case, we agree to abandon the revolutionaries. And if that's the case, you have nothing to stop the protofascist, except to go into a fortress. So mine is Williams, yours will be Harvard. I mean, figure out which way you want to go. But it's only in a fortress where they have private security that other police can't just roll up on you.
And so I have absolutely no answers, but I'll tell you what I tried to do in the book. I'll go to that now. See, you just told me to-- oh, it's up there. OK. I want to focus on the action. All the images in the book focus on the action.
So this is what the Black Student Union at Williams College that produced some really brilliant people. Some of them are in this room. A couple of years ago, I think after you graduated. I would just be truthful. They had a speaker for Black History Month and they bailed, so I was like their replacement.
So I had found out that Erica Garner had transitioned four months after she gave birth to a little boy that was named Eric Garner. So remember 2014? First, it was Eric Garner being choked out by NYPD Daniel Pantaleo, not by himself but others in Staten Island. Then there was Michael Brown. I know people who went to Ferguson, who was shot and left in the street for four hours. And then there was Tamir Rice who was playing with maybe a toy, plastic gun, or playing with nothing else, or nothing at all, but sitting in pavilion and cop cars speeds up and he's shot in seconds.
And when his teenage daughter comes out of-- his sister rather, comes out of a recreation room to try to give him aid, the police tackle her, shackled her, and put her in the back of the police car, and the 12-year-old bleeds out. So Erica garner becomes a figure-- I wouldn't say I'm haunted by. I consider her an ancestor. Ancestors always sometimes reminding you or speaking to you, but she becomes this figure that it has no capacity to compromise.
So she's not going to be like the Panthers, she's not going to go in a revolutionary underground, she's not going to offer armed protection, she's not going to do food, breakfast programs that'll be like trash by police or something like that. From the space of kinship as a maternal, as a mother herself, she's going to address the dishonor and the death of her father. In the process of doing so, this movement is developed in New York City.
And it spreads beyond. She'll go to Baltimore when Freddie Gray is killed by police because they sever his spine. And a police squad car, what they called a van a rough ride. And President Obama will make a statement. And first, he'll talk about the thugs because people are protesting. And then he has to walk it back because the grief and the terror are real. And how people respond to grief and terror in a state that is marked whole populations for disposability. If you're going to align with the state and that's what you get with your first Black imperial president, you will have the rhetoric of compassion, but you will not have any change in the material conditions of terror.
So I was fascinated by her, and I did not realize that she had died. And then I was mortified because I'd gone to a few protests, but I'm commuting back and forth to college. You're raising kids, you're trying to find schools for them. And so there's a way that you're distracted, or I'm distracted from politics itself.
So when the students asked me to talk about something or anything that looks Black and Black History Month, I say it's going to be Erica Garner. And what I did from her death in December 2017, if I was asked to speak anywhere, I only spoke about Erica Garner. But it was the students who made this possibility and made the poster where they imposed her over the ancestors.
And that's what I see. Despite the chaos, despite the terror we have a flow that has never stopped. There's been barriers or blocks or dams, but we've always gone. The water's gone over, it's gone under, but we have continued to re-event, reimagine, reconstitute our resistance.
The next slide is from Atlanta, and actually the data is wrong. It's 2005. That little girl is now graduated from college, but she was trained to be a captive maternal. So remember captive maternal has no gender, and it has no age, and she's feeding based on the training from her community and her family. She's feeding community, but they also understand the sharing of care because you talked a lot about care as also being a political act and tied to FTP. So FTP stands for Feed the People, Feed the People, and then you already the police.
All right. This is from Trey. Hi. This is an invitation from Trey to go to Texas for anti-death penalty organizing. And these are folks who participated in the panels that we were doing in Houston. And if you can look on the little marker in the garden, this is based on a community house open to everybody in Black Houston working class, impoverished, or low-income. It would have Sundiata Acoli.
So in their garden, there the names, and again, this is a Muslim name of the political prisoners. And Acoli was caged for about 40 years. I think he's still alive. Mutulu Shakur died a couple of weeks ago or a month ago. And every Black political prisoner in the US has been held till most of the majority, not everyone, for decades and only released shortly before their death.
And then this is the last one I will show, which is the resistance, and then I'll wrap up. We do have a history. We do have a lineage. So we have a legacy. And what we can remember or what we refuse to remember or whatever our false memories might be based on fear or wanting to forget and to be safe. You can't disappear who we are or what has been constituted in terms of a formation of people in an anti-Black world. I believe we are a mutation. But if we are a mutation, then we still have agency.
And whether or not you can see all those red dots, and whether or not 500 years is comprehensive, for afropessimist, they say also have to deal with enslavement, so it's going to be a millennia plus. We have been devastated, but we have not completely died, and we will always have revolutionaries. Whether or not we want them, whether or not we like them, whether or not we will acknowledge them, whether or not we will develop a language that articulates their love and loss and their sacrifice in Agape, they will never leave us. And if that's all we get, that's good enough for me.
[APPLAUSE]
PAUL ANTHONY DANIELS: All right. Good afternoon. It's a privilege and a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you to interim Dean Holland and my dear friend and colleague Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes for the invitation. In the program, it says that my talk is entitled Black Religion's Impossible Work. That's not right. That's my fault. I've changed the name to Black Mysticism's Impossible Work.
And I will just jump right in. Language its inadequacy is such that when spoken at a limit, when spoken out of a void, when operationalized to describe what is born in desolation, language in its inadequacy and under these circumstances is bound to bind unlikely companions whose station is not just shared bondage but the description of that experience and perhaps even its unraveling. So this afternoon, I would like to consider the word impossibility, particularly the way that it is fashioned into a concept across both Black Studies and Christian theology.
In both Black Studies and Christian theology, impossibility retains its literal sense with regard to various kinds of limits or unaccountable things or events, things or events that cannot occur. Whether that be certain limits of political capacity, or certain limits to the presence of God. the literal impossibility of becoming a proper political subject with the rights to be respected and protected and the impossibility of becoming properly enmeshed in God's glory as an enfleshed creature.
Impossibility in both of these disciplines refers to a limit case or limit experience, whereby the sentient creature at the core of study, blackened humanity and the religious devotee respectively, stand in for and stand before the incessant threat of death and the dissolution of reality itself, which is to say that blackened humanity and the religious devotee by virtue of a kind of shared bondage to disinheritance from the proper, are given over to a socalled life lived in the void that we call impossibility. A no man's land, a nowhere zone from which deliverance has mostly proven to be something that will not, some might say cannot, I would, occur according to the terms of order that determine the proper and so through which the disinheritance was inaugurated.
However, both Black Studies and Christian theology have variously engaged these impossible limit experiences and we've got a lot of this today, as counterintuitively generative. Further, both Black Studies and Christian theology, in naming that counterintuitive generativity, play with some form of the concept, quote, "impossible possibility." The possibility of impossibility emerges as an existential and cultural excess that, though refused by the myths of Western civilization and its adjudication of normativity and legitimacy, suggests that the void can indeed be a luminous place experience, all of that temporality.
So throughout, I argue that the metatheoretical structure through which Black Studies funnels the play of impossible possibility is Blackness. And the metatheoretical structure through which Christian theology funnels its play of impossible possibility is mysticism. Thus one might read Blackness and mysticism as commensurate metatheoretical structuring principles. However, it is my position that Blackness is a play in proximate impossible possibility, and mysticism is a play in ultimate impossible possibility is the difference between one whose object of study is culture or politics or history or aesthetics and the other whose object of study is culture or politics or history or aesthetics in relation to a self-conscious relation to God.
And though the metatheoretical operations and agendas meet at the point of the breakdown of form as pure duality or the pure duality of form, what I want to argue is that Blackness insofar, as it is not reducible to raciality as such, is no good if the breakdown or the eruption or the event that it occasions has no interest in proleptic anticipation, whereby Blackness exhausts both itself and so the world wherein it has significant function. So basically, what I'm arguing is that Blackness as a structuring principle insofar as it is not reducible to raciality becomes almost like a purified signifier.
And insomuch as it becomes this purified or universalizable signifier, I think that it's still too vulnerable to commodification and appropriation. And so if its operation is to exhaust the world wherein it has any security function, then it also has to exhaust its usability.
And the point at which this is the anticipation of the event occasioned by Blackness is my contention that such eruption necessarily pours or necessarily pours over into questions of cosmology, which in turn will demand new grammars, new languages, new tongues, and now move on.
Next section, Blackness and proximate impossibility. Here, I want to take up two examples of Blackness as structuring principle in Black Studies that explicitly veer into, at the very least, the linguistic domain of mysticism. As mentioned, Fred Moten's Blackness and Nothingness, Mysticism in the Flesh and a beautiful interview that Jared Sexton gave with Daniel Barber entitled On Black Negativity or the Affirmation Of Nothing.
The shared theme of nothingness is important here because as I will press later on my own understanding of God, God self, like my own first-person experience, if you will, resides in the space of nothingness or the void or the abyssal, something like that. I don't experience or talk about God in gendered or anthropomorphic terms that doesn't resonate with me. And I don't think that that is what is being revealed in scripture. Only insofar as it is revealed in the person of Jesus, who in turn, I think, inaugurates a spirit of rejection that is really a rejection of the kind of androcentric sociality that we're all after in terms of-- or all attempting to append.
And so I think that nothingness is essential here. It is my conception of God, and there's precedent for this in 20th century theologians, like Karl Rahner, for example. There's precedent for this in ancient theologians like Saint Gregory of Nyssa. So this is not really new at all.
And so if that's my conception of God and to get ahead of myself, you might be able to see already my reticence about Blackness which I think of as a proximate impossibility, approximate nothingness with relation to ultimacy, how that slippage into a purified signifier might be a problem rather than something that participates in the revelation of an ultimate nothingness.
Blackness and Nothingness, Moten's article, proceeds by way of an overturning of origin and speech as primary modes of meaning-making. It is a clarification of socalled Black optimism with respect to the protocols and procedures of socalled afropessimism, which Moten argues is quote, "the study of the impossibility that Blackness can be loved." Quote, "If afropessimism is the study of this impossibility," he writes, "then the thinking that I have to offer moves not in that possibilities transcendence but rather in its exhaustion." So keep that in mind.
"Moreover, I want to consider me," no him, sorry. "Moreover, I want to consider exhaustion as a mode or form or way of life, which is to say sociality, thereby marking a relation whose implications constitute, in my view, a fundamental," this is a major word here, "fundamental theoretical reason not to believe as it were in social death." And this Blackness is going to become the fundamental structuring principle that exhausts impossibility.
So Moten buys the sense in which Black people, in particular, have been relegated to political death, but it is also his sense that relegation to political death is, at once, a radical induction into what he calls fugitive sociality, which is to say that Black social and performative culture, aesthetics, occasions, and events in the midst of political death that reveal a fundamental capacity of Black people or impossible possibility.
This fundamental capacity exhausts political ontology in and through which Black political death is conditioned by displacing binary logic and enacting quote, "of dispossessing intimacy of rubbing" whose, quote, "mystic rehearsal is against the rules or more precisely is opposed," so beside, "to rule and is therefore a concrete social logic often misunderstood as nothing but foolishness, which is on the other hand, exactly and absolutely what it is," so Blackness as not sutured to the fixity of binary logics, not sutured to even speech and language and its meaning-making process. It is an engagement of an unruliness and unwieldiness. Some are saying in other wildness or waywardness that he's saying is foolish and perfect. That's what it is.
Blackness and exhausting this political ontology by virtue of unruliness with regard to speech, form, tradition reveals, and I use this term intentionally, something like an universalizable essence of an originality. He uses the word, I think playing on Lacan, he uses the word accents. But I think what it's actually doing is a kind of essentializing, a universalizing thing of an originality. Blackness is an original and antecedent to political ontology insofar as a certain kind of unruliness of form precedes cultural scientific positivistic significations and its reliance on the sedimentation of meaning.
So the construction of language of sociality is properly a construction. And because Blackness cannot participate in any real way in that meaning-making process, it is antecedent in the way that reality itself is antecedent to this meaning-making that we call Western civilization. There is an important resonance here between an originality that Moten ascribes to Blackness as a structuring principle and what Jared Sexton calls nonlocality, both of which take on a universalizable tenor.
Sexton argues that, quote, "A Black universality, the universality of Blackness is one that cannot settle or rest or accept what is universal within it. It is a ceaselessly universalizing universality attentive to insistent on and skeptical about every particularity, every local situation through which it is articulated."
I want to rest here at the skepticism that Sexton raises, and while Moten, I think, would happily accept skepticism as internal to Blackness as a structuring principle, it's my contention that if Blackness does indeed exhaust the impossibility instantiated by political ontology, if Blackness reveals political ontologies fundamental myth or mythology, then it would seem that Blackness would become skeptical who knows how of its own articulation. That would need to be the necessary move.
I think that section points towards something like the skepticism, particularly in the way that he locates impossibility. Referencing Frantz Fanone's suggestion to introduce invention into existence, Sexton argues that this introduction of invention into existence, quote, "is no expressive model of political transformation." Vernon's of war is, in my view, an exploration of the ways that the powers that be are not only upon us but also more importantly within us. Not because the external battle is easy, no, it is nearly impossible. It is just that the internal battle is even harder, it is actually impossible and no less necessary for that.
So from Moten to Sexton, the frame of impossibility, the high pitch of impossibility changes scales from the aesthetic to the psychic, which almost isn't fair. I mean, the psychic is definitely in Moten sometimes as a rhetorical place, sometimes as a very deep critical engagement, but it lands in the aesthetic in a way that I think may obscure the viscosity of what Sexton is after with a psychic placement. The impossibility, the impossible thing of the powers that be, being so deeply, a part of and formational of even the psyche of the oppressed.
But the reason I want to press into Sextonian direction is because the interminable internal skepticism that Sexton raises ask that we be dislodged, our minds, our language, from a kind of dreaming innocence or deceptive relationship to purity. And if for Moten, Blackness is an almost universalizable concept that signifies an essential impurity and unruliness of form, Sexton will say something like, that which is unruly or improper with regard to all terms, quote, "is without term."
And when something like Blackness functions as the structuring principle par excellence, it is at best peddling in paradox because what it wants is to, quote from Sexton, "hold on to itself, which is to say preserve its impropriety," what Sexton calls, quote, "all transcendent sense making, all so many attempts to take control."
Just like Moten, Sexton is uninterested in thinking about transcendence as the frame for playing with impossibility. Just like Moten, his language is of a groundlessness, a literal descent rather than a transcendence. For both writers, there is a staunch commitment to the fact of materiality that faces the harmony and the horrors of the breakdown of the breaking points of history of mind, of lives. It's the horrible encounter and facing of the thing without seeking some security from the dissolution.
But Sexton impresses into play what Moten more or less stops short of, and that is the eventuality of mysticism when thinking breakdown dissent and Blackness. And so because the eventuality of mysticism, then also the eventuality of cosmology. It's literally ultimately how the interview ends.
Indeed about this operation, Sexton says, quote, "Unlike the Christian tradition oriented by a transcended body or transcendent body, a mysticism of the flesh of the Earth might be one in which our ruthless and relentless engagement with history from the deep time of geological formation and biological evolution to the long debris of social structures and world systems to the present urgency of crisis and conjuncture pushes us toward the nothing from which we all emerge."
And to which some remain connected through the nonlinear dynamics of the spatiotemporal topology toward an understanding, or at least an appreciation of the pivotal differences between the all and the everything, between the eternal and the forever. But what happens to mysticism of the Christian stripe when its materials, its critical operations needn't be, quote, "oriented by a transcendent body." And further, what happens to the rhetorical mysticism of Black Studies when its operations in and through Blackness find tonal resonance with that which it would otherwise disavow.
So what I'm saying and what I'm about to say is that, it is I think a low-hanging fruit straw man argument to suggest that Christianity, in its totality, is only ever concerned with the duality between transcendence and immanence, whereby one is in the world, and in the body, and in the flesh, and one is somewhere else. That's just not how these things work. And so there is a way in which theologians have been reading for centuries, Christian theologians have been reading for centuries and a transcendence that is not attempting escape from reality in some fundamental way.
Conclusion. Black mysticism and ultimate impossibility. Impossible possibility appears in Christian theology as early as around 1918, 1920 in Karl Barth's commentary, The Epistle to the Romans, which-- and there's a scholar in the room, and we were conferring, and it may be the case that impossible possibility, as it appears here, is the first place it appears in post-war modernity until Heidegger, and then of course, Derrida, and then of course, Black Studies. And so there's a long line of it in critical theory, but it may be the case that it begins here in Christian theology in a particular way.
Interestingly enough, Bart touches on a kind of an originality, what he would simply understand though as origin. But how he describes origin is in the same way that Moten and others would describe an original or an originality. "Our origin," he says, "directs our attention to the time, which is beyond time to the space, which has no locality to impossible possibility to the Gospel of transformation to the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God to affirmation in negation." I mean, these are basically almost direct quotes from the interview with Jared Sexton, almost basically direct quotes. It's incredible.
"To salvation in the world, salvation in the world." We can have conversation about salvation. "To acquittal in condemnation to eternity in time to life and death." So he is perhaps not as creative in developing a mediating language, but he is attempting to create a mediating language, whereby we don't have to think in binaries about what reality is. And Bart was no mystic, at least not self-consciously, so perhaps even he condemns mysticism in a very real way, but the language he develops here is a part of the mystical attitude in Christian thinking.
It has been my insinuation that Blackness is operationally resonant with mysticism or what Michel de Certeau terms "Mystics," specifically what I'm after is the misconstrued sense that Christianity, particularly Christian mysticism, is oriented toward a transcendent body. And de Certeau is instructive. Here's what he says. "The mystical body is the intended goal of a journey that moves, a kind of fugitivity, you might say, all pilgrimage toward a site of disappearance. The production of a body plays an essential role in mystics. What is termed a rejection of the body or the world ascetic struggle prophetic rapture is but the necessary and preliminary elucidation of a historical state of affairs, a historical state of affairs."
It constitutes the point of departure for the task of offering a body to the spirit of incarnating, discourse, giving truth to a space in which to make itself manifest. This was the work of mystical science at the very beginning of the modern period. Insofar as rejection of the body or the world gets elided with transcendence, we see here that de Certeau isn't talking about some ghostly out of body immaterial experience rather rejection of the body and the world is a rejection of a particular historical narrative.
As Bart also pressed, quote, "We stand before an irresistible and all embracing dissolution of the world of time and things and men before a penetrating and absolute crisis, before the supremacy of negation, by which all existence is rolled up. And the narrative that mystical science went about rejecting was the very crisis, the very dissolution that we now call modernity in his individualizing, commodifying thrust." In other words, mystical science and Black studies stand at opposite ends of the modern project using similar tools of grammatical and conceptual a formality to break with the protocols of imperial domination.
Mystical science differs from Blackness, however, in the sense that it understands self-erasure egoistic dissolution the breaking of form is only viable in light of faith, which is to say that the work of breaking form, as it appears externally, and to break with form, as it is constructed internally, is to risk a kind of dissolution that makes no sense if the break isn't with also a certain attachment to the aesthetic histories born of the period of the things that we wish to append.
I think that means Blackness, and I think that it means also Christianity. And the beautiful thing about Christian theology, particularly in the 20th century, is its openness to his own dissolution, its openness to its own dissolution, and the dissolution of religion. We see this in Rauner, we see this in Bart, we see this in Cone, we see this all over the place that what they're after is not so much the instantiation of a Christian world, but the spirit itself. That's my time.
[APPLAUSE]
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Thank you to our three speakers for those excellent presentations. As a reminder, there is a Q&A. There is a QR code inside of the booklet, where you can scan it and submit your questions, and the graduate assistants will bring those forward. But if you are also in the room with a question, you can raise your hand and a microphone will be brought in your direction. As that is in process, I do want to offer perhaps a question to put you all in conversation.
Something that seems to be somewhat of a tension, I think, in all of these presentations is, on the one hand, a acknowledgment of Blackness as a negation or objection, and on the other hand, a perhaps from the side of religious studies and of Black religion, a falling into the trap of transcendence as the only recourse to make sense of Blackness as objection. I'm curious if we could spend some time thinking about this tension because I think it's actually at the heart of several debates in the field.
A kind of question I hear from Professor James about we know about the negation, we know about the objection, and actually perhaps, we haven't fully contended with the full magnitude of the negation, actually, because we don't center the revolutionaries, what I'm hearing, we don't center the captive maternal. And so a query that I think is very present in James' critique is how will Black religion respond? Right?
And so beyond a recourse to transcendence to joy to care to wonder, how will Black religion respond? And so Professor Day's presentation is actually calling us to perhaps tarry with wonder and care a bit more with the invocation of spirit. And so I'm wondering how spirit is functioning throughout these presentations.
What is spirit? What do we mean by spirit? Does spirit have a kind of ontological identity, character? I'm curious about the ontotheological, in particular, Professor Day, and if you could comment on what a decolonial theology of spirit might offer Black Studies today. And I know that's a really big question that you're--
KERI DAY: I'm still writing.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: --that you're writing.
[LAUGHTER] But perhaps just to hear you think aloud about, it would be really helpful. And Paul pointing us back to what I hear as a thinking about our Christian theological inheritances that go unacknowledged in Black Studies, so actually a call to really go back and to really think about where these terms of order and of categorization, where they come from.
And I'm curious about the call and perhaps pointing us to mystical science, pointing us to early Christian theology. Why should Black Studies return there? And what might we gained from that inquiry? And I think the last piece, for me, I've really been, in some ways, arrested really by-- and I know that's very carceral language, but it is what it is-- by Professor James, when you said our language is failing.
And I'm struck by that because I think part of the inspiration for this gathering is what I read as two things, one being willful misreading of each other, and by each other, I mean, Black Studies and of religious studies, a way in which the two often talk against each other or past each other rather than to each other.
And also, there's a way in which the intellectual history of the field of Black religion is not fully taken seriously. So by that, I mean, if we really go back and think about the canonical thinkers in Black religion as being a part of the Black campus movement, the Black Studies movement, I think often about Cone, who when he's writing, he says, some of us had to be in the streets, but some of us had to stay in the library and record the theology of the streets.
And I'm curious about that juxtaposition. And so there's a lot here. I'm just rambling because I think my mind is all over the place, which is a beautiful thing that you all have gifted us with. But if you could just ruminate there for a bit on any of those queries. And I would love to hear you all engage together first, and then we'll open it up for audience engagement.
JOY JAMES: I'll try to be brief. I want to read this from Reverend Matthew who's in Atlanta. And he actually-- I just wrote an intro to it. But he wrote the letter of concern to Black clergy regarding Cop City. So I think he has the words that I might not have. This is one paragraph. And he's so steeped in the faith.
"Dear siblings in the faith, I write to you during this Lenten season from my home in Atlanta. I write with a heavy heart, having lost friends to jail under false charges and one to murder, covered up poorly by police. I pray without ceasing for those who are still under arrest, denied bail, deemed a threat to the community for no good reason. I pray that the mother of the slain, Belkis Teran, a devout Catholic. I pray that she knows who her child truly was despite the misinformation swirling around their death. Tortuguita was murdered, shot over a dozen times with their hands raised and their legs crossed. May the bullet holes through their palms, holy stigmata, be a reminder that their child was a servant of God."
OK. So in May, I went down. I think it was-- no, May, I was in Texas. Yeah, it was May. I don't know when I travel. So this is about the language. I'm not just talking about the Academy. So met with Black Forest protectors. Tortuguita was actually shot 57 times when they were sitting down with their hands raised, and the Black women clergy says that they were meditating. Their eyes were closed.
So they believed in the possibility of peaceful protest, and Georgia State troopers riddled. And they said he shot them, but when the autopsy from the family came back, it showed that he was sitting, and then the bullet that hit one of the troopers in the leg, that was, quote, "friendly fire." Because they shot so many times, bullets were everywhere.
So I went down, and I met with some folks with Reverend Matt and a young Black, I don't their pronouns, but would be biologically female. And so I asked the question about Agape tied to security. And I said, what is your security apparatus? Because the troopers came. The police came, and now everybody's out of the forest.
And this pamphlet right here, if you can see this, this is what they bulldozed out of Willow Lani, which was all Indigenous land before it became a plantation, when they pushed the Indigenous out, and then they made it a prison farm, and then it's next to a Black neighborhood working class. And this is where they're going to train police and military tactics, and they also train Israeli Defense forces.
So I asked them, what's your security apparatus? And the young person, the youngest one the 20 in her 20s, she said, I've been to Europe. I've given these tours. I've talked about-- and Cop City is not just here, it's around the country. It is literally-- as I said, I grew up on military bases with people who trained to do assassin stuff. This is literally what domestic policing is going towards right now.
She said that she had none. And when they asked her in Europe the same question, she had no answer. So the language fails even on the level of the activists in the force and on the streets, because no one can articulate what it means to be safe and also resist state violence. So then the only safety is to align with the state and to become obedient.
I'm not 25, I'm not in the forest, I'm not in trees anymore. But just inter-generationally, trying to talk to a younger generation, there's a bit of a void, and then in your middle generations, there's a bit of a void, and then in my generation, there's a bit of a void. So I don't see how we talk over or through generations, and I don't see how we grapple with our fear.
Some people I know are just going to go towards the sight of pain, the apocalypse, and they know they will not be backed or protected. So I asked them about concentric like, what about circles? People who don't want to get involved, but they'll help with bail funds. They use terrorist charges against people who were trying to do bail fund.
So now everybody's got-- not everybody, a number of people were arrested by the FBI with terrorist charges for being environmental protectors. They had no weapons. They harmed no one, but now it's going to be, you bailed somebody out, or you bought totes, or you bought COVID wipes, those are all criminal offenses, if you're linked to a protest against a state-militarized endeavor.
So what is concentric protections look like? I haven't heard anybody articulate it. But when I talk to people who were in the party years ago, they assumed they were going to die anyway, so they did exactly what they wanted to do in resisting state violence. But the people I hear now don't assume they have to die. They want to live. But there's a segment that thinks they will be abandoned by the respectable citizenry who will not stop a militarized endeavor.
And so they've agreed not to physical death like the Panthers did, but they've agreed to languish in prison for their right to protest, the destruction of environment, and destruction of rights.
KERI DAY: If you don't mind to return to the question of spirit. Because I'd be curious to hear as well, in particular, Joy, how Dr. James, how you are-- you said a little bit about how you think about spirit in terms of the ancestors and so forth. And I'm still writing, and I'm still writing my way into clarity precisely about what I mean.
But here's my hunch right now, that I brought up, at the beginning of my talk, the need to move away from religious ontologies, and in this case, for me for Christian theology, the ontotheological or the theology of being an ontology of God. And so I think that ontotheology, particularly within the Christian tradition, I'm talking here about historic Western theology, it's been fundamentally predicated on an ontology of God.
And what I mean by an ontology of God is God as being. And to speak of God as being, it's a speak of God fundamentally as having certain kinds of properties and capacities that are proper to God. So within Christian theology, we talk about certain capacities and trace their proper to God. We think of doctrines the doctrine of aseity. God is self-sufficient to God.
Impassibility, we think of the language of omniscience, all-knowing, omnipotent, all powerful, and so forth. But the point here, and this is part of the conversation that's been going on within political theology and the critique of Western political theology, is that the ontology of God would, in many ways, shape more broadly within Christian theology a theology of being that would begin to shape-- well, I shouldn't say begin to shape, it would shape the project of modernity and coloniality.
And I think this is what I love about Sylvia Winter and even to some extent Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and that is they are tracking the religious modalities that come to constitute the project of modernity, the project of coloniality. And at least for Sylvia Winter, what sits at the center of that is a certain ontological understanding of the world, which of course, is grounded in this understanding of God that creates a scale of beings, this distinction among beings, and this distinction among beings.
So I believe Cecelia indirectly brought this up in talking about a cosmological understanding, that part of the problem with this distinction of beings, well, we know who and what's on top and we know what's on the bottom. I'm talking here in terms of universally all of creation.
And so the point here is that the way at least I'm thinking about spirit is against this backdrop, wanting to critique, in some ways, this backdrop, this language of religious ontology, this language of religious being grounded and predicated upon a kind of conception of God that then secures the category of the human eventually.
And I should also say this, that it secures the category of the human in terms, of course, being parasitic on, for example, I'm thinking of Anselm, I'm thinking of Augustine, it would be the ontological argument of sin. Well, in terms of the ontological argument of sin, and this goes actually to iconography as well, visually and philosophically and theologically, who would embody that? It would be blackened people, and as well as the land, I should say, too, the blackened land as well as blackened people.
So when I'm thinking of spirit I'm trying to push against the way in which in Christian theology spirit has been indexed to this discussion of God as being, so we think about the Trinity, we think about persons among the Godhead fundamentally conceptualize as being. And I'm trying to think against this in some ways because it has indeed contributed. And I should say this, I'm not the first person.
Even though, for example, James Cone's project, of course, is decidedly different than the direction that I'm going, I think it is important to acknowledge that in taking up some of its earlier christological work, he refused, even in God of the oppressed and talking about a doctrine of God. He refused to begin, for example, with the language of the Trinity, which I take to be this philosophical question of being or ontology that Cone thought was utterly unhelpful for talking about the question of Black experience and ultimately the quest for liberation.
And the last thing that I will say is-- so then if this is the horizon and this is what I'm trying to critique, what I want to provisionally begin to think about is the spirit as-- so when you ask the question, what is spirit, I feel anxious about framing the question as what is spirit because it invokes, I feel inevitably, this conversation about being about identity as such.
And so for me, at least from a phenomenological standpoint, I'm wanting to track how do communities thickly describe, again, this is the phenomenological move, thickly described their experience as a spirit? And to me, that allows the entrance at least of material practices to become the grounding upon which we think reflect. And again, it also allows the apophatic to stay front and center because it is, in some way, spirit through the material practices through how people are describing from many different religious traditions describing it and, in some ways, avoiding again, this language of being and thinking about spirit as this dynamic kinetic relational process, but this ambivalent and ambiguous process.
If we're not defining, it's open to corruptibility. It's open to fallibility. It's open it's open to all these things. But that's what I meant by the grotesque sensibility being at the center of how I'm thinking about the spirit, about the world as such that, in some ways, what I mean by grotesque not just in a negative sense, but grotesque fundamentally as the unresolved, maybe tensions and contradictions from just the ambiguities and contradictions that are experienced in the world.
And we have a tendency to try to want to resolve them, this is about the unity, trying to move towards a unity of experience. But these are unresolved tensions and all of their grotesqueries. And so for me, at least, that inches a little closer to keeping spirit as an open category, an apophatic category, but also at least through Azusa, as just one example, thinking about how the spirit announces a apocalyptic energy, that at the beginning of the 20th century, you have an early Pentecostal community that, through their forms of liturgy and through their material practices, they're offering a direct critique to the racial capitalism of the day and thinking about the way in which the spirit moves within their built environment.
So when I think of materiality, I also think of the built environment as a way of thinking themselves into their own understanding of what it means to be religious, but what it means to reject the idea of the citizen, the proper subject, political subject, the proper human subject that the state demands from them.
PAUL ANTHONY DANIELS: So I guess I'm answering two questions, mostly because I got myself in trouble there at the end saying too much. First, which is what is spirit? How does one talk about spirit? Because I did evoke that at the end of the talk. But the initial question was were curious about the call to mystical science and to ancient Christianity.
And I think that my answer to that is probably mostly unsatisfying-- I'm a bit of an academic scavenger. I use what I want to use, and I use what I think works. And that's about as much as that. Because again my commitment to the revelation of God in Christ as revealed in scripture is not at the same time a commitment to Christianity as such, a commitment to institutionality and final or absolute way.
And so the wonderful scholar of Virginia Tech, Amaryah Shaye Armstrong says, it's the use of Christian material to events or work against a particular term of orders. And that's been a hugely helpful framing from her. I think a place where I depart, though, is that I don't care if it's read as heretical or Orthodox. I'm not really interested. I'm ambivalent about any means of being captured by camps or terms, thus I use what I want.
In college, I was trained in philosophy, and the first thing they teach you in critical thinking is patterns and relations. And so I think from that moment on, my sense about how I read the world, how I read is that there's an almost unconscious search for patterns and relations, which I think is also related to my call as a priest.
But that search for patterns and relations, I think is as much in an accident as it is in intention. So it just so happens that I'm a theologian who also likes mysticism, who also likes Black Studies, and can see patterns in relations, and the material works. The difficulty for me and I think for anyone else is to say, well, what the hell do we do with the material? And that's the fun part. But I'm also a Capricorn, and I like chaos. So there's that.
OK. So my conception of God and whether we use God or spirit, it doesn't really matter to me, but again, it's this idea of void or nothingness, which isn't exactly right. My conception of God, the one I function with, and so spirit, the one I function with as my daily prayer is God as simultaneity, and that would be all of everything happening at once. If we had the critical perspective to zoom out and see every-- what do we call heartbeats? It's not intentional. It's unintentional, but it's another term. No, no, no. It's a process that you don't do on your own. Involuntary.
If we could see the whole host of involuntary processes, activities in the universe, we would see God God's self. And I think that has a really interesting-- that formation or that conception has a really interesting implications for things like evil. Because for example, that is to say that in God-- Paul says, in God, we live move and have our being. In God is the function of both very, very evil, destructive things, and also the things that we like, which change from period to period area to area and time to time.
But what it suggests is that always already evil is being transformed or changed into its being consummated, evil and good, or however we want to use these terms, all things are being consummated simultaneously at all times. And I think that that simultaneous interminable consummation has an affective quality, and that's what I call spirit. It's an unlocatable affective quality. We all experience some aspect of that simultaneity, but we do not have the capacity to pin it down in any definite way.
And this is why I really do love the Christian notion of original sin. Because then what it only ever refers to in my understanding is the incapacity to make note of or to experience or to map simultaneity, which means that at every given moment, the decisions that we make, the things that we do will be made in an incomplete relation to reality. And that incomplete relation will mean that we will necessarily be in contestation, in conflict, in confrontation violently oriented towards someone or something in the world at all times.
And so I think that when I talk about spirit, I'm talking about a simultaneity that is always in consummation, always in motion that has affective quality, and affective quality isn't a strong enough word. And that the work of ritual, of religious rite, of religious practice is to train one's mind, body, and soul to be more receptive to the effect of quality of simultaneity, to be more receptive to the consummation of all things. And that reception or the capacity to be more receptive, I think, is what helps develop the desire to place one's life in-- to take risks with one's life or something like that.
And so there's a part of me that maybe cheekily-- but I think actually, really deep down inside, I believe that in a real ambivalence about religious ritual, religious experience, ancient practices of training the body, mind, and soul to be receptive to the spirit or to this effect of simultaneity, this consummation is a part of this devastating lack of commitment to revolutionary processes. And I think it's that reception that makes revolutionary processes possible or something like that.
JOY JAMES: Could you define what is a process?
PAUL ANTHONY DANIELS: Right. So that was sloppy. So I'm thinking about the literal risk of life and limb and resources and acclaim and protection that you were naming throughout as things that people don't choose precisely. Because if they choose to do these things, if they choose to earnestly work against empire, then that means an almost absolute dissociation from community and from the possibility of living.
When we think about revolutionaries who have converted whose sense of religiosity has deepened their revolutionary sensibility, I think it has something to do with a life that is lived in complete receptivity to this consummating spirit or this consummating process that some might call spirit or God.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: We'll turn to the audience. There's a question from Rebecca Wilcox in the back, and then we'll go to Dr. Eric Thomas after that.
REBECCA WILCOX: Hi. Oh, this is so exciting. All of my favorite people in one panel. OK. So I just want to ask a two-part question for a dialogue that I think is happening between Dr. James and Dr. Day. On the one part, Dr. Day, can you give an account for the apocalyptic in light of how your understanding the way that critical Black Studies is taking up the concept of anti-Blackness. And what I mean by that is how is the apocalyptic not already status quo for the position of the slave, which is to say that in thinking of Saidiya Hartman's understanding of the afterlife of slavery, that the apocalyptic only produces world ending capacity, but it does nothing for the positionality of the slave. So the collapse of the world does nothing for the fact that the slave is already the dead subject in a world that has now collapsed.
So I'm wondering if you could say how the apocalyptic also responds to the anti-Black world does nothing for the anti-Blackness of Blackness and how that makes sense for then a understanding-- of a religiosity is happening through a neoliberal order that understands democracy where protest is permissible within democracy. So the anti-social arrangements of Azusa would be still within the ramifications of a social arrangement that allows protest to be democratic. So I'm just wondering how you would respond to that.
And then Dr. James, I really want to return to your opening statement about how it's not that it doesn't have capacity but rather that it doesn't have desire in relationship to how you theorize the revolutionary. And what I'm interested, as it relates to what you talk about the religiosity of this zone that you can't explain that one goes toward when compromising one's safety for one's death, how that makes sense then for the material examples you gave with Erica Garner or the movements happening with stop Cop City, which is to say that, this revolutionary desire or revolutionary capacity still requires a political subject as opposed to a revolutionary desire that just desires violence on violence's behalf. So it is not for a better world or a better community or the right to live, but rather the antagonism itself is violence or thinking more so of Fanonian understanding of wretched of the Earth.
And I'm asking these two questions, to tie together this theme between critical Black Studies and Black religion about ontological yearning, and I think Calvin Warren says in his response to Anthony Penn's 20th anniversary of terror and triumph that the issue of Black religion is ontological yearning. And so it seems like the revolutionary, it's only a revolutionary because it cannot be, and that the apocalyptic is only the apocalyptic because it cannot be, and what's organizing the revolutionary and the apocalyptic is being even if it's through negation. And so what does it mean for this political subject, even though it is negating to still be a response to being?
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Before you two respond for the sake of time, we'll hear Dr. Thomas's question. And if there's one more after Dr. Thomas, we'll take that one. And then there is one with Siobhan Kelly in the back. That would be our last question for now, and then we'll have the panelists respond. Dr. Thomas.
ERIC THOMAS: Thank you, all, for really thought-provoking papers. I want to ask about Black life. Perhaps the combination of Blackness and aliveness. I'm coming from a biblical studies place. I shall not die, but I shall live. I come that you might have life and have life more abundantly. So I'm wondering about the prescriptions that you all have the impossible possibility of Black life, the apophatic apocalypticism of Black life, the revolutionary experience of a Black life. And connecting to Snorton, what will it have meant, that Black lives matter?
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: And then we'll hear from Siobhan Kelly.
SIOBHAN KELLY: Hi, there. Thank you all for your wonderful comments today. My question is for Dr. James. Something I found really refreshing about your talk this afternoon is the attention to statist feminism. State feminism is a real place of danger. Perhaps this is from my own experience also being trained in Catholic school that I see a real solidarity that often appears between state feminism and religious organizationally based projects. And so I'm wondering if you have anything to say about how to imagine revolutionary activity either from within or without religion.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Yeah. So just to rehash a question about ontological yearning, the relation between Black religion and Black Studies on this particular question for Dr. Day and Dr. James. A question about Black living and perhaps a deeper interrogation of how that relates to perhaps ontological yearning, I would say. And then a third question about state feminism and its relation to religious organization, which I actually think also might be connected to ontological yearning. And so we'll start there, and I think you all will work your way down.
JOY JAMES: OK. Those are all incredible questions, and I'm just going to try. So when you were talking about state feminism, I started to think about the Volk moms who are Nazis. And is it the mothers of liberty or the liberty moms who are like, OK-- so it depends. There's attempt to capture the state. It's coming from-- I would call them neofascists, you call them what you want. Ultra conservatives is a nice phrase.
Then there's the liberal capture, which is our normative. And I also think it shapes our understanding of religion and ethics that even though the Pope came out about environmentalism and also about what's going on in Germany about blessing, same sex marriages, it's minor, but it's something. The resistance to that makes the liberals seem vanguard. So the reactionaries make liberals seem edgy because the reactionaries are just so on the cliff. We'll burn everything down just to get the perfect world.
And years ago, when I was growing up in Texas, the rapture was Jesus would come down and then take all the good souls. But Kathy Buelow and others have noted in their scholarship, the new rapture is that Jesus wants a genocide so that you have to get rid of Jews, you have to get rid of Roma, you have to get rid of people of color, you have to get rid of LGBTQ. That's when Jesus will come, only if you do the dirty work first.
So over the decades, that desire, because that's a desire, too, that desire has been able to accumulate quite an arsenal, infiltrate the military, get trained 20 years of warfare in the Middle East that they come back to be police. They're hyper trained, they're very disciplined.
Now the state feminists who want to be liberals. Their understanding-- my read on them is that I think of the captive maternal like as on a fulcrum like a seesaw. If we can just balance off the far right with the revolutionary left and just stay in the center, we'll be OK. But that's really not how it works.
And you'll stop me if I'm not being nice. My experience over the decades, having been with icons decades ago and just watching from afar now, is that they would agree to the terms of liberalism, and they would issue a promissory note that Reverend King told you weren't going to be able to cash, that there was going to be a promissory note that if you only remained in a law-abiding citizen and you could work within the system, there would be non-reformist reforms. And I've written elsewhere that that's an oxymoron.
But what I've seen recently is that the people who were arguing for state liberalism or a status quo, it's like we're going to cut a deal with the far right, and just stay in that lane, and don't try to do another January, coup attempt, and we can live with you, even though we know they're killing people. So those people obviously can't live with them.
But my understanding is when they made those agreements, their language is going to have to shift, so now they're talking about war. So now they have to appear as the revolutionary even though they're the liberal. And once you put on the guise of the revolutionary and then deeply spiritual, but now it's a public spirituality, they promise you hope in the way in which you would read the New Testament. And now you don't have to read the New Testament because they're telling you that it's going to be OK, and you don't have to.
There's some divine way in which non-reformist reforms freedom, dreams. I mean, all this language that is circulating now, it's fine if it's comforting, it's not OK if it's pacifying. Because you're going to actually miss the move when the reactionaries keep making the moves.
And then a couple other things. I mean, Rebecca, thank you because you're so brilliant but your questions are so dense that I'm going to just do my best and move on. I've always said that thought of the captive maternal as moving through stages. And in the book I say, as this captive maternal ages, she's definitely going through stages. I mean, I'm talking post-menopause. I'm talking political stages.
That you move from the caretaking because you'd like to see your kids live longer than you and you want your elders to die with some dignity. You move past that caretaking to the protest, then you move to the movement, and we went through that with Black Lives Matter. You brought up Black Lives Matter. But the stage of Marinaj was not really pursued. Because the modern age. That's when we ran, and we ran sometimes with Irish, sometimes with Indigenous. But it's just like we're leaving the enclosure.
I would argue now it is prohibited in terms of leaving. They would hunt you, then they will hunt you now. Because Black autonomy, I'll be specific, Black autonomy is prohibited in a Black world. So if you're like, I'll go to the poorest land, I'll go to the mountains, I just want to get out of this, that's not on the menu. That's not an option.
And so I see with Marinaj, every attempt at Marinaj, there is a military endeavor. And so that's the one thing we never-- I haven't heard the word war all day. I don't know how. This is what I meant about the language. I mean, basically, that's all I've been describing is warfare.
And so if we're going to be hunted for wanting to be free and to move beyond the enclosure, my understanding is that we will accept our casualties and our deaths, but we will reproduce our love of life, and love of spirit. And then you just keep doing it until something cracks. And Rebecca, that's not a full answer. But it's the only thing that I can articulate.
I see all of this as it's unfolding, and I don't go visit all these zones all the time. But when I go visit, I see the same thing. It's incredible levels of violence, faulty articulation, aspirations, and discipline to trust in liberal projects. And if you think about it, and this all closed on this, remember Goodman Schwerner and Chaney? The two White youths and the Black youth Chaney? Remember that Lyndon Johnson only invited the White parents to the White House after all three were murdered? Because again the disappearance of Black agency, Black love, Black value.
But also understand that President Johnson, who is going to be better than the reactionary Southerners, was also funding mercenaries to kill African intellectuals and liberators on the continent. The difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is real. I know Cornel West got bashed for trying to say that. But the intent is similar.
So unless you leave the enclosure, you will have a kinder assassin. And there's a difference, especially us because we're not going to be targets. But that is not a fundamental change. No matter what Black Lives Matter thought they did or what they were paid to do.
KERI DAY: So Rebecca, to your question. So anti-Blackness and its world ending capacity. I think you're right. I think you're right to raise the question, first, about the apocalyptic right. And this is something that I said in my presentation is that the way in which the Azusa community used, I should say embodied, and deployed the apocalyptic, was paradoxical in that, in some ways, it recapitulated, in this case, the theological terms of the anti-Black order. But simultaneously, there was something else going on in excess to that and what I talked about.
But I'm curious-- and I think we haven't had real between those in Black religion and those in Black Studies. I know some people are located in Black religion, where there is-- what I'm about to say there's more considerable overlap that might present an impasse or a creative tension. But the conversation about, even if, for example, the apocalyptic gestures or inaugurates a world ending capacity, it doesn't change the position of the slave. I mean, this is part of what you're talking about with respect to ontological yearning. There's still socially dead.
But actually, I think that this is a presupposition that scholars, I would include myself, scholars in Black religion and scholars in Black Studies probably contest. And I think this has to do with how one thinks or describes or defines social death. I'm thinking here of many, of course, like Christina Sharpe that would say anti-Blackness is total climate of how people think of social death in terms of objection. Is that total climate?
And part of what at least I was trying to get at in my paper is that, I would like to think of-- and I take Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and talking about abject generativity, I don't think that she is making the argument that there is some generative capacity that overcomes anti-Blackness as such. But I think what she's arguing is that there's this paradoxical latent power in the Black maternal in Blackness that even as it produces objection, it also has the capacity to disrupt and rupture the present meanings of an anti-Black order. I mean, in this interview, she talked about her work in many ways. She sees it as the initiation of the dissolution of the anti-Black world as such.
And for me, when I read that, I'm like, I know she's not religious, but damn, this sounds religious. And so I guess what I'm getting at is that this will be a presupposition that I think I don't know if I'm fully compelled by in terms of the slave as simply socially dead. And for me, this ties into your question, how do we think about the relationship between the theoretical and material? We've been talking about this all day.
So I look at Sylvia Winter, and I see someone who is theoretically stunning in her conversation about decoloniality and Blackness but also wants to theorize that with respect to what she refers to throughout much of her work, the physical referent to Blackness, being communities of the African diaspora and the material conditions, and somehow that matters to the theorization of Blackness as a theoretical position and paradigm.
And so for me, at least part of my discussion of spirit, the way I was describing spirit, is trying to think about that relationship. And to be clear, that's one of my commitments, and I should put my cards out on the table. I don't think that methods and theories give us our commitments. I think that we come to methods and theories with commitments. And I also think that methods and theories are representations of reality.
But my point about the apocalyptic making an epistemic intervention into the form of knowledge is actually related to how we think about representational understandings of knowledge namely through theory is that it doesn't exhaust reality. And what I'm very concerned about is when we think about language or theory representation in very absolutist ways as a totalizing project in many ways that it doesn't make room for incalculability, for surprise, for unpredictability, for excess that cannot be captured by these theories as such. So
To the point of the apocalyptic, again, I think that the way that they're using the apocalyptic absolutely is paradoxical. It is indicative of the recapitulation, in some ways, precisely to what you're talking, concerning ontological yearning. But simultaneously, I think that it's also doing a work in attempting to disrupt and provide an opening to something like the end of the world and an inauguration of what may lie on the other side of that.
So it's not an answer, but rather what I want to do is I want to play in the creative tension of what you're asking concerning. But I do think that Black people in Black religion and Black Studies, it begs, I feel like more conversation needs to be had around what we disagree about in terms of basic analytic categories with respect to this question, especially.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Well, thank you, all, so very much for this really rich panel discussion. I wanted to-- yes.
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Because we are nearing the very end of our time together, we wanted to spend just a few moments thinking about this colloquium as an ongoing conversation. And so with that in mind, anticipating ways we might continue to extend the conversation. And so I wanted this to be an open space at least for the next 10 or so minutes to think aloud together about possible future collaborations and conversations, so areas of focus that we might or around topics or themes, potential areas of study, also a space to think about debates that were in the room but might not have been named.
And so if we could just articulate that both from the side of those who have presented today, if there's something an earlier panelist has to say to someone who has presented and vice versa, this can also be that space. And so we have a microphone still in the room, and so that can pass around. But thoughts about how do we proceed from here, I think, of this moment as one in which there's a seeming synergy, I think, across several institutions that are now turning to think about the relation of Black religion to Black Studies.
And so just last week, there was another conference at Columbia University. And here we are today in the same waters. And so I think we should pay attention to that synergy in the press. And so I don't want people to just leave without thinking ahead about ways to extend the conversation. Thoughts. Yes, there's a hand over there.
DANIELA MARIE MALFI: Thank you, all, so much. My name is Daniela Marie Malfi. I'm a master's of Religion and Public Life candidate, which is a one-year academic year program. It is how do we create the bridge between the spiritual and the secular and business. And one of the things that really struck me today in offering what this collaboration might look like in the future is actually in the classroom. I lost my breath when I heard that we want to be safe more than we want to be free.
I want to thank you for that. So much because it is true for me and I believe my peers. And I am in this middle ground between feeling like I am an other in most inner communities observing and wondering why there aren't more people like me and also curious about how to create safe spaces in academic settings when violence is prevalent in different ways than it is out in the world and in business. We have a wonderful program related to diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and yet that still doesn't feel like enough aluminum in real time.
I also am coming from a culinary background. I've been a chef for 15 years. And I'm interested in understanding what's this intersection between food and faith. And I actually think that these things and what I'm talking about this notion, this desire, this craving for safety is related and relatable to all people, no matter what you belong to or don't belong to. And so as I think about collaboration, one of the things that I yearn for today in feeling like I can get through this and successfully prepare myself for the future after this with my peers is actually how to train people what safety looks like and doesn't look like and why that's relevant. Thank you.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Thank you for sharing. Other thoughts, reflections? Yes, a hand over here.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Thank you to the panel. This was just amazing. So as I mentioned earlier, I'm situated with a Native American Indigenous studies. And I went to a conference earlier this spring, a Society of Early Americanists. And there was a track on foundational works in Black Studies, Toni Morrison, Paul Gilroy, Cedric Robinson, a whole track. And there was a whole other track on Native American Indigenous studies, and they were simultaneous actually. And I was like, but I have learned so much from Cedric Robinson about a Black radical tradition and thinking about religiosity as part of that.
And that's actually something within Native studies that I would like to really engage and think about those types of questions. So I guess that's part of my question is thinking about how might these conversations overlap and engage with conversations, say, in Native American Indigenous studies and other fields as well.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Thank you. Thank you for that. Second over here.
AUDIENCE: Thank you to all of the brilliance and generosity that have been offered, including the imagination of this space. What I'm sitting with is Blackness within Black religion and what constitutes that. How do we engage are or what are the considerations that the multiplicity of Blackness is not simply Blackness within the United States or the boundaries of the United States, but Blackness of peoples of African descent, beyond that and the discourses that are relevant in spaces like this is named imperial feminism? How do we talk about imperial Blackness while honoring the revolutionary thrust of Black religious studies and the lineage of this conversation and why it's so significant to have?
But how do we move to be inclusive of Blackness as diasporic Blackness as multiplicity, as a multiplicity of cosmologies that are present but not necessarily centered in foregrounded, not as 1 centimeter but a multiplicity of centers within the conversation, such that we are honoring the legacies and the revolutionary thrust from the shores of Africa through the Black Atlantic like the Haitian Revolution Marronage as a response and as worldmaking as well.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Thank you. Any other pressing thoughts, or reflections, questions? Yeah. So
JOY JAMES: We have bookmarks. Rebecca contributed, Ahmad contributed which is about Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous and African-American struggles, and there's a site. We got a bit of a Mellon grant at Williams, and we've posted round tables in which Indigenous and people of African descent, we weren't able to do as international as we should have because this is all an anti-colonial endeavor. But if you want some bookmarks, I think they're over there. And even though I don't have to say, this has been incredibly generative, especially your contributions and queries.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Yeah. I believe the bookmarks are at the registration table, and so you can grab them there. But if all hearts and minds are clear, we can leave this place. And so I'm very grateful to all of you for being here for this gathering. And I'd like to just thank all of our speakers from this morning and this afternoon.
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And huge thanks to my colleagues in the Office of Academic Affairs for their contributions to making this happen. I'd also like to just acknowledge Soo Min, if you could stand, who has been a tremendous support, often thinking of the things that I have not been thinking about and already planning things ahead of my even thinking about them. So I'm very grateful for her assistance with making this all happen. I'd also like to thank Dean Holland for being with us today and for the Divinity School's commitment to the study of Black religion.
There is truly a lot of great energy here happening in this moment, and so we're very grateful for administrative support to make that happen. And that is not always the case, and so we are very grateful for that support. And so with that said--
PAUL ANTHONY DANIELS: And thank you to Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes.
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KERI DAY: He ain't got nobody thank him.
AHMAD GREENE-HAYES: Thank you so much. Thank you. That's all. That's all I got.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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