Abstract
In a 1971 essay entitled “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion,” Charles H. Long threw down the scholarly gauntlet, challenging students of Black Religion to approach it systematically and programmatically. He issued this challenge in a context where popular and scholarly discourses equated Black Religion with Christianity and “reduced” it further to sociological or theological accounts. According to Long, a systematic study of Black Religion should not be equated with Christianity or any specific religion. Rather, as a proper object of study, Black Religion is an ensemble of images and meanings, a deep symbolic logic lying behind particular religions, experiences, and expressions. These symbolic images and meanings, he argues, double as methodological principles; that is, they should guide explorations of Black Religion. Long describes them as follows:
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Africa as historical reality and religious image
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The involuntary presence of the black community in America
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3.
The experience and symbol of God in the religious experience of blacks1
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Notes
Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 1999), 188; published originally in History of Religions 11, no. 1 (August 1971): 54–66.
Long, 189. The work of Michael Gomez among others has complicated if not undermined this contention. See Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Jennifer I. M. Reid, ed., Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 17.
Long, 156. See David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Long, 162. See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Know, 1982), 60–61.
Also see Nell Irvin Painter, History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) for an extensive analysis of the aesthetics and science of race thinking.
Long, 5. See Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
John Solomos, ed., Theories of Race and Racism (New York: Routledge, 2000).
For a powerful and controversial critique of this kind of methodology, see Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Malcolm Diamond, Contemporary Philosophy and Religious Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 82.
See Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Here I quote Long, who is quoting Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners (New York: Urizen Books, 1977). Long cites this passage on page 94 of Significations.
See George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 13.
James A. Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), ix.
Charles H. Long, “Indigenous Peoples, Materialities, and Religion: Outline for a New Orientation to Religious Meaning,”, Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long, ed. Jennifer I. M. Reid (New York: Lexington Books, 2003), 177. Quoted in Noel, 15.
See Oliver Cromwell Cox, Class, Caste, and Race (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1948).
Noel (pages 63–64) supports his claim by citing Elaine Scarry’s analysis of torture in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
On pages 62–63, Noel quotes extensively from Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa The African. Written by Himself. (New York: Dover, 1999).
Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41, 43.
J. S. McGrath, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Erdmans, 2008), 62–63, 68–69.
Robert Gooding-Williams, “Look, a Negro!”: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 95.
Carter wrongly claims that Long’s notions of oppugnancy and opacity violate Charles Sanders Peirce’s claim that consciousness is mediated by otherness. See J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 225.
Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995), 13.
See Karl Barth, “The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion,”, Church Dogmatics Vol. 1, Part 2 (New York: T&T Clark Ltd., 1956).
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© 2011 William David Hart
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Hart, W.D. (2011). The Archaeologist. In: Afro-Eccentricity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118713_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118713_4
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