Epistemologies Opaque: Conjuring, Conjecture, and the Problematic of Nat Turner’s Biblical Hermeneutic

Abstract

I pointed out in chapter two that whites constructed themselves over and against blacks who appeared in the consciousness of the former as the “empirical Other.” In chapter six I discussed Du Bois’s description of how blacks experienced the distinction between their own subjectivity and the externally imposed empirical self as “double consciousness.” What I wish to assert at this point is that since whites are never aware of their own identity as dependent upon the one they created over against the black empirical Other, they never fully comprehend the true nature of their own social construction. Furthermore, since whiteness has been such an integral part of their religious identity, they never fully comprehend the relationship between their religious with their racial sensibility. The curious thing is that this is maintained and reproduced through the positing and presupposition of white religion as normative. Thus whites can never pierce beneath the veil to encounter the “mysterium tremendum” of black religion because in so doing they would necessarily have to overcome the epistemological divide that always constitutes the Other in their consciousness as an empirical object rather than as a subject. Therefore, we must remind ourselves that throughout this study we are never looking at black religion in and of itself or in isolation to its white counterpart.

Even when slaves, ex-slaves, or colonized persons become aware of the autonomy and independence of their consciousness, they find that, because of the economic, political, and linguistic hegemony of the master, there is no space for the legitimate expression for such human form. The desire for an authentic place for the expression of this reality is the source of the revolutionary tendencies of these religions. But on the level of human consciousness, religions of the oppressed create in another manner. The hegemony of the oppressors is understood as a myth—myth in the two major senses, as true and as fictive. It is true as a structure with which one must deal in a day-by-day manner if one is to persevere, but it is fictive as far as any ontological significance is concerned.

The oppressed must deal with both the fictive truth of their status as expressed by the oppressors, that is, their second creation, and the discovery of their own autonomy and truth—their first creation. The locus for this structure is the mythic consciousness, which dehistorizes the relationship for the sake of creating a new form of humanity—a form of humanity that is no longer based on the master-slave dialectic. The utopian and eschatological dimensions of the religions of the oppressed stem from this modality.

The oppressive element in the religions of the oppressed is the negation of the image of the oppressor and the discovery of the first creation. It is thus the negation that is found in community and seeks its expression in more authentic forms of community, those forms of community which are based upon the first creation, the original authenticity of all persons which precedes the master-slave dichotomy. There is thus a primordial structure to this consciousness, for in seeking a new beginning in the future, it must perforce imagine an original beginning.

(Significations, p. 170)