Abstract
How do we think religion, theology, and class? How do we critically engage this problematic when we consider the development and evolution of invidious conceptions of race and antiblackness in the modern world? With what conceptual categories, what theoretical frameworks, and what analytical methods and normative underpinnings?
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Notes
On this theme, see, for example, Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003),
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005),
and Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse of Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
This particular formulation is inspired by the line of thinking opened up by Ronald Judy in his work on “the Negro” in Kant’s critical project and the recent work of Jonathan Judaken in his formulation of the “conceptual Jew” in the thought of Arendt and Adorno. See Ronald Judy, “Kant and the Negro,” Surfaces 1.8 (1991): 1–70
and Jonathan Judaken, “Blindness and Insight: The Conceptual Jew in Adorno and Arendt’s Post-Holocaust Reflections on the Antisemitic Question,” in Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, eds., Arendt & Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Sanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 173–196.
Sean McCloud and William A. Mirola, eds., Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 2.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (1935, New York: Free Press, 1998).
Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the Philosophy of liberation, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2007).
Lerone Bennett, Jr., The Challenge of Blackness (Chicago: Johnson, 1972), 33.
On this point, see Corey D. B. Walker, “‘The Empire and the Garden’: Race, Religion, and the (Im)Possibilities of Thinking,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78.1 (2010): 265–289.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 170.
See Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), xv.
On this point, Etienne Balibar’s production of “class racism” is acutely instructive. See Etienne Balibar “Class Racism” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 204–216.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. and trans. Quintín Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 721.
Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (1986; Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 1995), 203.
For a previous engagement that attempts to think the category of class within a critical articulation of liberation theology, see Marvin G. Dunn, “Liberation Theology and Class Analysis: A Reassessment of Religion and Class,” latin American Perspectives 13.3 (1986): 59–71.
George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1.
The exemplary effort to “occupy religion” is quite suggestive in this respect. However, the task must not rest with this project. Indeed, the efforts represented in this volume seeks to deepen this line of thinking by enabling a fuller elaboration of freedom and human possibility that does not render the majority of the world to mere actors within a categorical drama, which is acceptable to logical and political regimes of the West. See Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-Lan, Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).
Long, Significations, 204. On this point, see also Bob Jessup, “Informational Capitalism and Empire: The Postmarxist Celebration of US Hegemony in a New World Order,” Studies in Political Economy 71/72 (2003–2004), 39–58.
An early and classic attempt at such a thinking is Cornel West, “Black Theology and Marxist Thought,” in James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, Volume I 1966–1979 (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979), 552–567
and Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982).
Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Knopf, 2010).
James Crotty, “The Centrality of Money, Credit, and Financial Intermediation in Marx’s Crisis Theory: An Interpretation of Marx’s Methodology,” in Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, eds., Rethinking Marxism: Essays in Honor of Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy (New York: Autonomedia, 1985), 45.
Quite instructive in this regard is Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
See Walter Lowe, Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 4.
See Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 533–580;
Walter D. Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101.1 (2002): 57–96;
and Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Cultural and Religious Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995).
Houston Baker, “Foreword,” in Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 5.
Victor Anderson, Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008),.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 3.
My position is informed by Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and Phenomenological Antimonies (1956; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 3.
David Levering Lewis, “The Promise and Peril of Class in the Problem of the 20th Century,” Journal of Negro Education 65.2 (1996): 112–113.
Cornel West, “Afterword,” in Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 301.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” in Barbara Laslett, Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres, Mary Jo Maynes, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Jeanne Barker-Nunn, eds., History and Theory: Feminist Research, Debates, Contestations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 305.
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Walker, C.D.B. (2013). Black Reconstruction: Thinking Blackness and Rethinking Class in Late Capitalist America. In: Rieger, J. (eds) Religion, Theology, and Class. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339249_10
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