Living Exiled in the Promised Land

Abstract

Chapter 1 dealt with Baldwin’s prolonged religious crisis. I framed the crisis as the inheritance of a religious tradition that is shaped by puritanical influences, which demonize black bodies. I showed how Baldwin’s understanding religion exposes the influences of puritanism in black religion and how what he offers creates a sexualized discourse that defends against the psychological trap of metaphorical blackness: the psychological collision between the images created by Protestant Puritan ideology and black bodies. In chapter 2, I wrote about how the sexualized discourse emerging from Baldwin’s interpretation and experience of religion is a form of blues. I wrote about how puritanism forces Baldwin to signify—an act of verbal indirection that exploits the gaps between the denotative (indication) and figurative (semiotic) expression of a word that creates a strategy for reclaiming black moral authority: the power to define the (blues) self on its own terms (righteousness expressed via black religious vernacular) for blues bodies in the black church. I showed how blues bodies are a site of revelation wherein Jesus’s acceptance of incarnality and sexualized bodies reveals God to be found among those who are not only marginalized racially but sexually as well.