Attached Paper Annual Meeting 2024

New Visions & Political Theology: The Unnoticed Convergence of King “the apostle of nonviolence” & Fanon “the apostle of violence”

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

I comparatively analyze two contemporaneous freedom fighters: the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. radical Civil Right’s activist—also known as, “the apostle of nonviolence” —and Frantz Fanon radical Algerian anti-colonial activist—also known as, “the apostle of violence”. In popular historical memory, the former is invoked as formally religious and the latter officially secular, but each are mislabeled as conventionally operative within the religion-secular binary that subtends the terms of order. Through examining their significance to the Black Freedom Struggle, their considerations of anti-Black racism and colonialism as a theological problem, and visions of the radical Black sacrality of their theorizing/praxis, I consider a significant convergence they carry, even with vast ideological divergences in tactics, which pushes forward the discussion of religion/politics, and sheds light upon alternatives to move beyond impoverished binary views of alterity, of policing and governance: religion/politics, sacred/secular, violence/non-violence, and so on.