What does it mean to think the human otherwise, beyond practices of captivity and carcereality and the dominance of Man? Looking at women and flesh in Blackpentecostalism, at theories of the hu/Man that contribute to the maintenance of carceral logics, and at Fanon and King's legacies of Black radicalism, these three papers push religious and theological reflection to consider how enclosure is maintained, and what it will take to undo it.
In this paper, I seek to illuminate the relationship between the doctrine of sanctification and the community of the sanctified, giving particular attention to the role of the Black woman within scholarship on the sanctified church. At least since Zora Neale Hurston, scholars of Black pentecostalism have understood the sanctified church as an identity-in-protest to one or more of the forces inimical to Black life—whether patriarchy, antiblackness, capitalism, or homophobia. However, given the biblical-historical-theological contours of the doctrine of sanctification, as well as the socio-political realities facing Black women, I argue that the doctrine/identity of “sanctification/sanctified” forms a grammatical enclosure within which the flesh/body must abide. In light of the stronger associations of Black pentecostalism with conservatism (relative to progressivism), I question whether the grammar of sanctification forecloses the Black pentecostal church’s ability to escape the enclosures of colonial modernity.
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.
The American carceral system–from policing and plea bargaining to probation and parole–is a system of personal and communal fragmentation. The paper argues, first, that this is the product of an essentialist carceral anthropology that disproportionately condemns race, gender, and class minorities to preserve the American neoliberal social order. The paper then argues that a Christian apophatic, non-essentialist anthropology destabilizes this carceral system. Apophatic theologians from antiquity to the present insist that humans must be figured with reference to their relation to an infinite divinity. If God is the ground of all things, one's relation to God opens the human to infinite relations to divine, human, and non-human others. This infinite relationality creates abolitionist possibilities, rejecting final decisions about one’s raced, gendered, and classed essence, resisting the neoliberal reduction of infinitely relational beings to self-interested individuals, and challenging attempts to punish wrongdoing through forced removal from communities.