This panel attempts to tarry with the aporia that Afropessimism’s political ontology of social death presents for Black theology’s faith in the Human. Each paper on this panel interrogates how, in Jared Sexton’s words, Black social life is lived in social death. Further, each contributor tarries with the singular modes of existence that are invented in the hold of the ship and carry with it the hold's abyssal elements, such as: worldlessness, landlessness, nothingness, absence, incoherence, opacity, spirit, flesh, and the potentialities of gratuitous freedom—which is to say, freedom from the Human, World, and Being. Along these lines, this panel implicitly finds in social death the sacred potentialities that the Human-World-Being have subjected to enclosure. Accordingly, each paper offers an experiment in thinking Black theology/religion with Afropessimism, wherein which the inhabitation and/or tarrying with social death aspires to intensify the antagonistic potentialities of Black faith.
This paper attempts to connect the pursuit of (black) incoherence with Frank Wilderson’s under-examined admission: “I believe in the Spirit world; that is to say I believe that the African ancestors are still with us and can be consulted from time to time." This belief in the spirit world resonates with Jared Sexton’s claim that black social life is out of this world. Consequently, this paper suggests that afro-pessimism invites a conversation with black theology, religion, and practices of the sacred. Accepting this invitation, this paper considers Dianne Stewart's and Tracey Hucks's recent studies of how Afro-Atlantic religious traditions re-concieve notions of the human and the world, terms that have been historically configured against blackness. The hope of this paper is to develop conversations between black studies and black religious thought around (social) death, anti-blackness, spirit, and that which cannot be contained by prevailing conceptions of the human/world.
Bringing in conversation Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of practice in Scenes of Subjection and Judith Casselberry’s ethnography of Black Apostolic Pentecostal women in Labor of Faith, this paper argues that Black Pentecostal women's religious imagination and its emergent practices provide "redress and nurture the broken body" and produce "other terms of sociality" in an anti-black world (Hartman, 102). These women’s prayer lives demonstrate concern for and solidarity with the exigencies of black life in an anti-black world. I argue that the practices work within and exceed the parameters of social death through supernatural, mystical, and divine interjection. Within Pentecostalism, speaking in tongues (glossolalia) intervenes in the world’s use and understanding of language. As prayer language, speaking in tongues assures the faithful of God’s ultimate control and ability to intervene in any circumstance. God's presence, even if a moment, ruptures the world’s order while strengthening the faithful. By centering the prayer practices of Black Apostolic Women, this paper expands the present discourse on black theology and social death.
This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone's call for white people to "hate their whiteness and ask from the depths of their being: 'how can we become Black?'." More precisely, this paper take W. E. B. Du Bois's reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the "soul of an ex-white man." For Du Bois, Brown's taking up of the "Negro question" proceeded to shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben's monasitc/messianic informed notion of "form-of-life" and Afropessimism's elaboration of the "Negro question" through the idiom of social death, this paper offers a reading of (Du Bois's) Brown in terms of a form-of-life-toward-social-death. In imagining Brown as Du Bois's, Cone's, and Frank Wilderson's "ideal" white reader, this paper situates Brown as a model for Wilderson's iteration of Cone's charge "to lose one's Human coordinates and become Black."
This essay argues alongside Warren’s project of black nihilism that the crisis of the good life exists insofar as black life is always in crisis, meaning that there exist no onto-theological grounds for black life. Thus, there is a need to rethink what constitutes our theological renderings of the “good life.” The papers central claim seeks to go beyond Warren’s project and take at its word the necessity for black religion and theology to consider black life as that which is ungrounded. Thus, if we want to think of the possibilities of “the good life,” there must be a rupture and abandonment of the onto-theological categories which engender new possibilities for black life beyond the world. Turning toward Afrofuturism and black feminist notions of futurity may offer generative models of theological “ungrounding” to imagine black life beyond that which cannot sustain it.