Black Flesh Matters: Essays on Runagate Interpretation 9781978712690, 9781978712706, 1978712693

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Black Flesh Matters

Black Flesh Matters Essays on Runagate Interpretation

Vincent L. Wimbush

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Available ISBN 9781978712690 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781978712706 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

In loving memory of my Mom, Willie Mae Rowland Wimbush (1934–2019), who taught me to walk and enabled me to run.

“I’m gonna’ run, I’m gonna’ run. I’m gonna’ run to the city of refuge. I’m gon’ run” —Blind Willie Johnson, 1928

Contents

List of Figures

xi

Forewordxiii Burton Mack Acknowledgmentsxv Introduction: Cursus Fugae—Frenzied Soundings and Threatening Gestures; or, the Making of an Undisciplined/Black-Fleshed Maroon PART I: CONTEMPTUS MUNDI; OR, HŌS MĒ: INITIATION INTO A DISCURSIVE FORMATION

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1 Contemptus Mundi: The Social Power of an Ancient Rhetorics and Worldview (1992) 23 2 Ascetic Behavior and Colorful Language: Stories about Ethiopian Moses (1992)

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3 “Not of This World”: Early Christianities as Rhetorical and Social Formation (1996)

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4 “Like a Ship That’s Tossed and Driven”: The Ascetics of Social Formation (2001)

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5 Contemptus Mundi: The Dialectics of Modern Formation

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PART II: “HITTING A LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK”; OR, READING DARKNESS, READING SCRIPTURES: OBLIQUE CRITIQUE OF THE DISCURSIVE FORMATION vii

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6 Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures: African Americans and the Bible—A Disturbing Conjunction and a Defiant Question (2000)

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7 “Naturally Veiled and Half Articulate”: Scriptures, Modernity, and the Formation of African America (2008)

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8 “No Modern Joshua”: Nationalization, Scriptures, and Race (2009)

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9 Int​erpre​ters—​Ensla​ving/​Ensla​ved/R​unaga​te (2010)

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10 Performing Scriptures: Text(ure)s of African Diaspora Formation (2020)

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PART III: SIGNIFYING (ON) SCRIPTURES; OR, READING TEXTURES, GESTURES, POWER: EFFORTS AT RE-ORIENTATION AND RE-FORMATION WITHIN THE VEIL OF FORMATION

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11 The Work We Make Scriptures Do for Us: An Argument for Signifying (on) Scriptures as Intellectual Project (2010)

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12 Scripturalization: A Theory of the Politics of Language (2015)

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13 From Being Framed to Selling Shadows

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14 American Constantine

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15 White Men’s Fetish: The Black Atlantic Reads King James (2015)

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16 The Name the Peckerwoods Gave It: St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple and the Scriptural Formation of the Black Atlantic Written in collaboration with Rosamond C. Rodman

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17 “We Will Make Our Own Future Text”: An Alternate Orientation to Interpretation (2007)

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18 Meditation on Disruption (2018)

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PART IV: “I’M BUILDIN’ ME A HOME,” OR, “[I] HAD TO RUN”: EXPANSIVE AND SAFE SPACE FOR “COMPOSING” THE HUMAN

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19 Scriptures: Fathoming a Complex Social-Cultural Phenomenon (2004)

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Contents

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20 Escape: The Launch of the Independent Institute for Signifying Scriptures (2014)

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21 “I Wish [We] Knew How it Would Feel to be Free”: The Subjunctive Mood (2016)

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22 “If the President Does It . . . It’s Not Illegal . . .”: The Modern Nation/State as the Scriptural (2017)

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23 “They’re Ruining the Game”: (Mis)Readers of the Nation-State (2018)

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24 Who Counts?: Scripturalization as Classification (2019)

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25 Scriptures, Race, Nation: Thinking through our Mystifications

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26 Religion as the Scriptural: Or, the Mimeticization of Reality

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27 Scripturalization as Violence

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28 “Backgrounded by Savagery”: Black Flesh as Scripture

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Afterword: Mr. George Floyd—American Scripture

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Bibliography389 Index399 About the Author

403

List of Figures

Figure I.1 A Sketch of Vincent Wimbush by Roland Bainton (1894–1984); pencil on paper, between 1975 and 1978. Bainton was a British-born Reformation historian who taught for more than four decades as Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale University Divinity School. His critically acclaimed and bestknown book (among more than thirty written during his career) was Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950). He remained in New Haven and engaged students at Yale Divinity School in his retirement years. It was there that the author encountered Bainton. He was known for his sketches of selected individuals. Figure I.2 Cover of the program for the African Americans and the Bible conference at Union Theological Seminary, 1999. Author’s collection Figure I.3 Participants at the African Americans and the Bible conference. Author’s collection Figure I.4 Cover of the program for the inaugural Conference for the Institute for Signifying Scriptures in Claremont, California, 2004. Author’s collection Figure I.5 Participants in the 2004 ISS Inaugural Conference. Author’s collection Figure I.6 Cover for the program of the Ten-Year Meeting of the ISS, 2014. Author’s collection Figure I.7 Poster for the First Annual Meeting of the Independent ISS, 2016. Author’s collection

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List of Figures

Figure 6.1 The Life Cycle of Marronage Figure 9.1 Frontispiece to the 1724 Edition of Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs de Sauvages Ameriquains Comparées aux Moeurs de Premiers Temps. Engraving signed by L. B. Scotin. Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 9.2 Image of a White Man Outside the Mabari Shrine in Nigeria. Photograph by Herbert Cole; used by permission Figure 13.1 A “carte de visite” of a sort: a photograph of Sojourner Truth, photographer unknown, 1864 Figure 14.1 Donald J. Trump holds a Bible for a photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church, June 2, 2020; photo by White House photographer Shealah Craighead; public domain Figure 16.1 St. Paul’s Village. Photograph by Judith McWillie; used by permission Figure 22.1 Frontispiece of John Brown’s Self-Interpreting Bible (2 vols.; Edinburgh, 1778). Image in the public domain Figure 23.1 Cover of the Jan. 15, 2018, cover of the New Yorker, reprinted by permission of Condé Nast Publishing. Figure 23.2 Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, oil on canvas, 2018. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama Portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia Figure 23.3 Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, by Amy Sherald, oil on linen, 2018. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama Portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia Figure 25.1 Title page of M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description Topique, Physique, Civile, Politique, et Historique de la Partie Française de L’Isle SaintDomingue (Philadelphia, 1797) Figure 25.2 Image of Haitian Constitution

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Foreword Burton Mack

This book provides a record of Vincent Wimbush’s scholarship on the Bible and Christianity’s investment in it. His training as a biblical scholar is impeccable, and his scholarly contributions to the fields of Christian origins, Pauline studies, and the history of religions during the Greco-Roman period are outstanding. But as his career developed and the modern formations of Christianity and culture unfolded around him, he found himself as an African American academic with a Bible that began to read differently. The academy was that of the dominant culture rooted in the Western tradition of European history. In this culture, the Bible provided for a sense of election, righteousness, and destiny that generated social formations called nations, which thought of themselves as superior to other non-European peoples. In the case of the Africans, they were regarded as primitives and forced to become “Christians” by means of conversion to the European mission stations. In the case of the African Americans, they were enslaved, brought to America to work on plantations, and forbidden to read, marry, be educated, have families, or think of themselves as citizens. The European Americans, and especially the owners of the plantations, justified slavery by means of a reading of the Bible that the academic biblical scholar knew was wrong. It was this conflict of readings in the context of the social and cultural crises of the times that made it impossible for an African American scholar to treat the Bible as sacrosanct. Vincent turned the tables on the traditional designation of the Bible as “Sacred Scripture” (or “Word of God”) by turning the word Scripture into a technical term to allow its double entendre of “written” and “sacred” text to determine another reading and function. This left the Bible in the hands of the Christians and allowed it to be read as their sacred text. But it also turned the Bible into one among the many “scriptures” of the many other peoples in view and gave their readings of their own scriptures xiii

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authority within the language worlds within which they lived. Now the function of the biblical text turned from the divine authority of law into the human authority of social discourse. Vincent calls this “the work we make our scriptures do.” Writing and discussing about one’s social world by “signifying” observations, intentions, and movements is the way we enable ourselves to live together as a multicultural people. Thus, Vincent has made room for our multicultural world of many peoples with their various cultures by providing an invitation to treat our scriptures as discourse and to talk together about our many observations as the resources for a multicultural social democracy. It is the social formation of democracy that is now in trouble. The Western Christian tradition, in its many forms of empires and nations, has produced several layers of distinct and separate organizations of social interests that function as segments of the social fabric, such as capitalism, colonialism, military power, and global financial institutions. The notion of the American “Christian Nation” is one of them. And even though it was not Christianity or the Bible that generated the need for the emergence of any of these interests, the Bible has been left in place to provide the text by which the new social formations generated their rationales and justifications. In Vincent’s case, the history of slavery and the struggle for its “abolition” were experienced as fundamental features of Western Christian society and culture that called our biblical and theological Scriptures into question, supporting social issues for which the Bible did not have the answer. In fact, instead of providing for the answers needed to correct the culture’s attitude toward “others,” it turned out that the Bible itself was desperately in need of revision. Vincent’s answer is startling. Leaving the Bible as the Christians’ Scripture in its cultural place, Vincent turns “Scripture” into a technical term for the “writings” of all peoples by which their own cultural identities can be explored, analyzed, and resignified. So there Vincent stands with the scriptures of a multicultural world in his hands, telling us that the many identities of the many peoples now in view are the very resources we need for the formation of a new multicultural society. Multiculturalism should become the center, not left to the margins, of a new world order. Thanks, Vincent!

Acknowledgments

I am pleased to have opportunity to express my gratitude to those who made it possible for me to complete and offer this collection of chapters for publication and reading. First, to editor Neil Elliott (of Lexington Books/Fortress Academic), for his encouragement and constructive ideas. His clear-eyed understanding of the times, of scholarship in the humanities, and of the possibility of my being able, through my intellectual projects and barking, to speak to the times, not merely add to the infinite lineup of published books—all have helped me persevere. Second, to Arlecia Baker and Jonese Austin, for their expert typing and editing services. They came through when I needed them. Third, and most importantly, to Rosamond C. Rodman, my collaborator in all high crimes and endeavors (intellectual-political, and otherwise), for her love and friendship, her patience and support, her inspiration and provocations. What she has provided has proved again to be basic—all that is really ever needed. She has in the last couple of years or so, on more than one occasion and in more than one respect, picked me up and helped me to stand and keep running. *** Some of the chapters in this volume were first published elsewhere. Chapter 1 was originally the author’s inaugural address at Union Theological Seminary on October 22, 1992, and was subsequently published in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 47:1–2 (1994): 1–13.

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Acknowledgments

Chapter 2 was first published in Semeia 58 (1992) 81-92; chapter 9 was my 2010 presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, published in JBL 130:1 (2011), 5-24; and chapter 11 was first published in Transforming Graduate Biblical Education, ed. E. Schüssler Fiorenza and K. Richards (Society of Biblical Literature, 2010). All are republished by permission of the Society of Biblical Literature. Chapter 3 was first published in Reimagining Christian Origins, ed. E. Castelli and H. Taussig (1996), 23-36; chapter 6, as the introduction to African Americans and the Bible, ed. V. L. Wimbush (2000); chapter 7 first appeared in Still at the Margins, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (2008). All are republished by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Chapter 8 first appeared in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christianity, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Laura Nasrallah (2009); chapter 17 first appeared in True to our Native Land: African American New Testament Commentary, ed. Brian Blount, et al. (2007), 43-53. Both are republished by permission of Fortress Press. An earlier version of chapter 10 appeared in Aaron F. Henderson, Fight On: A Visual Interpretation of African American Spirituals (2020), and is republished by permission. Other chapters began, in different form, as lectures: chapter 4, at Harvard Divinity School on October 1, 2001; chapters 12 and 15, as the Phi Beta Kappa lectures in 2015; chapter 18, as my remarks on the 25th anniversary panel of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Committee on Underrepresented Minorities in the Profession, in November 2017. Chapter 19 was my address to the conference launching the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS), at Claremont Graduate University on February 27–28, 2004; chapter 20, my comments launching the independent ISS on November 15, 2014; and chapters 21–24 were my addresses to the ISS Annual Meetings in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. Chapter 25 was my Helen White Memorial Bible Lecture at St. Martin’s-in-the-Field Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, on March 13, 2021. Chapter 27 was first presented as a paper at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in November, 2020. Chapter 28 began as remarks given at the Scripture and Literature Workshops at the University of Virginia, Charlottesille, on June 11–13, 2019, and at Johns Hopkins University, March 6, 2020. Chapter 16 was written in collaboration with Rosamond C. Rodman.

Introduction Cursus Fugae—Frenzied Soundings and Threatening Gestures; or, the Making of an Undisciplined/Black-Fleshed Maroon

With essays written over a period stretching back more than thirty years—a few previously published, some others not—this collection has, as I have reflected on it, reminded me of Joseph Conrad’s translation in perhaps the most famous passage in Heart of Darkness (1899) of (European white males’/ white world’s) reactions to the sounds and movements of Black natives oblivious of white gazes and interpretations and at home in their bodies: As we struggled round a bend, there would be . . . a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stomping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling . . . on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy . . . an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse . . .1

As was the case with the acclaimed writer Chinua Achebe, I have found it hard not to react to such words; they are disturbing and riveting. Yes, ultimately, they say more about the anxieties and fears and foibles of Conrad and the world he was anxious to join and represent fully. Achebe and some other Black African and other Black-fleshed interpreters have condemned Conrad and recoiled from his description of the Black-fleshed peoples around the bend of the River Congo. Yet, I still cannot prevent myself from wanting in some respects, and for reasons at this writing still not entirely clear, to embrace the description. Perhaps, this sentiment has to do with my wanting to be at home in flesh and body as the people—no matter the ignorant cultural prejudices Conrad faithfully translated—are imag(in)ed to be. Despite, if not because of, Conrad’s world’s prejudices and anxieties, what comes through the description is a people at that stage of being—before the local colonial violence is set in motion—at home. The noises, the gesturing, the dancing, 1

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the being in the body—what delight, how fascinating. There was no communication between the natives and the strange men on the steamer. The world of the steamer did not yet register. Those at home were simply being at home in their bodies. I suspect my not being able to dismiss Conrad’s description has to do—in the course of my inventorying and poring over and over and revising essays I wrote over a period of many years that are included in this book—with my recognition of having that sense and reality of not being at home in terms of space and in terms of my body being lost or being stolen from me. Thus, this recognition is likely the reason for my fighting, my struggle to approach or represent some of what Conrad had his narrator Marlow register with such anxiety. In my own way, in the life work I have chosen, I have wanted to yell, hoop, dance, and stomp about—as reflection of being my best possible authentic Black-fleshed self. That most of my life experience must be honestly characterized as other than the simple being at home (and) in my Black flesh I must face. There is a sadness about it. And I think this collection of chapters represents both recognition of the situation and an attempt to address, if not to resolve, it. My life, of course, has not been “at home” in the sense of being somewhere around a bend on the River Congo (or thereabouts near or far on the continent now called Africa). The hoops, yells, dancing, the madness, the frenzy— these for me must represent something else; they must mean differently. Way on this side of the historical stealing and selling and subjugation and humiliation of the Black-fleshed there is no return home. There is not even a way—no simple, honest way—to claim and accept (Toni Morrison’s novel’s characters’ voices and directives and pleas in Beloved notwithstanding) with love my Black flesh. There is too much history (of violence and the necessary sensibilities) to wade through and unread. Nevertheless, the hoops, the yells, the stomping, and so forth persist; I have found through the chapters included in this book (and others not included) that I have not been able not to continue—on planes academic-intellectualdiscursive, with their psycho-political and socio-political implications—to make noises. But now not so much, because I am at home, but precisely because I am not at home. Those around the bend of the River Congo did not intend to strike chords with Conrad’s men. But this collection of chapters aims to stir up, jolt, and challenge thinking and practices first and foremost in me, and on the part of others—all critical-thinking and humanity-sensitive beings (not at all limited to the study of religion). This collection aims to have this effect by playing up some poignant and compelling resonances with and parallels to the practices and sentiments and worldviews of some historical (and legendary) Black-bodied figures— maroons/runagates—including myself, that were made to undergo the

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modern Atlantic world systems of slavery and their ongoing, reverberating epistemic regimes, what I call “scripturalization”/being “scripturalized.” This phenomenon of scripturalization—that which would befall those hooping and yelling in Conrad’s novel—reflects a particular type of violence or enslavement or death, of a literal/physical and/or psychic sort. Beyond pointing to commonalities to some historical figures and events, in these chapters I perform in some respects the continuation and advancement of the ethos and sentiment—the resistances or ex-centric orientations—commonly associated with such figures. In more specific and graphic terms, this collection lays claim to being an argument and a modeling or performance—echoes and continuing reverberations of the hoops and cries, the horn-blowing and warnings, the forms of subterfuge and creativity and, perhaps, even some of the teachable moments from the derring-do gestures and movements and arguments, the strategic programmatic (mis)judgments and (mis)steps, the scripturalizing or practices of signifying (on) scriptures—of those figures of history and legend called maroons, runagates, escapees from the modern Western slavocracies and continuing related politics, ideologies, practices, epistemic codes, and regimes. The most basic point of the comparison to the maroon figure has to do with the urgent need—on my part, and so I challenge readers of whatever disciplinary or field identification, of whatever profession or work arena—to think again and ever more deeply and critically about the formation, through various means, mostly through discursive games and regimes, of a world based on humiliation and abjection, especially, of the Black-fleshed. The lesson left by the maroon to all—whatever the color of and stripes on the body—is to position the self to be always in a running posture. The always running posture is the poignant meaning of the Black vernacular grammatical form, “gon’” (as in the epigraph of this book): The Black-fleshed must always be on the run and must always be poised to escape, to run away from, to be silent when needed, to make threatening noises when needed, and to undermine the darkness and pain brought on by the violence, the physical and psychic, moral and mental/discursive/intellectual death that the anti-Blackfleshed world has inflicted (persistently on the Black-fleshed) and made natural or scriptural. The death referenced here was experienced first in terms of physical enslavement, and later it was also experienced in terms of ongoing dehumanization and oppression of Black peoples finding themselves in the modern circum-Atlantic worlds. Such death is called now by some theorists “corpsing.”2 Aspects and effects of the slavery and dehumanization that the chapters in this book directly address or evoke and resist, of course, continue to haunt all moderns in different ways and respects, even as slavery’s children are affected most chronically. As one among such children, I have simply had to express myself—in all sorts of tricky, strategic, subtle, and unsubtle

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ways—regarding the lingering aspects and effects of Black flesh having been made scriptures, that is, having been made to be the “savage” “background” to limn out the white world, to help it construct and maintain scripturalization as regime. I maintain it is not only apt but poignant to think about the self-expression, the response to the ongoing situation, in terms of running—not merely running away, although that has often been necessary, a logical response to situations that are toxic and insane and violent. But much more than getting away, the running can and should mean in terms of an intellectually persistent and psycho-politically transgressive orientation and development—toward refreshment from time to time, if never redemption. Again, the language in the epigraph—“I’m Gon’ Run”—as scholars of the Black vernacular speech know and have tried to teach us,3 speaks not to intention in regard to some act to be done in the vague far-off future but instead to the poignant present, to what has already been set in motion. “Gon’,” “Gonna,” or “Ima” in Black vernacular speech is not the same as the straightforward simple futureoriented “Going to” in “standard” speech. Here it means—and here I mean to mean!—for all the reasons given in this chapter and cumulatively argued throughout the chapters collected through the years, to continue to run. In this respect, “Gon’” only sounds like the future in order to make emphatic what obtains (or what in this case I commit to continuing to do). I grant that others in history and in the present are running/escaping from different places and on different terms/in different directions. As a scholar, my running should be viewed and responded to in connection with my intellectual projects and published writings and in my academic-scholarly programmatic work. What is collected in this volume is only a sampling of such in order to make the case about the necessity of “running” and the developments—including compromises and setbacks and disappointments, as well as collaborations and accomplishments with various stops/sites—along the way. This book represents a type of formation and orientation that is not yet completed but is nonetheless mature and ripe(ning), that is, recognizable so as to be viewed inviting or provocative or instructive and imitable, perhaps, also even disturbing and threatening. The orientation is toward a style of criticism I call here—under some influence from the world of the Black vernacular and from vernacular-sensitive scholarly criticism—“signifyin(g).”4 This term is for me shorthand not merely for a certain recognized vernacular discursive or rhetorical stylin(g) or dissin(g), although some inflections and substantive arguments may be recognized as such by some. More importantly for me, the crux of the matter of the running is about finding voice and sustaining a voice and with it calling out, hooping, and hooting—in ways that make Conrad’s description of such an apt and ironic and poignant reporting from a distance. Yes, I’m “gon’ run,” and my running is experienced by me and by

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others who encounter me as intellectual-discursive noises—about Black flesh matters. It is important to note here that the sites along the way of the running in which (de)formation is accomplished and made for me at least more compelling have been until very recently from within academic institutions. (After having honestly assessed my potential strengths and gifts and dispositions, and despite the almost default thinking and professional direction that my upbringing and youthful experience argued for, I had long ago decided that it was teaching and research, not the clerical/ministerial office, that beckoned and energized me.) On such sites—in several institutions of several types— stumbling-blocks if not havoc and destruction in general and at times particularly at me have been wrought through silences, specialized/technical codes, rationalizations, obfuscations, special forms of manipulation, and violence that have been associated with discourse. It is in one corner within such a site or playpen—the academic study of religion, in the field of scriptural studies (and for a period into the subfield that is New Testament and Christian Origins)—where I applied for the opportunity to be formed, and then I struggled with the challenge to figure out what to do in it, with it, how to survive it, then how to challenge and reshape if not upend it. The chapters included here will help provide for the reader a window into my own development in the corner of the academy where I found myself, with the evidence of attempts at both somewhat simple mimetics and different expressions and models of resistance. The impetus behind and hope for this collection of chapters is that readers may be challenged to stay alert to, and be honest about, the continuing deleterious effects of our complex and haunting shared histories of experiences and be inspired to continue to give them honest and sensitive critical constructive attention. I offer this collection as one individual’s story of capture and escape, of falling back and reaching and leaping forward again as a gesture toward readers who find themselves facing complex near-similar situations, desperately wanting to find exits and voice, voice to sound back on the discursive formation, in this case, in the study of religion, in particular the study of scriptures (as a metonym for the larger scriptural problem). Of course, I also think the example and dynamics relevant for any persons laboring in any academic field. Indeed, in any complex endeavor in the world. Here I feel the need to raise a couple of self-reflecting questions—for my sake and the sake of the reader’s travel with me: Can it be that I have merely made the best of scriptural study for my own psychic development? Or might it be the case that I was allowing myself to “see through” my own flesh that made the gravitation to the scriptural poignant and necessary and compelling? Did my tuning into or away from my Black body make scriptural studies of compelling interest? How should I read such a body in the world? Did

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scriptural studies lead for me at least inevitably to my Black self? Or did it retard the process of discovery, slow down and try to prevent escape? Here I offer the reader my own interpretation of these matters. The reader is here being invited to travel back with me. (But only after having looked with me at the present complex situation, and then assess whether running forward with me is in order.) I assume there is much room for accounting for and assessing differently the different developments (see fig. I.1). From historical criticism to critical history such normally academy-focused jargon, seemingly reflecting little or no larger social reality, appearing to mask political and psycho-social complexity and struggle, may nonetheless be apt and pointed language for describing the major shifts in my intellectual, political, and social-cultural orientation during my full-time academic career of more than thirty years. (The scholarly work continues at fever-pitch and with joy.) I was trained to be a scholar of religion, with primary focus on the Christian Bible, with secondary focus on the comparative history of religions. The scholarly study of the Bible in my (arts-and-sciences-situated)

Figure I.1  A Sketch of Vincent Wimbush by Roland Bainton (1894–1984); pencil on paper, between 1975 and 1978. Bainton was a British-born Reformation historian who taught for more than four decades as Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale University Divinity School. His critically acclaimed and best-known book (among more than thirty written during his career) was Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950). He remained in New Haven and engaged students at Yale Divinity School in his retirement years. It was there that the author encountered Bainton. He was known for his sketches of selected individuals.

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program within the context of a major research university reflected the usual discourses and operations of history—philology, literary-, source-, form-, and rhetorical-criticism. Although some of these methods and approaches and operations developed over centuries and decades beyond their original and long-term functions as part of what was termed historical criticism, they have continued to be used as the cover-all shorthand for traditional work in my field and other fields that focus on the study of texts—“ancient” to “modern.” Such criticism is generally focused on the explication of (canonical) texts, with attention to their “worlds”—their historical and/or literary-rhetorical contexts, and their (hardly ever surprising) substantive messages.​ My scholarly career is an ongoing struggle against, if not escape beyond, what at times seemed to be the deadening self-erasing, self-splitting politics, sensibilities, and operations of colonial-era-defined and -impelled historical criticism, even as I recognized my deepening intellectual socialization and formation in relationship to it. I now recognize different periods in my career that helped get me to what I understand to be the layered consciousness of being a mature and free-thinking human being who has earned a “living” and made a “career” as teacher/scholar as a result of such formation and who has also constantly chafed against it. This developing self-reflexive critical consciousness I associate partly with an extra-academy influence, perhaps, a type of return of the repressed, a coming to my-(race-ialized-)self (not unlike, even as it is located on a rather larger less personal level, the Black Lives Matter movement and, of course so many other earlier unnamed or differently named movements and gestures of consciousness and agency). The critical consciousness was experienced as a turn toward an un-“disciplined” orientation—to the practices of critical history, involving focus not on canonicaltheological-textual interpretation and its highly circumscribed history of implication in and denial of colonial politics and its project (translatio), but textural excavation, the probing of ongoing (not merely some construal of ancient world) human signification and human-making that included me and my kind as complex and agential (signifyin[g]/signification). Arriving at this state of consciousness and orientation has not been natural or easy; it has in fact been hard-fought, with wounds and scars as evidence; and it has occurred in stages. The first stage—from the beginning of my career in the early 1980s to the mid-1990s—had to do with my representation/reinscription of the traditional philological orientation, sensibilities, skills, and practices of Western Enlightenment-inflected academic biblical scholarship. Teaching in a wellregarded graduate professional school of theology in a small town of small private elite colleges in Claremont, California, I further cultivated the skills of the historian (of late ancient circum-Mediterranean religions and culture) and the philologist (of ancient Greek and Latin texts, especially ancient

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Jewish and Christian texts called “scriptures”). And I accepted the agenda of pursuing the historical “facts” in and behind the (ancient) “texts.” Within this system, I worked as an historian of religion and text critic invested in the critical exegesis of the pertinent texts and in the origins, historical development and theorizing of early Christian-ities, with special interest in the history of Western traditions of asceticism and other forms of world renunciation, as my wedge-issue. (Beyond it being the focus of my doctoral dissertation, it was not at the time clear to me why I gravitated toward this wedge-issue. I remain open to the possibility of influences of which I was not then and not even now aware of. But I recognize now some not very well considered or articulated notions and fledgling attempts during those years to connect ascetic behaviors framed by classical and canonical ancient world figures to Black modern-world ascetics, including marronage. Clear enough was my sense that the intellectual and academic program frameworks and the scholars and guilds sharing some of my interests simply did not allow much room for wiggling, for being loud about issues I thought about. No one made pronouncements in my presence about limits I needed to respect; all was baked in the formation cake. I would limit myself.) Thus, for my orientation and work associated with this period, I was granted tenure (in 1990). I was then by any fair measurement a productive and successful historical critic and citizen-scholar, seemingly committed (in my corner of the pretty amorphous but nonetheless recognizable church-inflected academy) to the extension of the masked, unnamed colonial project. The second stage—from the mid-1990s to roughly the year 2002—included my slow and somewhat careful conscious departure from the traditions and orientation of my training and the beginnings of my attempt to construct and model an alternate intellectual orientation and set of interpretive practices. The intellectual departure coincided with my move in 1991 to the mouth of Harlem (New York City) to accept an appointment as full professor at Union Seminary (and adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Religion Department and Classics Department, at Columbia University). Union had long been regarded—from the late nineteenth century and early to middle decades of the twentieth century, at least—as the leading and most prestigious center of Protestant liberalism (including proponents of Black Liberation Theology). It was there, at Harlem’s edge, in a noisy little institution torn by allegiances to social and political activism, on the one hand, and traditional Western intellectualism and scholarship, on the other, that I was provoked to begin (more earnestly and persistently than before) to rethink received intellectual categories, practices, and orientation. I threw myself into conversations and debates around curriculum reform. I emerged as a leader of study groups for serious reform of institutional-academic and intellectual paradigms and agenda. Inspired and challenged by a few very bright and

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intellectually and politically courageous students, I came to the realization that I no longer had the passion to support and project the still reigning and protected intellectual paradigm—U.S. protestant theological inflection of the dominant Western European academy—which Union represented and (notwithstanding a few critics here and there) upheld. In fact, with great irony and as a paradox and shock to me, Union seemed especially in my “Field” (biblical studies)—always Field number One in protestant land—at the time unwilling to address the need for radical rewriting and reorientation, that is, going beyond supporting liberal interpreters and interpreters of an anachronistic, inherently conservative and dangerous discursive paradigm. I could neither find nor fathom myself and its history—much less help others fathom theirs—within the traditional intellectual system and its practices (ironically constructed around the colonial European nation–church nexus model). After having invested much in this dominant traditional-conservative high protestant North American intellectual enterprise, all the time ironically claiming for itself social and political progressivism (that no one minded the registrations of within other Fields, namely, theology), I realized this raising of basic challenging questions about or opting out of the way things had long been ordered was not going to be easy. But I resolved to admit to myself that in the intellectual work I was doing, in the ancient texts I was exegeting and the ancient world I was excavating, I could not see or hear myself, I was splitting myself and could not find meaning or intellectual passion in what I was doing. (Although this situation had obtained from the beginning of my graduate studies, the newness of the experience was motor enough to keep one moving along at a clip pace without slowing down for much-needed reflection. The experience had by this time in the 1990s proved to be intolerable and unacceptable.) I began in earnest to change my focus and intellectual agenda—from the reconstruction of the (still mainly unproblematized) ancient Greco-Roman world context and the pursuit of the correct content-meaning of the ancient Christian texts—as apologetic fronts for modern colonial arrangements— to the problematics of the meaning of seeking meaning in relationship to ancient iconic texts called “scriptures.” I committed myself to the raising of what I came to consider the most basic question that should be raised prior to the question regarding the content-meaning of the iconic texts (an agenda intended to defend the entire enterprise of Western religious-theological, as well as “secular” political interests). I began to ask not so much about the meaning of this or that text but about the psycho-social/political work we make texts do for us. I had begun raising the questions and issues of critical history. The most significant intellectual step I took at this time was my decision to make the history of African Americans’ (and more broadly, Black Atlantic)

10

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experiences and expressions and practices the subject not only to think about but “to think through.” I became convinced that the default socio-religiouscultural and academic thinking and practices would continue to presume the “scriptures” to be “white,” that is, to be the mostly unacknowledged representations and projections of the dominant history and culture. I then began to conceptualize and develop a multi-disciplinary and collaborative research project on “African Americans and the Bible” that modeled a different academic-intellectual orientation, and thereby challenged the dominant paradigm that defined a number of different academic fields and programs. (I also agreed to serve during this period as the first chair of what became the Committee on Underrepresented Minorities in the Profession in the Society of Biblical Literature. Among the initiatives of this committee, the convening of recruitment conferences that aimed to explain to persons of color what the field was about and to encourage consideration of coming our way. Obviously, the colors of flesh mattered here.) Over a period of two years, beginning in 1997, I set up what was the first ever of a series of structured but enormously dynamic and intensive colloquia among different types of scholars—historians, philosophers, culture critics, theologians, literary critics, social scientists, visual art historians, musicologists, and religion scholars around the topic African Americans and the Bible. These experiences led to my convening the first major international conference on the topic in New York City in 1999 (see fig. I.2). (The conference was attended by more than 200 persons—scholars of many different fields and disciplines, and also community activists [see fig. I.3]. A well-received publication, African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. V. L. Wimbush [2000, 2001], resulted. This included my programmatic essay, “Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures,” which appears in this volume as chapter 6.) Grant support for all such initiatives included the Lilly Endowment, in support of three-year research project on African Americans and the Bible, September 1996—August 1999; the Ford Foundation, in support of the Contemporary Ethnography Project (in relationship to African Americans and the Bible Research Project), October 1998—September 1999; a Ford Foundation Planning Grant, in support of planning the next stages in and shape of the African Americans and the Bible Research Project, November 2000–2002; and a Ford Foundation Grant, in support of the continuation and reconceptualization of the project and its transition from New York to Claremont, California (covering the period October 2002–September 2003).​​ During these years, I began in earnest to facilitate conversation that represented the turn to critical history—the layered and expansive history of the complex interrelationship of people and phenomena and dynamics (usually collapsed into this or that reading of a “text”). Such history I understood included me—an expansive, layered, collective, historicized me—in respects

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Figure I.2  Cover of the Program for the African Americans and the Bible Conference at Union Theological Seminary, 1999. Author’s collection.

that the colonial philological fields did not. Such history also made use of the Bible as example of scriptures in broader, more comparative, and phenomenological and conceptually elastic terms. Inviting scholars of many different fields and other professionals of different backgrounds into conversation and collaboration, this was the beginning of a new discourse and intellectual project that gave me energy and direction. Although I had some reservations about whether Union as a type of school would prove to be appropriate site for the interests I was developing, I had nevertheless thought Union might continue to be a good place for me. But this was for several reasons not to be the case. The third stage—from 2003 to 2009—represents my acceptance of more academic-intellectual and programmatic risk-taking with the new orientation and intellectual project: I took up the ongoing challenge to balance focus upon my own world and its traditions and forms of expressions with comparative work, with traditions and expressions of many different peoples. This acceptance reflects my assumption that the experiences of African Americans (and the Black Atlantic and the larger African diaspora) are different from

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Figure I.3  Participants at the African Americans and the Bible Conference. Author’s collection.

others, but not altogether exceptional or unique, that such experiences are not to be studied as exotica but as analytical windows onto fascinating broadly shared if not universal practices, expressions, and experiences. What I began doing in this period represents not the abandonment but expansion of the African Americans and the Bible project. I began to make use of continuing research on African Americans and the Bible as a wedge for theorizing about and building a critical studies program around “scriptures” as a complex historical-comparative phenomenon in society and culture. A physical institutional move with the potential to do a very different kind of work was made along with the differently defined intellectual programmatic move. I returned, oddly enough, to the West(ern edge of the United States): I accepted a senior faculty appointment at the Claremont Graduate University (a part of the Claremont Colleges Consortium) in 2003. And having already conceived it before the move, I convened in February 2004 another international conference (see fig. 1.4). This was the Inaugural Event (“Theorizing Scriptures”) for the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS; sig​nify​ings​criptures​​.org). (The naming of the latter was probably seen as odd. Not noticed by most, I assume, was that the name was intended to be a signifying on, a counter, of a sort, to the already established and recognized Institute for Antiquity and Christianity [IAC]. The latter was very much in imitation of the German and larger European orientation to colonialist historical recovery,

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Figure I.4  Cover of the Program for the Inaugural Conference for the Institute for Signifying Scriptures in Claremont, California, 2004. Author’s collection.

that is, to the establishment of links between antiquity and European civilization, through special focus on what Christianism meant.) ISS was established as a center to facilitate the sort of multi-layered, trans-disciplinary research on “scriptures” that I had for many years sought to encourage and model (see fig. 1.5). This rather unique research institute still has as among its agenda the forcing of certain simple and basic but disturbing questions and issues about the complex phenomenon of “scriptures”—what they are; how they are invented; the work we make them do for us; what they represent in the politics of language and discourse; and the power dynamics and relations they create and foster and delimit. Because of what we can learn from shifting the focus of research of a syndrome or phenomenon from dominants or presumed “traditional” or “normal” subjects (cf. medical research), I placed privileged but not exclusive focus upon ex-centrics, that is, historically dominated peoples. This represented a recognized analytical-conceptual breakthrough, the invention of a different field of research.​​

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Figure I.5  Participants in the 2004 ISS Inaugural Conference. Author’s collection.

Recognition and financial support came from the Ford Foundation for the establishment of the ISS in the form of a major grant ($600,000), October 2004—September 2006, at Claremont Graduate University. In 2006, The Henry W. Luce Foundation provided a three-year grant for general operational costs of ISS. As an indication of its commitment to my initiatives, in 2009, the Ford Foundation provided a second major three-year grant ($600,000) for the ongoing research and operations of ISS. The programmatic initiatives and accomplishments during this period were many: Brown Bag Discussion Sessions came to be widely recognized as a site of cross-disciplinary conversation on the campuses of the Claremont Colleges, and in that larger community, a book series (Signifying [on] Scriptures) was established ; the production of documentary film projects (Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures; Finding God in the City of Angels); conceptualization and leadership of a collaborative inter-field ethnographic research project on scripture-reading among communities of color in the United States; conceptualization and establishment of a new PhD program (Critical Comparative Scriptures). The ISS became a thriving center of academic-intellectual activity and programming.​​ The fourth period begins roughly in 2008 or 2009 and extends into the present. This is the period that I have claimed for my own research work and writing on the basis of the years of collaborative work and conversations, programs and projects that I had conceptualized, organized, and facilitated. Of

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course, I have been writing all along, all through the years of my academicintellectual organizational leadership. That I had been somewhat successful in my double-leveled efforts over many years to continue my own research and scholarship and facilitate new collaborative research initiatives can be seen in the honor I was given by my peers in my election in 2010 as president of the Society of Biblical Literature. I continued during this period, the work of conceptualizing collaborations and convening scholarly meetings. One of the most meaningful and challenging collaborative projects of my career was the multiple-year project that involved transdisciplinary excavation of the practices and performances in “underrepresented” communities. The project/conference was entitled “Reading Scriptures, Reading America: Interruptions, Orientations, and Mimicry Among U.S. Communities of Color.” The conference was convened in October 2009. The book was entitled MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference (2013). My opening address was “Knowing Ex-Centrics/Ex-Centric Knowing.” This project was after “African Americans and the Bible” project and book publication, something of a second big turning point for me: it demonstrated the kind of scholarship that brought together all the issues that had over the years captured my imagination and given me a charge of enthusiasm and energy. As a reflection of and complement to this level and type of work, and after having had enough experiences with institutional colleagues and administrators that proved to be discouraging, exhausting, and frustrating, I made in 2014 the hard decision to resign from the professoriate in order to devote myself to the advancement of the research mission and focus of ISS and to my own research and writing. Taking into consideration the risks involved, I took this step because after thirty years of effort, I became convinced that the traditional programs with which I was affiliated in the academy would not likely support or help advance the transgressive research focus and orientation of the ISS. Because I believe such work to represent the future that had already been initiated in the globalized twenty-first century—and now most especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter movements—I continue to be willing to devote myself to its advancement. Insofar as the focus and orientation of ISS includes critical analysis of the dynamics and politics of scripturalizing, relations of discourse and power, politics that are complexly situated in the academy, I needed to face the difficult decision about what had to be done to secure momentum for the work already initiated by ISS. I took the challenging, but also exciting step of doing what had to be done to expand and secure the work of ISS: I made the decision in 2014 to make ISS an independent scholarly organization that facilitates and represents safe space for research work on scriptures as shorthand for the politics of language, a new trans-disciplinary discourse and field of research (see figs. I.6 and I.7).

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Figure I.6  Cover for the Program of the Ten-Year Meeting of the ISS, 2014. Author’s collection.

This risky move also made the way for me to begin to pursue in earnest and to expand and deepen and radicalize the nearly career-long projects on which I have been working and which model the work to which ISS is committed. Now construed and designed in terms of multiple volumes, this project (“signifying [on] scriptures”) is centered on the history of uses of scriptures—or meanings of meaning-seeking and identity formation—within the Black Atlantic. (White Men’s Magic [2012] and Scripturalectics [2017] are books that are part of the big project that now require expansion and revision.) I am by no means finished with this big project. My most creative work is still percolating. I consider such work my mature personal individual scholarly statement. It is slow-cooking and well-seasoned, a result of many years of teaching, grants-writing, and institution-building, but also the outcome of many years of listening and (re) learning, facilitating, lecturing, leading, and participating in trans-disciplinary and collaborative conversation and research. The invitation to spend the academic year 2015–2016 as Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar was a great honor and, more important, the beginning of rich opportunities to transition—escape or run—to the disciplinarily transgressive scholarship to which I had for years been leaning. Finally, I should like to return to this collection of essays as a whole. And, again, I turn to the epigraph. The words are taken from the title of a song (You Better Run) made famous (now collected in the Smithsonian Institution) by

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Figure I.7  Poster for the First Annual Meeting of the Independent ISS, 2016. Author’s collection.

a preacher, Reverend C. J. Johnson, whom I encountered when as a young boy I accompanied my grandmother to one of his special non-primetime afternoon song services in Atlanta. Dr. Johnson’s métier was song—he wrote and styled and channeled “old-fashioned” non-musical-instrumental Black spiritual songs, the performance of which in those years in some circles in urban settings had been forced outside the regular (white/black bourgeoisieaspirant) services. My grandmother was among those who constituted the following of such non-prime-time services and their stars. The song has obviously been with me, has haunted me, for several decades. I have since learned that although Johnson may have been the one to make the song famous—timing and location and some luck come into play—he was not the inventor of the song whole cloth. The song has its origins (with a different title, I’m Gonna Run) in circles that go back at least to the 1920s, with the recordings of Blind Willie Johnson and the Wiseman Sextette.5 There should be little doubt that given the basic sentiments emoted, versions of the song likely go back much farther in time. The rendering of the song in the

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epigraph is taken from Blind Willie’s version of the song. (Johnson’s version has, since my discovery of earlier versions, come to represent something of the aspirations of the urban Black working-classes, with their nostalgic turns, back to another place and time, and also rhythms.) The verses—made up of different rather clever scenes, dynamics, or events from the Bible—never made much sense to me. But the title and refrain—“You Better Run!”/“I’m Gonna Run”—reverberated and challenged and even unsettled me, inspiring me and forcing me into wrestling with and rolling over many issues that the song opened up but did not address directly. The chapters included here—twenty-eight in number—are divided into four major sections, reflecting as, the title of this introduction suggests, the cursus fugae, the different stages in my psycho-social, academic/intellectual, and social-political development. The sections reflect the different stages of the one phenomenon that defines me and through me the argument and challenge of this book—escape. As is usually the case with escape, there may be some circling about; there is no clear straight line ahead. The chapters included here may represent revisiting some arguments as sites returned to along the way. But I think the reader will find that with each circling back—to arguments, themes, conversations with other thinkers (W.E. B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, et al)—I discover something more and add something new. There is evolution in my thinking, to be sure, but there are also recursive hoops and yells around a few matters6. Hence, the following sections as stops—and/as insights and engagements and struggles—as I run along the way: I. Contemptus Mundi; Or, Hōs Mē: Initiation into a Discursive Formation II. “Hitting a Lick with a Crooked Stick”; Or, “Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures”: Oblique Critique of the Discursive Formation III. Signifying on Scriptures; Or, Reading Textures, Gestures, Power: Efforts at Reorientation and Reformation Within the Veil of Formation; and IV. “I’m Buildin’ Me a Home”; Or, “[I] Had to Run”: Expansive and Safe Space for “Composing” the Human/“World” The work over the years behind the chapters has for me been profound. The roiling has convinced me that on account of the persistent violence focused on, even defining, Black flesh, the running is absolutely necessary; and also that the orientation to, the direction of, and the psychic plane on which, I run remains for me compelling. This is the impact I am hoping the collected essays will have on readers—of whatever type of flesh. Given the connection made here between the fraught history of ideologization or scripturalization/ scripturalectics of Black flesh and the construction of “world,” not simply the Black-fleshed person, there is a challenge to all peoples to run as sign of fighting. I had to run because I came to “see through” Black Flesh the violent

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scripturalization, that is, I came to understand (that) Black Flesh Matters.7 Because modern-world violent scripturalization, notwithstanding its primary focus on Black flesh, infects all, why would escape not be the challenge for all those of the flesh? NOTES 1. Great Short Works of Joseph Conrad (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967), 246. 2. See in re: the concept, David Marriott, Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), xv, 90, 318–30, 332–36. See Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright Publishing 2020), in terms of compelling engagement of larger issues, but without working the term itself. 3. See John R. Rickford, African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), chap. 4. 4. See use/spelling of and accounting of this term in Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). See also Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), and his construal of the category as a heavy substantive. These two critics have most influenced me. Other critics have since taken up the terminology and played differently with it. I have preferred spelling of the verbal form without the parenthesis in order to indicate the already layered rendering. 5. Both versions are preserved by and can be accessed through the Smithsonian Institution. 6. So then, dear reader, I hope you will have patience with some repetition in this collection. It represents a true picture of my not letting go, my ongoing wrestling with issues and problems, struggling to place them (and some carriers or translators) in different historical and social and argumentative contexts. One might say that they helped fuel, direct and influence the rhythms of my psycho-political and intellectual running. 7. See the cleverness of language play and the perspicacity of thinking about and discussion of epistemic issues in W.J. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). And as for matters having to do with “the flesh,” one simply must read, as I have several times (each time being provoked and challenged by different issues,) the stunning and now famous programmatic essay by Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81. Her challenge is the reason I stick with and continue to fathom “the flesh” (as opposed to body, and so forth). And her title signals patient anticipation of someone of my training and sensibilities slowly coming to “see” Black flesh as all too fateful text begging to be taken up and to then to be fathomed.

Part I

CONTEMPTUS MUNDI; OR, HŌS MĒ INITIATION INTO A DISCURSIVE FORMATION

Chapter 1

Contemptus Mundi The Social Power of an Ancient Rhetorics and Worldview (1992)

In his puzzling and fascinating poem “To Nike,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggested that perceptions and constructs of reality can be too often what religion scholar James M. Robinson, in engaging the poem along with other issues, termed “a game of solitaire . . . of catching on rebound the ball thrown by oneself, the resubjectivizing of what one has objectified,” mere “‘boomerang” philosophies and theologies: So long as you catch what you yourself have thrown, All is skill and justifiable winnings

When he engaged Rilke in the mid-1960s, Robinson had already established himself as one of the leaders in New Testament scholarship with his work on the New Quest and the New Hermeneutic. He concluded then that some philosophies and theologies of the day had once found it especially difficult to resist playing the game of solitaire. But now they were beginning to sober up to the point that they could be distinguished in terms of “world” —“understandings of world” as part of the cultivation of skills in “catching the ball” our cosmic “playmate” has thrown our way.1 It is about “world”‒‒about particular contemporary (American and Western) understandings of and responses to the “ball” that has been thrown our way, about the challenge that lies in a particular rhetorics and worldview that is ancient in its origins, including, but not exclusive to, Christianity— that I should like to speak. In addressing such a theme, I should like also to attempt to model a particular type of scholarship—new historicist and cultural-critical, multi-disciplinary, at points even shamelessly anti-disciplinary, hopelessly experimental, with contemporary cultural situations and issues as presupposition for attention to things ancient, with focus always on the 23

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longue durée. This characterizes the type of scholarship with which I hope to be associated in years to come here at Union, even if—and this is entirely likely—I fall short of the mark in this address. Harold Bloom, literary critic of Yale fame and beyond, is at it again. Convinced, as far too many of us are not, that religion is a fascinating intellectual and cultural-critical topic, he has now turned his attention to the work he calls “religious criticism,” involving the characterization and criticism of expressions of the religious in American culture. This time he has gone beyond concern about “J” and its authorship; this time he has gone too far— into the religions of Greco-Roman antiquity. In an effort to account for the origins and orientation of the dominant strand of contemporary “American Religion,” he has turned to some of the religious impulses of Greco-Roman antiquity‒‒Christianity, Judaism, Gnosticism. It is one thing to be playful with “J”; it is another to argue boldly, as he does, that the dominant strand of contemporary “American Religion”—otherworldly and radically individualistic, mostly conservative and fundamentalist Christian, but also found among those of other (including other Christian) persuasions‒‒is ideological heir to the Gnosticism of late antiquity. Bloom can speak ably for himself: Religion, in the ostensibly Protestant United States, is something subtly other than Christianity . . . we are post-Protestant, and we live in a persuasive redefinition of Christianity. A blend of ancient heresies and nineteenth-century stresses, the American Religion moves towards the twenty-first century with an unrestrained triumphalism, easily convertible into our political vagaries. And the American Religion, for its two centuries of existence, seems to be irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom; from nature, time, history, community, other selves.2

This argument cannot go without a response. Not only because in substance it is a fascinating argument but also because as a model of “religious criticism” it provides opportunity for the scholar of religion, especially the historian of religion, to engage broader cultural-critical issues and to reframe normally, narrowly focused technical work into cultural criticism. But most important, Bloom must be answered because, on the matter of substance of argument, he is, if not wrong, at least not provocative or radical enough. The dominant strand of American religion, rightly characterized as conservative and fundamentalist and as obsessively individualistic and escapist, should not be argued to have its origins in, or even to have a fundamental affinity with, the Gnosticism and/or Gnosis of late antiquity. This is so because contemporary U.S. conservatives and fundamentalists, their rhetorics notwithstanding, are not otherworldly, or anti-worldly, enough; they do not

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share seriously what was the impetus for the discovery of and obsession upon the self so fundamental to self-styled Gnostics and many others in late antiquity‒‒contemptus mundi. In Rilkian terms, they have not caught the “thrown ball” that is “world” that they have themselves thrown in a particular required trajectory. They do not share the Gnostic “world”‒‒complex, comprehensive, and radical in its “outworldly” stance.3 This difference is important not for the sake of the historian making points at the expense of a literary critic. It is important because although Bloom may be correct in arguing that the contemporary dominant strand in the “religion-soaked,” “religion-mad” United States is its obsessive focus upon freedom and solitude, it is not at all clear that the freedom and solitude of Americans should be identified with, or be seen as derivative of, the ancient Gnostics. At any rate, the matter clearly warrants further examination, within the framework not of the history of ideas but of the history of “world”‒‒of that “world” for which contemptus mundi is provocative shorthand. The expression contemptus mundi (“contempt for the world”) is representation both for a recognized literary genre and a worldview. As literary genre (and by extension rhetorics or discourse), it is associated with a certain type of literature that proliferated in the late Middle Ages (eleventh and twelfth centuries).4 As worldview and social orientation, it is ancient in origins, going back to the proliferation of new, interstitial social formations or networks of (Far and Near Eastern, and Greco-Roman and Western) antiquity, including the complex of movements that came to be known as formative Judaism and Christianity. Initially appearing and developing “between the cracks” of traditional formations in holistic societies, these formations were reifications of transcendental visions.5 The philosophers, prophets, sages, seers, and wisdom teachers of the “little societies” stretching from India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Arabia, and all around the eastern and western Mediterranean, from roughly 600 BCE to 700 CE (corresponding to K. Jaspers’s “Axial Age”), came to define themselves as carriers of transcendental visions and impulses over against “world.” The latter came to be conceptualized and problematized as the realm of relations, mores, traditions, and orientations in tension with the newly discovered “world above”; or “world to come,” the realm of ideas‒ ‒and so forth. The rhetorics of the visionaries, reflecting social station and psychic states, was oppositional and often hyperbolic. I would argue that ancient Christianity (through Augustine) in all its diversity of expressions and orientations can be understood as a historical complex of social formations that were carriers of contemptus mundi. This means that the different, even conflicting orientations, and the debates in extant ancient Christian literary and other sources, can be understood in light of this worldview. But such a history of ancient Christian “loss of world” requires reconsideration of old interpretive assumptions and schemas. It will

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no longer do, for example, to assume that ancient Christianity is the dramatic history of the inevitable “catholicization” or “bourgeoisification” or “worldaccommodation”: A historical-rhetorical reading of the primary ancient Christian sources in association with comparative readings suggests that “loss of world” remained a fundamental assumption and ideological touchstone throughout the period of ancient Christianity, in spite of internal and external opposition. How to come to speech about it, how it would be translated into world orientations would be matter of much debate, thus, impetus for rhetorical experimentation and enormous literary productivity.6 I want to state as clearly as possible my view, in light of the reading and re-reading of ancient Christian and other sources, that contemptus mundi is not only a key to a clearer understanding of a quite popular ancient rhetorics and worldview, it is also a provocative challenge to modern sensibilities, religious or otherwise. If my argument that extant ancient Christian texts document not so much the steady development toward world-accommodation or “secularization,” or something of the kind, but instead the nuancing of translations of transcendental visions and impulses, then discussions about the appropriation of “Christian tradition” ought to be put in a different key: Not only must the world-accommodating developmental reading of ancient Christianity (still quite popular in high places!) be challenged but also some reigning assumptions about the socio-political ramifications and utility of transcendental, so-called “otherworldly” visions and impulses. I am prepared to argue that one of the most powerful, provocative, and challenging legacies of ancient Christianity for the modern world is contemptus mundi as rhetorics and worldview. The power that I discern in contemptus mundi is social and rhetorical. It is, of course, not specifically or uniquely, Christian. I emphasize again that the world in which the Jesus movement began was full of prophets, sages, seers, and philosophers, competing with one another over translations and reifications of transcendental visions. These were numerous and diverse enough that a comparative history and taxonomy of renunciations in the ancient world is possible.7 Robinson had discovered the foundations of a genuine history of understandings of “world” among the early Christians in Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament (2 vols; 1948–1952).8 This major project, however, was finally considered by Robinson to be flawed, more systematic than historical, ordered according to Bultmann’s own prejudices toward the particular understandings of such associated with Pauline and Johannine theologies. In his provocative essay published in 1968 (see note 1), Robinson offered the outline of such an interpretive history. But he soon thereafter abandoned the project for other academic games.

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Nevertheless, Robinson stayed focused on the subject of “world” long enough to be characteristically provocative. He urged the complete abandonment of the history of ideas associated with particular authors for the sake of the comprehensive and complex “tracing of world as it comes into language”: He proposed the term “trajectory” as the appropriate rubric for the different understandings of “world” that can be associated with the dynamics and orientations of early Judaisms and Christianities. The trajectory in terms of the most general description ranges from “loss of world” to “worldly world”: A more detailed charting of the trajectory establishes the relative nature of “worlds” from the perspective of “loss of world.” It identifies a movement from “Jewish apocalypticism” to “Christian apocalypticism” to “Jewish Gnosticism” to “Christian Gnosticism,” with different texts and authors reflecting different “modulations.”9 Paul’s differences with the Jewish Palestinian mission, for example, may be viewed as a more “otherworldly world” against the more “worldly” concern with profit and the public approbation of the wandering missionary. Against the radical asceticism of the pneumatic elites of Corinth, his famous and haunting hōs mē exhortations, framed by eschatological pronouncements, actually represent a more worldly “world.” The Johannine community, defining itself with the mantric “not . . . of this world,” was nevertheless split between factions representing more or less adequate “worldly” imaginings and remembrances of Jesus. The figures behind the defensive worldliness of the Pastorals, however, were hardly viewed as established citizens by established citizens. The communities behind the apocryphal acts and gnostic documents were the most radical in their contemptus mundi. They considered their enemies to be all others— including other believers—who had not been seized by gnosis, who were initiated into the inner circle and pledged to a life of uncompromising enmity with the world. Even Augustine, usually considered a worldly figure by most scholarly interpretive measurements, can be better understood as advancing contemptus mundi in his mature, perhaps most influential work, The City of God, insofar as he encourages the desacralization and depolitization of the empire‒‒in fact, of every empire or social and political order, whether headed by a Constantine or a Julian! For Augustine, pace Eusebian establishment court theology, there could be no such thing as a Christian empire. The Christian is always a pilgrim and stranger‒‒peregrinus.10 These and other examples of contemptus mundi had important social (and power) ramifications in the context of the Roman empire. The great differences and conflicts notwithstanding, contemptus mundi among the earliest Christians and contemporaries was a complex of rhetorics and was recognized as a discursive formation, a “matrix of meaning,” within which a range of certain sentiments were expressed and practices and relations obtained

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according to certain rules and assumptions. These rules and assumptions constituted an “ideological formation,” a set of “ideological relations”—a “worldview.”11 But insofar as contemptus mundi represented worldview, it was worldview in opposition to the dominant worldview and its social order, and all of the contradictions and practices represented in the exercise of dominance. Contemptus mundi represented a “disidentification” with every reigning ideological formation. This “unforgetting” of the psychic strait-jackets normally imposed on every individual in a culture was accomplished through language or rhetoric, the one common tool or weapon of all. The evocation of oppositional “sentiment” in Greco-Roman culture was registered through discourses and newly created channels of communication in such a manner as to provide a rhetorical and ideological place for minorities and ex-centrics to stand.12 Contemptus mundi should not, therefore, be identified as mere otherworldliness, as escapism and powerlessness, passivity and victimization, or the idealization of such. It is, instead, a coming into power through speech, a language of critique, one of the “arts of resistance.”13 But even the negative or opposite does not fully explain its social function and power. Its force is double-sided: it represents serious focus upon, and a problematizing of, world. The over-against-ness should be seen as part of a strategy in order to gain ground, space, power for the rethinking and reframing of world. The loss of world, the taking out of world, was not an end in itself but part of a move to gain new perspective for a new prioritization of world.14 Granted the pervasiveness of contemptus mundi in the ancient world, including the world of early Christianity, how might it figure in our times and situations? How has it traveled? There are important implications first for the critical study of religion, in general, and of early Christianity, in particular. To focus on contemptus mundi is to focus on ethos and worldview, what C. Geertz refers to as the “evaluative elements,” the “cognitive, existential aspects,” the “tone, character, and quality . . . and mood” of life, a “picture of the way things are” in a particular culture.15 To focus on contemptus mundi as worldview and ethos, then, is not to focus on the history of ideas or systematic theologies or ethical propositions and moral norms in the study of religion. I would in another forum want to argue that the study of religion in general should not be carried out under the banner of the history of ideas; I argue here most vehemently with respect to the study of early Christianity in particular that no continuity in the history of ideas is even possible. As argued earlier, there is no getting from the ideas or theology of “Q” to Matthew to the stories of Thecla to Augustine in a straight line or within simple single cultural network.16 Religion can never be reduced to a complex of ideas; it is not fundamentally or strictly theology, or even ethical propositions or norms or certain types of

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required behavior. Religion is worldview and social force, and the study of it should reflect as much. Contemptus mundi represents a worldview, arguably the most powerful of worldviews that can be related to the earliest Christians. It is provocation for certain rhetorical and social formations. Focus upon it forces attention away from or beyond preoccupation with a particular writer’s position on certain ethical or theological issues—marriage, law, slavery, women, and so forth. It does not assume that the rhetorics about such are transparent and reflective of self-definitions. They are not; particular moral and ethical and other ideas, arguments, propositions, orientations can have multiple meanings and function quite differently in the same and across different rhetorical formations. No moral and ethical or any other type of discourse can be understood, can be engaged and accepted, unless it is assumed to be part, even a problematic part, of a worldview, a “picture of the way things . . .are.” Worldview always governs the particular ethical and moral positions and their discourses and behaviors, notwithstanding the fact that very often particular individuals, communities, and rhetorics reflect degrees of contradictory and problematic shifts and modulations in it. The pervasive force of contemptus mundi among transcendental communities suggests that religion is, more than anything else, an attempt to realize in social orientation and rhetorical formation particular worldviews. This, in turn, suggests the possibility of a history of religions that would focus upon the shifts, the “rising and falling” of “world” and of world-construction. That a basis for a more consistent framework for the comparative study of religion is a potential goal with this scholarly agenda is clear and should be encouraged for this reason alone. With contemptus mundi an entirely different set of heuristic categories and typologies suggest themselves in the interpretation of religions. We would discover the necessity of, and the delight in, the shifting of conceptual boundaries between and within religious traditions. With worldviews in focus, we might find it intellectually profitable, for example, to associate certain Buddhists with certain Baptists and find justification in claiming such association to be reflective of a more profound understanding of the religious impulse than the concept of denominationalism. A focus upon contemptus mundi can also provide guidance for general contemporary cultural and religious understandings and orientations. With respect to Western culture and Christian traditions in particular, contemptus mundi represents a significant challenge. Our situation in urban late twentieth-century America, having been defined by transnational capitalism and its power to create and disseminate information and transcultural images and values, now seems to reflect enormous shifts and modulations. There is great dissatisfaction with, and a falling away from, many forms and expressions of totalisms that accompanied the rise of capitalism and modernism, including

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theological modernism (some forms of which, I must add, are associated with Union’s self-defined glory days!) The present situation, whether accurately termed “postmodern,” or “late capitalism”—perhaps, inspired by the weight of the many contradictions of modernity‒‒now seems to reflect a trend toward a relativizing of the modernist penchant for historicist distantiation, toward a reexamination of progressive-liberal embarrassment over and disdain for the peoples, relics, and orientations of the past, a questioning of the secular trend toward a stripping away of the archaic and exotic. This “antimodernism” has inspired “new social movements” that seek “openings” onto forms of “cultural otherness,” relationships with other worlds characterized by attempts at “simulation,” not mere demythologized and ritualized “commemoration.”17 (That these attempts can result in both fundamentalisms of the left and the right is clear from our history and is warrant for the constant critique of every worldview.) Thus, in our times and in our situation—the late modern, if not postmodern era‒‒contemptus mundi may with some profit be reconsidered. It must be reconsidered if intellectual honesty and openness and the full range of cultural criticism is to be employed. As opening onto cultural otherness, it stands as a powerful challenge and potential social force. It represents one of the most powerful rhetorical and ideological legacies of the ancient world. I am even willing to argue that it is perhaps one of few ancient world legacies deserving of our consideration in a situation of “1ate capitalism.” Worldview alone should capture our attention and challenge us. Worldview alone governs, makes sense of, justifies and/or condemns the particular exhortations and behaviors of archaic rhetorics, visions, and orientations. We should no longer debate writer x’s teachings on any matter. These cannot be deemed relevant for us‒‒certainly not apart from characterization of and identification with that writer’s “world.” Paul’s teachings or rhetorics‒‒about sexuality, marriage, law, to use a few historically controversial examples— have no relevance for us, cannot even be understood, until we have come to understand and identify with his “world,” one of several ancient “outworldly” perspectives. Although the rhetorics of contemptus mundi, like that of love and art, is hyperbolic, and may suggest only the negative, the shrill, or escapism, the psychosocial dynamics are much more complex. The worldview that is contemptus mundi is actually a legacy of critique, of resistance, although without a complete detailed agenda of world reform. It is only a rhetorics, a complex of visions of world criticism. But it assumes that no world order can ever be adequate or correct. It represents perennial challenge, perennial review, constant renewal, not the dismissal of and escape from, but the relativization of, the world, an opportunity and a conceptual and psychical field for the

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reprioritization, hierarchicalizing of our givens (world). It always assumes the imperative of reform. Harold Bloom’s attempts to link the Gnostics of late antiquity with the devotees of late twentieth-century American religion are questionable: Not only does the linkage smack of exploitation of the Gnostics in debates with contemporaries, viewing them as the go-to example of exotics—an exercise much in evidence throughout history, beginning already in late antiquity—it also represents failure to go beyond the game of solitaire insofar as behaviors are abstracted from worldview. Bloom and others18 have argued persuasively that American culture, in general, including the dominant strand of American religion, is characterized by radical individualism. But the discovery or cultivation of the individual or of radical individualism in the United States or elsewhere does not require late antique Gnosticism as antecedent. At any rate, the Gnostics of late antiquity would be hard pressed to find common ground with modern-day Americans, especially with conservative devotees of the dominant strand of American religion. This is so not because of differences in certain notions about the individual, but because of differences in what is more fundamental‒‒“world.” Americans would be considered far too worldly, far too unwilling to level and sustain radical critique against culture and society, to qualify for membership in Gnostic circles! Hence, Bloom’s focus upon particular behaviors, and the lack of focus upon “world,” made his comparison between American religion and ancient Gnosticism provocative but ultimately indefensible. Nevertheless, as this address suggests, it provides impetus, even need, for our reconsideration of dominant worldviews of our times and of the ancient worldview associated with the outworldly. None of us, as is often the case with the engagement of religious traditions at the level of ideas or ethical and moral propositions, can embrace or dismiss contemptus mundi easily. It is not a system of thought. It is not a complex of ethical propositions. It is more comprehensive, a rhetorics and worldview, a discursive and rhetorical formation ever productive of new social formations—formations that represent constant renewal, constant reform and social force, a place to stand from which to shout and constitute and reconstitute the self. The power of contemptus mundi, then, lies in what it provides in imagination and discursive formation—“weapons” available to all, even or especially the “weak,” the minority, for real-world reform and renewal. It suggests that only radical, sustained problematization of world provides impetus for world change. Thus, the question for us remains whether and to what extent we are interested in being other- or “out-worldly” enough in order to gain power to affect change in ourselves and the world. If my argument that only worldviews—not particular ethical proscriptions or

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exhortations—are important in the interpretation and engagement or rejection of archaic religions, that Christianity as an archaic religion is fundamentally a proliferation of social formations inspired by contemptus mundi as worldview, then the question for our times and situation is not whether, for example, the Pastoral Letters’ teachings about slavery are to be embraced, but whether the “outworldly” perspective that inspired rhetoric about slavery and other matters is to be countenanced. All our modern theological and religious differences and conflicts notwithstanding, most of us make decisions and live our lives according to an “inworldly,” as opposed to “outworldly,” perspective. This is the reason for our difficulties with, even embarrassment over, the Bible, our ancient “outworldly” religious text. It is also the reason that the poor and marginal groups engage these texts—in spite of our modernist puzzlement and efforts to direct them to more “progressive” agenda and hermeneutics and formations in response. And such groups, it should be noted, engage these texts not as mere commemorative rhetorics, but as their “world.” If my arguments are defensible, the modernists’ difficulty with Christianity may be understood as a matter ultimately not of (the challenge of radically different) hermeneutical agenda, but of world-position and solidarity. If Christianity can be argued to be one of the many socio-cultural carriers of contemptus mundi, the question before us may not be, according to Bloom and others, whether we are Christian or post-Christian, but whether we want to be associated with any “outworldly” movement that, in Rilkian terms, represents the catching, in a particular trajectory, of the “balls” thrown our way by a cosmic playmate. The total Rilkian point, I think—at any rate, the point of this address—is that transcendental impulses and visions should be “caught” over and over again until human existence can come to be seen as “thrownness,” as transcendence itself, as outworldliness in the world with all the profundity, the potential for good and bad, that such thrownness has had and will always have in the world. I end as I began with Rilke and the continuation of his marvelous double, not simply mixed, metaphors about world transcendence and its consequences: . . . And if, not resting here, you’d strength and will to throw them back again—no—even more wonderful!—forgot all that, and then found you’d already thrown . . . (as, twice a year, the flocking birds are thrown, the birds that wander, thrown from an older to a younger, yonder, ultramarine warmth)—in that mood of sheer abandon you’d be equal to the game. Both ease and difficulty would disappear: you’d simply throw. A meteor would flame out of your hands and tear through its own spaces . . .19

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NOTES 1. Quotation from Rilke (“‘To Nike”). Translated by J. M. Robinson (from text included in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s preface to his Wahrheit und Methode), in “World in Modern Theology and in New Testament Theology,” in Soli Deo Gloria: New Testament Studies in Honor of William Childs Robinson, ed. J. McDowell Richards (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1968), 88, 90. See also Rainer Maria Rilke: Poems 1906 to 1916, tr. J.B. Leishman (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 260–61. 2. See his The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post­Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 45, 49. 3. See the perspective brought to this issue in Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modem Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chapter 1. 4. See extensive and provocative historical treatment by Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of Western Guilt Culture: 13th-18th Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); and two classic primary texts in Bernard of Cluny (Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny’s De Contemptu Mundi, ed. Ronald E. Pepin [Medieval Texts and Studies No. 8; East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 19911), and Lothario Dei Segni (Pope Innocent III), (On the Misery of the Human Condition [De miseria humane conditionis], ed. Donald R. Howard [Library of Liberal Arts, no. 132; New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969). 5. See S. N. Eisenstadt, The Axial Age Civilization (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 1–25; and Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginnings to A.D. 1760, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapters 1 and 2, for discussion of these concepts. 6. See Mann, Sources of Social Power, 303–10. 7. See Gorge H. Sabine’s A History of Political Theory (4th ed., New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), as one attempt at such a history. 8. trans. Kendrick Grobel (Waco TX: Baylor University Press, 2007). 9. Robinson, “World,” 91–2, 104. 10. See R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and The End of Ancient Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially 1.4. 11. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 195– 97; and John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), chap. 6 re: discursive practices; and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), chap. 5 re: worldview. 12. See Eagleton, Ideology, 221–24; and Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8–11. 13. The is the terminology of James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 14. See Dumont, Essays, 50–51. 15. See C. Geertz, Interpretation, 126–27.

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16. Robinson’s argument in “World…,” 101–2. 17. See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 389. 18. I am thinking here particularly of the work of sociologist Robert Bellah and associates. But see also fairly recently published polemical work by a pastor­ theologian (greatly influenced by Union’s neo-orthodox traditions), Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 19. Poems, 261. See note #1 above.

Chapter 2

Ascetic Behavior and Colorful Language Stories about Ethiopian Moses (1992)

Given the nature of their sources, and the influence and challenges from other fields and disciplines, not to mention the pressures from the lay populace, the various subfields of ancient studies (including the study of ancient Christianity) are now more than ever forced to question the notion of texts as simple sources for reconstructive purposes or unearthing the facts. They are being challenged to engage seriously the problems inherent in relating the study of history and rhetoric, history and textuality, history and the critical study of literature, history and discursive strategies. It seems most useful and appropriate at the outset rather than attempt to make general comments about how the field of ancient Christianity should draw the lines in such matters, to turn attention to particular motifs and issues in a particular complex of ancient Christian texts that can help focus and problematize the issues so as to provide suggestions for further work. I should like to draw attention to two motifs‒‒racial-color differences and ascetic piety: how the former functions as part of the discursive strategies for the valuation and commendation of the latter in a particular complex of ancient Christian texts; what this function suggests first and foremost about the perspectives and orientations of the writers and collectors of such texts and what these perspectives and orientations might reveal about the presence and influence of Black African peoples in ancient Christian literature. My discussion is (by design at this point in my own thinking and research) introductory, exploratory, and schematic. In the first paragraph of her essay entitled “Virginity as Metaphor: Women and the Rhetoric of Early Christianity,” Averil Cameron makes the following provocative statement about the limited perspectival character of the extant ancient Christian literature and its implications as such for scholarship, 35

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including, but not limited to, the study of the presence and influence of women in early Christianity: The rhetoric of the early church was a male rhetoric, and it is only recently that readings of it have not also been male readings. Thus the entire debate about the “position of women in the early church” has taken place, and still must take place, within a framework of male textuality.1

In this passage and in subsequent remarks in the same essay, Cameron directly addresses the problem of the complex relationship between history and (the rhetoric of the) text by arguing that the most pressing intellectual challenge, even if ultimately the primary concern is for historical-reconstructive work, especially with a view to “setting the record straight” about the role of women in early Christianity is an examination of the “misogynistic” rhetoric of ancient Christian texts. The question of how women really fared in the early Christian world is a second-order question, to be approached only after (examination of) the rhetoric of texts.2 Although there are some differences in approaches and nuances, the issue of the Black presence and influence in biblical antiquity, including Near Eastern, Greco-Roman, and Christian antiquity, has been raised from a methodological perspective similar to the one regarding the role of women in ancient Christianity. Both issues, for example, obviously arise from those who have been defined as more or less on the margins of established scholarship. There have been numerous critical and not so critical revisionist histories designed to isolate the African influences upon Western civilization, including early Christianity.3 Given the history of racialization/racism in the West, including Western scholarship, and Christianity as part of its ideological arsenal, there should be little wonder that more than the establishment of the “facts” is and has been at stake in debate about the African presence and influences in biblical traditions. Nevertheless, most critical scholars‒ ‒African, African American, and others‒‒will acknowledge the complexity and problematic nature of the issue, especially the extent to which we are dependent upon literary sources. Since Christianity has almost from the beginning been a literary phenomenon, we are quite dependent upon literary sources for answers to most of our basic questions about it. This includes the question about the Black presence and influence in ancient Christianity, as well as fundamental questions about Christian self-definitions and orientations. For such questions, examination of different rhetorical strategies may provide a helpful heuristic key and a most useful beginning.

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This chapter cannot possibly explore all of the rhetorical strategies that may be discernible in early Christian literature; it is designed only to be a springboard for further research and discussion by focusing upon one example of a discursive strategy that involves the interfacing of the rhetoric of racial-color differences and the rhetoric of ascetic piety. Such a strategy as part of an effort to commend ascetic piety is likely not only to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of asceticism in Christian antiquity, it might also provide a clearer understanding of the methodological challenges involved in an effort to understand among other topics the Black presence and influence in early Christianity. This is, at any rate, the aim of the present chapter. Since ascetic behavior can with justification be viewed as reflective of specific types of orientations to and understandings of the world and of the self in the world, literary strategies that attempt to persuade readers of the value of ascetic behaviors very much need to be understood. Such a strategy that is found to make use of the rhetoric of, and draw upon reactions to, racial-color differences represents a fascinating find, begging serious consideration. There are very few actual references to Black peoples in ancient Christian texts. Where there are such references they are often pregnant with symbolism, often to emphasize, at the expense of credulity, the universality of Christian salvation.4 Such few references “work” the symbolism far too much to be accepted as unproblematized recording of social (viz. interracial) dynamic and history. References in Greek and Roman literature to the color “black” without direct connection to Black people are much more numerous. These references also are used symbolically. Such symbolism is in fact so pervasive that it makes much more complex the matter of the Black presence and influence in antiquity, including Christian antiquity. The situation certainly warrants the serious study of the language of color differences, no matter whether the goal is to clarify the “historical record” regarding racial diversity or to understand more about aspects of ancient sensibilities and mentalities. Augustine’s statements about color differences serve as an example of the popular ancient Christian symbolization and spiritualization of color: Ask yourself what sort of servant you really value. You may have a servant who is handsome, tall, and finely built, but a thief, a rogue and a swindler, and you may have another who is dwarfish, ill-featured, and foul-skinned [colore tetro], but trustworthy, thrifty, and steady. Now which of these two, I ask you, do you really value? If you judge by the eyes in your head, the one who is handsome but dishonest wins; if by the eyes of your heart, the one who is ugly but reliable. . .5

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And in an obvious reflection upon the provocative pre-Pauline primitive Christian theme struck by the apostle Paul in Galatians 3:28, to the effect that old human types and divisions‒‒“Jew and Gentile,” “Greek and barbarian,” “slave and free,” “male and female”‒‒are “put off” in the ritual of baptism: whoever is born anywhere as a human being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange he may appear to our senses in bodily form or color or motion or utterance, in any faculty, part or quality of his nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that such an individual is descended from the one who was first created.6

Such sentiments were part of and need to be understood in light of the ancient aristocratic Greek and Greco-Roman and Christian ethos that tended toward the relativizing, even rejection, of (accidental) worldly goods, attributes, situations, and circumstances, in light of increased emphasis on the cultivation of the self, the mind (nous), and the spiritual (pneumatika). With beginnings among aristocratic intellectuals in the Greek classical period, such an ethos, emphasized the absolute superiority of the intellectual and spiritual over all other pursuits and interests—all worldly situations and circumstances. The (socio-economic-political) consequences of such intellectualizing and spiritualizing sentiments and interpretations for many in ancient societies was often the maintenance of the status quo‒‒to the clear advantage of elites, the disadvantage of all others prone or forced to receive the pronouncements of elites as truth. The example of slavery is the clearest and most dramatic example from history of the effects of the aristocratic spiritualizing and intellectualizing ethos and its rhetoric. Although the topos did not begin with him, Aristotle is probably the most influential figure from the Greek classical period in the debate about “natural slavery,” whether some human beings‒‒notably nonGreeks, barbaroi—are slaves by nature. I agree with de Ste. Croix that statements made by Aristotle establish in a powerful way the intellectualist, spiritualizing ethos that led to the socioeconomic-political “non-reality” of slavery. It is a fateful argument that, along with others, provides ideological basis for the relativizing of the world in the Hellenistic and late antique periods and helps account for the ancient Christian adoption of such an ethos: . . . [H]e is by nature a slave who is capable of belonging to another (and that is why he does so belong), and who participates in reason [logou] so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it. . . . [T]here exist certain persons who are essentially slaves everywhere and certain others who are so nowhere. And the same applies also about nobility: our nobles consider themselves noble not only in their own

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country but everywhere, but they think that barbarian noblemen are only noble in their own country—which implies that there are two kinds of nobility and of freedom, one absolute and the other relative in so speaking they make nothing but virtue and vice the distinction between slave and free, the noble and the baseborn. [I]n some instances it is not the case that one set are slaves and the other freemen by nature; and also that in some instances such a distinction does exist, when slavery for the one and mastership for the other are advantageous, and it is just and proper for the one party to be governed and for the other to govern by the form of government for which they are by nature fitted . . .7

The ancient Christian sources that draw directly upon the intellectualist and spiritualizing ethos and in which the more heuristically fruitful references to color differences are found—for the sake of addressing both historical and literary questions—are among different types of narrative materials. Narrative, part of the “literature of edification” of ancient Christianity, has been argued to be a most appropriate and powerful propaganda tool for ascetic piety.8 It is among a certain cluster of narrative forms‒‒historical, hortatory, panegyric writings‒ ‒where we find an interesting combination of intellectualist color symbolism, through the eulogistic characterization of a Black person, and the commendation of a type of ascetic piety. This combination is so rare for the literature of antiquity in general that it begs attention. Moreover, because my interest has for some time encompassed both ascetic piety of the type in evidence here and the Black presence and influence in early Christianity as separate issues, the literature that allows both to be taken up cannot possibly be ignored. Ethiopian Moses, or Moses the Black, is characterized as an ideal monk in four ancient sources‒‒Palladius’s Lausiac History (c. 420); Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History (c. 443–448); the anonymous Apophthegmata Patrum (late sixth century); and Acta Sanctorum (tenth century). In many respects, these are typical hagiographic texts from ancient Christianity. Kathleen Wicker’s translation and examination of the sources has recently led her to conclude that the Moses characterization functioned variously to commend the ascetic lifestyle as the superior lifestyle (Palladius, Sozomen), to instruct and edify those who have accepted the monastic life (Apoph. Patr.) and to provide a model of monastic perfection (Acta Sanct.)9 Wicker also argues that these sources “reflect” perceptions of racial-color differences in antiquity. In their “histories” addressed to literate audiences far away from Africa, Palladius and Sozomen, Wicker suggests, seemed unconcerned about the issue of Moses’s color. Moses is simply noted as an “Ethiopian,” a Black African. Apoph. Patr. and Act. Sanct., because they contain explicit valuations based on Moses’s color, are said to reflect contemporary attitudes about racial-color differences in Egypt and throughout the Greco-Roman world.10

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Although I would make the same basic divisions among the four textsources, I would nuance the arguments so as to make it clear that all of the texts more or less reflect the same (white or non-black) perspective regarding “racial”-color differences (especially, the color, black). The difference between the first category of (seemingly benign) texts and the second category of (more explicitly prejudiced) texts lies only in literary strategy. All of the texts reflect a view of Moses on account of his color as “other,” as alien, as polar opposite. This perspective is consistent with classical and postclassical references to Black Africans (so Cortes). Apart from his color, there is no reason for the stories, first oral, then written, about Moses. His heroic ascetic piety was not singular. His ascetic piety provided such a perfect counterpoint (He’s too good to be true!) to (the white, non-black view of) his color that it would normally‒‒given the usual logic and skepticism of historical and literary criticism‒‒cast great doubt about the very historicity of Moses. The point should be, however, that differences between the text-sources about him should be seen as differences in the rhetorical-literary strategies, not in real attitudes about color differences. The Moses story itself, in whatever version, was not about a pious man who happened to be Black; it was about a Black man whose blackness alone was important. The latter served as a symbol of all forms of lower, imperfect existence that were other than, and in polar opposition to, the ideal religious life, viz. the ascetic life. Palladius’s initial identification of Moses as “Ethiopian by birth,” and “black,” functioned to explain, and provide dramatic narrative effect for, further characterization of him as recalcitrant slave, robber, and murderer. The apologetic nature of the “history” is clearly set forth: “I am obliged,” says Palladius, “to tell about his wicked behavior in order to demonstrate the excellence of his conversion.” Moses’s “wicked behavior” is all the more onerous and dramatic because he is black, the “other,” the assumed polar opposite of the visualized good. The conversion of such a man was thought to be good drama, enough to sell the reader on the ascetic life. According to Sozomen’s account, which was clearly dependent upon Palladius’s account, “Moses the Ethiopian” was before conversion a man of ill repute. So disreputable was he considered that it was said that “no one else ever made such a change from evil to excellence,” that is, to “the height of monastic philosophy.” That the pre-conversion Moses could be considered to have been so radically and uniquely notorious can be understood not only as propaganda for the ascetic lifestyle but also a sharing of strong assumptions and prejudices regarding Ethiopians between writer and intended audience. Direct prejudicial statements were not, therefore, required for the story; only the mention of Moses as Ethiopian, with the underlying assumption that something about being Ethiopian (viz., being black) made one different, was required. The very late (tenth century) and anonymous writing “The Life of Moses the Ethiopian” obviously drew from earlier sources and reflected the ascetic

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(viz. monastic) traditions and values of the time.11 Its importance for us lies in its rather clear reflection of the ancient well-springs and Western historical trajectory of the assumption that being Ethiopian/Black represented otherness, foreignness‒‒from the perspective of certain non-blacks, of course. The efforts to include Ethiopian Moses in the economy of salvation are much too nuanced and clever for comfort.12 Moses as an Ethiopian is seen as representative of a far distant and strange people, in the same way that Scythians are seen as a far distant people in the opposite direction. The kingdom of God has not been closed to slaves or evildoers, but they are within it who, as is fitting, have made use of repentance and prefer to live righteously and according to God. And it has by no means been closed to Scythians or Ethiopians. (Act. Sanct. 1; Wicker: 344)

The contrasting of Moses’s skin color and slave status with his ascetic piety is consistent and striking: “He . . . who had a black-skinned body, acquired a soul more brilliant than the rays of the sun.” He was said to be “vulgar and worthless,” “wayward and ignorant” (Act. Sanct. 2; Wicker: 344). But after having been touched by “divine grace,” and having joined the ascetic life, he became “pitiful in appearance, abject in manner, contrite in spirit, totally restrained” (Act. Sanct. 4; Wicker: 345). At first sight of him, the other monks, whom we must assume to be non-black, were afraid. But the fervency of his contrition and piety matched or countered the “blackness” of his sins, symbolized by his skin color. This as the moral of the story is made unmistakably clear: As infamous as he was for evil, so greatly did he shine as an expert in perfection. . . . Moses was indeed a great monk, and was talked about by everyone. The desert, the mountains, the city, and all the surrounding areas resounded with Moses, Moses, Moses. And here it seems to me that Moses alone has changed his appearance, even though an Ethiopian is never completely washed clean. For indeed, he cleansed his soul, if not his body, with the hyssop of repentance, and he made it more brilliant than the sparkling suns . . . (Act. Sanct. 6; Wicker: 346)

The anonymous sixth-century alphabetical collection of the Apoph. Patr. is in many ways the most important of the sources about Moses. Intended for the edification of monks, it includes the most powerful connection between color symbolism and ascetic piety. The popular prejudice against Ethiopians is made clear in the contemptuous question “Why has this Ethiopian come into our midst?” Such a question is used by the editor to point to and counterpose the rigor and constancy of the ascetic piety of the Black man called Moses. The more he is hassled by the other (“white”) monks, the more exemplary he becomes as an ascetic: “I was troubled but I did not say anything.” (Apoph. Patr. 3; Wicker: 339)

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Indication of the view of blackness and of Moses as Black man who is also convert and fellow monk and cleric can be found in the statement the archbishop is made to speak upon laying the tunic upon Moses: “Behold, you have become completely white, Father Moses.” In the response, Moses is made to give‒‒“Indeed, the outside, 0 Lord Father; would that the inside were also white”—the point that the ascetic life signifies radical transformation or change of identity is made most dramatically through the employment of color symbolism and color contrast. More officially sanctioned hassling of Moses on account of his racial and color difference ensues, and Moses again accepts such treatment with humility characteristic of the ascetic: “Rightly have they treated you, ash skin, black one. As you are not a man, why should you come among men?” (Apoph. Patr. 45; Wicker: 340). Because Moses was a Black man—from the perspective of the editor and audience assumed to be odd, even to be held in contempt‒‒the point of the story is to emphasize how very pious he was as an ascetic. As pious an ascetic as he was considered different. And his difference was on account of nothing other than his skin color. The color symbolism in the stories told, transmitted and written about Moses, point to provocative questions and suggestions to be pursued regarding at least two important issues: (1) the presence and views of Blacks in Christian antiquity from the perspective of non-Blacks and (2) the motives and self-understandings reflected in certain forms of ascetic behavior among non-Blacks. The texts about Moses suggest that the ancient Christians followed a widespread trend among Greeks and Romans with respect to color symbolism. The texts at first glance suggest that Black peoples in particular were included within the circle of the elect without problem. On more careful reading, however, it appears that Moses as a Black man was much too important a symbol of the superiority of ascetic piety to be beyond doubt as to whether he was an historical figure or as to whether his characterization in the stories reflects ancient Christian racial inclusiveness (contra Snowden). In other words, the stories are worked too hard by different communities and traditions to reflect both the attractiveness and superiority of the ascetic life and the simple openness and inclusiveness on the part of Christian, especially monastic communities. The problem lies in the fact that not only is the symbolism rather heavy and thick-almost too nuanced (again, Moses being too good to be true; the opposites too radical): not only is Black Moses rare among early Christian spiritual athletes and heroes as pre-served in the oral and written legacies of ancient Christianity but the advancement of the attractiveness and superiority of the ascetic life is done at the expense of Moses, not just as individual but as representative of Black peoples. The texts and their use of Moses and color symbolism would seem at first to suggest a reading of monastic-ascetic piety as radical, as defined by

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totalities and absolutes, radical opposites—the world (and for some, including even other tamer Christian [=ascetic] lifestyles) against those who have adopted the monastic-ascetic lifestyle. The radical opposition of the color “black” against the color “white” in general, and Moses as living example of Black peoples and their assumed sinful state and “other-ness,” served well the advancement of a certain type of ascetic propaganda. The ascetic lifestyle seems to be associated with the adoption of radical commitment, the living of life in radical discipleship, an orientation to the world that spelled distance, critique, resistance. This ascetic orientation to the world was understood to parallel the foreignness that dark-skinned peoples were considered to represent in the psyche of those who were transmitting the tradition to experience. Yet it is important not to fall uncritically under the aesthetic discursive strategy that is in the working of the symbolism in these texts to the point that historical dynamics and realities are forgotten.13 To be sure, asceticism as valorized in the literary characterization of Moses was supposed to be histrionic, stark, and radical. But in the employment of such symbolism in literary form, the ascetic communities and traditions behind the texts reflect aspects of certain types of historical-political realities, prejudices, and sensibilities. They betray the extent to which certain ascetic communities were not, actually could not have been, otherworldly (and apolitical!), according to popular notions and much scholarly argumentation regarding the “religious” life. Such communities accepted widespread cultural concepts, assumptions, and prejudices, and even attempted to advance their causes by playing upon (actually text[ur]ing) such. The lesson here is not that religious people were or could be found to be hypocritical or less than perfect, or something of the kind. The important lesson is that the literary games played by some social groups with asceticism and loss of world, with their use of color symbolism, can tell us something about history and discursive strategies, about mentalities, or visions of the world in history and how they come to expression. Through the color-coded discourses about asceticism, we can learn much about the character of the worldliness of a particular loss-of-world ethos and its corresponding required behavior. From a reading of the texts about Ethiopian Moses, asceticism cannot be considered world-rejection in any absolute apolitical sense. It must be understood as a type of world-orientation involving selected renunciation or reprioritization of the world, complete with selected cultural (even minority culturalist) and political assumptions and prejudices. This insight of course squares with the notion that ascetic behavior is not simply rejection of the world, it involves the complex and fraught embracing of an ideal.14 The color symbolism in the Moses texts points the reader to the importance of seeking to discover and account for the worldly choices and worldly psycho-politics of religious renunciation.

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NOTES 1. Cameron, in History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History, ed. A. Cameron (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 185. 2. Ibid., 185. 3. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol 1 (London: Free Association Books, 1987). 4. Cf Acts 8:26; also see discussion in Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); and Jean Marie Courtes, “The Theme of ‘Ethiopians’ in Patristic Literature,” The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol II.1 (ed. Jean Devisse. Gen .Ed. L. Bugner. Trans. William Granger Ryan; New York: William Morrow and Company, 1979). 5. Augustine, Second Discourse on Psalm 33.15, Ennarationes in Psalmos; cited and discussed by Peter Frost, “Attitudes Toward Blacks in the Early Christian Era,” Second Century 8 (1991): 1–11, esp. p. 2. 6. Cf. Gal 3:28, and Wayne Meeks’s discussion, in The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 88, 155. Re: separated extended Quotation—de civitate Dei 16.8. Also cited by Frost, 2. My emphasis. 7. Quotation from Politics I.2.13, 18–19. See discussion by G.E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic to the Arab Conquests (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 417, including n.17. 8. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 67f. 9. I owe gratitude to my friend and colleague Kathleen O. Wicker not only for her collection and translation of some of the relevant sources for this discussion but also for her encouragement of my interpretive efforts. See “Ethiopian Moses (Collected Sources),” in Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity A Source Book, ed. V. L. Wimbush (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 329–48. 10. Wicker, “Ethiopian Moses,” 334. 11. Ibid., 330, n 9. 12. Pace Snowden, as odd apologist of a sort for color prejudices, 169–95. See Wicker, “Ethiopian Moses,” 334, n 37. 13. In Bryan D. Palmer’s Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) we are challenged to think carefully about the work language is made to do, especially in connection with writing history or transmitting tradition. 14. For challenging perspective, see Steven D. Fraade, “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages, Vol 13 of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest (New York: Crossroad, 1986).

Chapter 3

“Not of This World” Early Christianities as Rhetorical and Social Formation (1996)

I An examination of the New Testament and of early Christianity as part of a discussion about what has come to characterize Western culture provokes a number of knotty issues and problems that have literary-, rhetorical-, historical, cultural-critical, theological, comparative religious, and political implications. Perhaps the one complex of issues most relevant to a concern about the relationship of the Bible, in general, the New Testament, in particular, to Western civilization has to do with the history of interpretation or appropriation—I mean, of course, cultural, as opposed to individual, interpretation or appropriation. That this concern remains poignant and controversial can be illustrated by reference to a 1992 (October 19) issue of New York Magazine. An article on “family values” in the United States is of particular interest. The article was a response to the presidential election year controversy about national “family values” or the loss of them‒‒provoked by then vice-president Dan Quayle’s criticism of the situation comedy Murphy Brown, particularly the main character’s decision to get pregnant and give birth out of wedlock. In a farcical and pointed section of the article entitled “Classic Family Values,” the magazine pushed the debate to the limit. It asked its urban, fairly highbrow, and very educated readership to look again at some of the primary literary sources of the making of the West (including the United States): The recent attempt to associate situation comedies with the decline of family values is silly. Family values should be associated with great works of literature. Can you, the voter, spot the collapse of morals in central works of the western canon? 45

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A number of summary only-in-New York farcical descriptions of great works of literature follows. The reader is asked to guess which “great” works are being described. I cannot resist sharing a few examples: A baby born of incest grows up with a death wish and dares her uncle to kill her, which he does. A boy almost kills his father and runs away from home. He plays racist tricks on a black man by, among other things, falsely imprisoning him. The boy flees all personal and social responsibility. Two adolescent couples escape into the woods for a night of passion, and girl-friend-swapping, and bestiality.

And finally: A Jewish boy who leaves home to associate with prostitutes, low-lifes, and thieves undergoes rough treatment at the hands of the authorities.

The works so provocatively described above that are among the foundations of our Western core values are identified in the following order‒‒Antigone, Huckleberry Finn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the New Testament. In its own odd way, the article makes the question of the identity and character of the sources of American and Western values a very important one. And, of course, the sources provoke serious questions about the differences in, and socio-political ramifications of, the different legitimate and not so legitimate interpretations of such sources. Just what does “classic” mean or suggest? And what are the values exemplified and extolled in the “classic” texts of the West? Do the values exemplified in such texts square with those described in the summary and farcical terms by New York Magazine? Are the values exemplified in these texts those that the West has actually embraced? Are they such that the West ought to continue to embrace them? How might the values associated with the texts mentioned be more fully characterized and assessed? Has the West really built much of its identity upon the stories of Jesus as interpreted by New York Magazine? Each of the questions above is important in its own right. I want to pursue most of them in only an oblique way. In this chapter, I want only to further problematize the issue of cultural appropriation of tradition by focusing upon only one of the complex of sources that has contributed to the making of the character and orientation of the West‒‒the New Testament. And I shall be able with such focus only to further characterize the irony, challenge, and problematic in the continuing late modern appropriation of the New Testament as a particular ethos and worldview.

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I should like to elaborate upon the ironic and satirical spin put on the New Testament and other Western “classic” texts by the article in New York Magazine. This spin defines the main character in the New Testament as one who associates with “lowlifes” of the world, and whose prosecution as common criminal puts him within that category. This is at the same time a characterization of the movements‒‒the Jesus movements and early Christianities‒‒inspired by this main character of the Gospels as foundation stories of a sort. Such movements are seen as marginal, of mean reputation, of little worldly power, with even less worldly interest and investment. This characterization has been put slightly differently in technical scholarship on the New Testament and early Christianity, taken over into theology and ethics in general, and into popular imaginations and discussions. Often, “otherworldly” is the term used to describe the self-understanding and orientation of Jesus and the early Christians. It is, perhaps, an apt term as a beginning characterization, but it requires unpacking and problematizing. At any rate, “otherworldly” may be appropriate not simply as a characterization of some radical, viz., unusual aspects of, or historical situations within, the New Testament and early Christianity; it may‒‒as the New York Magazine article and much contemporary sentiment suggest‒‒be a defensible characterization of the movement as a whole, or certainly at least significant segments of it, and its rhetorics—the range of differences in representation and orientation notwithstanding. Thus, it may be suggestive of some significant methodological and perspectival challenges for scholarship in the field. It may, in other words, be suggestive of a history of early Christianity as a history of otherworldliness. And this suggestion may in turn lead to a reconsideration, à la New York Magazine, of a more serious questioning of what is or should be the late modern relationship to such a movement and its traditions. If the New Testament and early Christianity are argued to have been “not of this world,” with all the difference in meaning and intensity that are to be respected, in what way can and should contemporary religious and cultural tradents engage them, take them seriously? To whom do they belong? Whose values, whose worldviews, do they really reflect today? II Its diversity of expressions and orientations notwithstanding, early Christianity can be understood as rhetorical and social formations that were representations of otherworldliness. This means that the different, even conflicting orientations, and the debates in extant ancient Christian literary and other sources, can be understood in light of this worldview. But such a history of

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ancient Christianity as types of otherworldliness requires reconsideration of old interpretive assumptions and schemas. It will no longer do, for example, to assume that early Christianity is the dramatic history of its inevitable “catholicization” or “bourgeoisification” or “world-accommodation,” or of the balancing of worldly and the otherworldly resulting in a perennially vague worldview and world orientation that is “ambivalence.”1 A historical-rhetorical reading of the primary ancient Christian sources suggests that denunciation and renunciation of the world remained a fundamental assumption and ideological touchstone throughout the period of ancient Christianity, in spite of opposition and censure from outsiders, and in spite of efforts at domestication, cover-up, and silencing on the part of some insiders. Such interactions and exchanges became the impetus for enormous rhetorical and literary histrionics and productivity,2 as well as social experimentation. Early Christian texts can now be seen as documenting not so much the steady, inexorable development toward world accommodation or “secularization,” but instead the constant nuancing and modulating of translations and reifications of otherworldly or transcendental visions and impulses. Discussions about “Christian tradition” and the appropriation of such, then, ought to be put in a different key: Not only must the world-accommodating developmental reading of ancient Christianity be challenged but also some reigning assumptions about the socio-political ramifications and utility of transcendental visions and impulses in general. The world in which the Jesus movement was begun had a great share of prophets, sages, seers, and philosophers competing with one another over translations and reifications of transcendental visions. A history and taxonomy of such visions in that world is possible.3 James M. Robinson suggested the framework of such a history of the earliest Christians in a provocative essay entitled “World in Theology and in New Testament Theology” (1968),4 which was a contribution to a festschrift for his father. But the intellectual motivation for the essay seemed to have been his initial view that the beginnings of a genuine interpretive history of early Christian “understandings of world” was to be found in Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament. This major project, however, was considered by Robinson at second glance to have been more systematic than historical, ordered according to Bultmann’s own prejudices toward the particular understandings associated with Pauline and Johannine theology. Robinson argued that the needed methodological leap forward was to be found in the complete abandonment of the history of ideas and understandings of existence associated with particular authors for the sake of the more comprehensive and complex “tracing of world as it comes into language.”5 The term “trajectory”‒‒herein the origins of the

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concept of and appellation for the Trajectories volume that Robinson later coauthored with Helmut Koester‒‒suggested itself as the appropriate rubric for a description of the different understandings of “world” that can be associated with early Judaisms and Christianities. The trajectory sketched by Robinson ranges from “loss of world” to “worldly world.” Most important as a reflection of a change in methodology and perspective, the relative nature of, and relationships between, early Christian “worlds” is seen from the perspective of the more basic or baseline “loss of world.” The sketch identifies a movement from “Jewish apocalypticism” to “Christian apocalypticism” to “Jewish Gnosticism” to “Christian Gnosticism,” with different texts and authors reflecting different “modulations” of these movements. Paul’s differences with the Jewish Palestinian mission, for example, were viewed by Robinson as a more “otherworldly” “world” against the more “worldly” concern on the part of the wandering missionary with profit and public approbation.6 Other examples can be easily supplied to the general sketch: Against the radical asceticism of the pneumatic elites of Corinth his famous and haunting hōs mē exhortations framed by eschatological pronouncements actually represent a more worldly “world.” The Johannine community, defining itself with the mantric not “of this world “ was nevertheless split between factions representing more or less adequate worldly imaging and remembrance of Jesus. The figures behind the defensive worldliness of the Pastorals, however, were hardly viewed as established by established citizens. The communities behind the apocryphal acts and Gnostic documents were the most radical in their otherworldliness. They considered their enemies to be all others‒‒including other believers‒‒who had not been seized by gnosis and initiated into the inner circle and who had not pledged a life of uncompromising enmity with world. Even Augustine, usually considered a worldly figure by most scholarly interpretive measurements, can be better understood as advancing a type of otherworldliness in his mature, perhaps most influential work, The City of God, insofar as he encourages the desacralization and depoliticization of the empire‒‒in fact, of every empire or social and political order, whether “Christian” or “pagan.”7 A full grasp of early Christian otherworldliness should entail among other things a recognition of and comparison with other types of religious and cultural otherworldliness, or‒‒as most often referenced‒‒transcendental visions and worldviews. Transcendental visions, world- views, and orientations are after all ancient in origins, going back to the proliferation of new, interstitial social formations or networks of the worlds of the Far and Near East, including the Greco-Roman world. Initially appearing and developing “between the cracks” of traditional formations in holistic societies, these new formations

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were responses to the challenges of transcendental visions. The philosophers, prophets, sages, seers, and wisdom teachers of the “little societies” stretching from India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Arabia, and all around the eastern and western Mediterranean from roughly 600 B.C.E. to 700 C.E. (corresponding to Karl Jaspers’s “Axial Age”) came to define themselves as carriers of transcendental visions and impulses over against “world.” The latter came to be conceptualized and problematized as the realm of dominant systems, relations, mores, traditions, and orientations in tension with the newly discovered “world above,” or “world to come,” the realm of ideas‒‒and so forth. The rhetorics of the new visionaries and prophets, reflecting differences in culture, social stations, and psychic states, was generally oppositional and often hyperbolic. The world that was now being problematized and critiqued had become “this world,” the world of phenomena, of ephemeral things, of the vicious cycle of karma. In opposition to the “world above,” “this world” was thought to be hopeless, to be inveighed against, to be renounced.8 The sentiment of such movements has been characterized best by Benjamin I. Schwartz: If there is some underlying impulse in all these “axial” movements, it might be called the strain towards transcendence . . . a kind of standing back and looking beyond—a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond.9

But of course such a response seems not to exhaust or explain the situation. Otherworldliness is, after all, complex: it is not a reference to a single self-understanding or orientation to the world; it is, if anything, a reference to a multiplicity of worldviews and orientations across and within different religious and cultural traditions. It is also ultimately a reference not to the negative, to privation, or to renunciation, but to certain understandings of and efforts at what Robert W. Hefner refers to as “world-building” among the transcendental or world-prophetic religions: The transcendental tension prophetic ideals create‒‒between reality as it is and as revelation insists it should be‒‒is . . . the source of . . . remarkable power to transform the world. World rejection, then, is of worldly consequence. It relativizes everyday reality by proclaiming that the new religion stands above local custom or community. For at least some believers, this claim creates a passionate imperative for the reevaluation of local ways. “[Transcendental world religions] . . . renounce this world and announce another, more compelling and true.”10 Hefner’s arguments applied to early Christianity should force reconsideration of it as otherworldly ethos that nonetheless was complex, worldly, differentiated. It was not so much that it did not experience institutionalization

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and world accommodation; it certainly did. It was that institutionalization and accommodation were experienced within a matrix, a frame of reference or worldview, that gave it a different meaning. For example, the exhortation in Romans 13 to accord respect to political authorities‒‒at whatever level‒‒within the context and frame of reference of (Pauline) Christian communities cannot be understood as the same presuppositions under which most “pagans” in Rome lived at the time. Among the early Christians, the directive‒‒in light of the assumption that the world was thought to have run its course, to be “passing away”‒‒more likely was heard as granting authorities only grudging respect. A range of sentiments and responses from outright indifference to a grudging acknowledgment of the divine appointed role of political and military authorities is allowed. These and other examples of otherworldliness had important social and power ramifications in the context of the Roman empire. The great differences and conflicts notwithstanding, the transcendental visions and orientations among the earliest Christians (and some of their contemporaries) represented particular rhetorics, recognized “discursive formations,” “matrices of meaning,” within which a range of certain sentiments were expressed and practices and relations obtained according to certain rules and assumptions. Each set of rules and assumptions constituted an “ideological formation,” a set of “ideological relations”‒‒a “worldview.”11 But insofar as the different transcendental gazes and discourses represented different worldviews, they were nonetheless worldviews alike always in opposition to the dominant worldview and its social order, and all of the contradictions and practices represented in the exercise of dominance.12 Thus, it represented a “disidentification” with every reigning ideological formation. It was the practice of “unforgetting” the ideological and psychic straitjackets normally imposed on every individual in a culture. This was accomplished through language or rhetoric, the one common tool or weapon of all.13 The evocation of oppositional “sentiment”14 was registered through discourses and newly created channels of communication in such a manner as to provide a rhetorical and ideological place for minorities to stand, called “scriptures”. And I accepted as the primary agenda, established by that slice of mainstream academic culture in which biblical studies participated, to occupy myself in a disciplined way with one set of texts among the “classics.” So I dutifully pursued the historical “facts” or “truth(s)” in and behind the classic texts that were the Christian Bible. Religious otherworldliness, therefore, should not be identified as mere otherworldliness, as escapism and powerlessness, passivity and victimization, or the idealization of such. It is, instead, a coming into power through speech, a language of critique, one of the “arts of resistance,”15 however veiled or

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nuanced. But even the negative or opposition may not fully explain its social function and power. Its force is double-sided: it represents serious focus upon, and a problematizing of, world. The over-against-ness should be seen as part of a strategy in order to gain ground, space, power for the rethinking and reframing of world. The “loss of world,” the taking out of world was not an end in itself, but part of a move to gain new perspective for a new prioritization of world.16 To focus on otherworldliness is to focus on ethos and worldview, what Clifford Geertz refers to as the “evaluative elements,” the “cognitive, existential aspects,” the “tone, character, and quality . . . and mood” of life, a particular “picture of the way things . . . are” within a particular cultural matrix.17 It is not to focus on the history of ideas or systematic theologies or ethical propositions and moral norms. Transcendental visions and orientations simply cannot be contained and defined by systems and ideas. No history of ideas continuum is even possible for transcendental visions and orientations. Transcendental religions can never be reduced to a complex of ideas. They are not fundamentally theology or ethical propositions or norms or even certain types of required behavior. Particular moral and ethical ideas, arguments, propositions, proscriptions, and orientations can have multiple meanings and function quite differently in the same and across different rhetorical formations. No moral and ethical or any other type of discourse can be understood, can be engaged and accepted unless it is assumed to be part, even a problematic part, and reflection of, a worldview, a “picture of the way things . . . are.” Worldview always governs the particular ethical and moral positions and their discourses and behaviors, notwithstanding the fact that very often particular individuals, communities, and rhetorics reflect degrees of contradictory and problematic shifts and modulations in it. III The Johannine literature provides an example of the nexus between otherworldliness and rhetorical and social formation. It reflects virtual linguistic and ideological obsession about “the world,” and about being “not of this world,” and thereby provides a good opportunity to focus attention upon some of the complex questions and issues involved in a religious formation’s use of the language of otherworldliness, “anti-language.”18 Interpreters of the Johannine literature have long noted and been fascinated by its strange and haunting rhetorics. The questions of the origins and functions of such language are of course very important. For the purposes of this chapter, however, the question of the origins of the language is not to be

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addressed, except insofar as it throws light upon the related, but perhaps even more important question having to do with the nature of the relationship between rhetoric and social formation. It is not clear any longer, at least in sophisticated analyses, that the one comes first and then creates the other. Something approaching a more complex, symbiotic relationship between rhetorics and social world is more likely obtained and is more defensible in analysis. What is so striking in the Gospel of John is the language consistently used to convey the belief that there is opposition all around. There are forces opposed to the sovereignty of God, to Jesus, God’s messenger/ revealer who has descended from and ascended back to the heights, and, of course, to the Johannine circle, defining itself as among the few, if not the only, prescient and obedient human followers. The forces arrayed against God, Jesus the Revealer, and the Johannine believers are everywhere to be found‒‒close at hand, among the Jews in the local synagogue who reject the claims of the Johannine circle; and, amazingly, beyond the local world, almost everywhere else and everyone else who has not “received” Jesus as the One having come from above. The term used to refer to the opposition in its totality is kosmos (“world”). The Gospel and the letters are full of the language or rhetorics of kosmosopposition (cf. 15:18f.; 16:18; 18:28f.). This opposition to all outsiders, to the totality of reality outside the Johannine circle, to neighboring Jewish detractors, and even to some of those who had “received” Jesus, was clearly a touchstone for self-definition. Johannine Christianity was thus formed and defined on the basis and in terms of over-against-ness. The strange rhetorics suggests as much. The polarities, dualisms, conflicts, and harsh polemics and judgments that are found throughout the Gospel and the letters are stark. They may suggest to some readers that they are the formation of one or perhaps two minds. But the symbols and metaphors are so closed as systems, so self-referential that it is rather likely that documents, with the amazing number of different types of religio-cultural materials and traditions, reflect a closed circle’s ways of referring to itself and communicating its painful relationships with outsiders. Few if any understood the Johannine believers, whence they came, what they believed and why; they understood themselves to be alone, “not of this world” (15:19). The Gospel seemed to function for its original readers “in precisely the same way that the epiphany of its hero functions within the narratives and dialogues.”19 As Jesus forces characters in the narratives to choose between allegiance to him and “the world,” so the Johannine circle presented the challenge to all to choose between the solidarity of the Johannine circle, on the

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one hand, and, on the other, “the world.” Each individual was understood to be on one side or the other; there was no middle ground, no dual membership. Too much was thought to be at stake. Total allegiance and solidarity to the cause or no acceptance at all; one was either accepting of the ethos and orientations of “the world” or of the Johannine circle. Such strict separatism had a flip side: those who could be identified as “not of this world” could only be in allegiance with the Jesus of the Johannine circle’s memory and imagination. Within such a circle, believers were said to be able to find as much intensity of acceptance‒‒succor, friendship, and love (13:14; 15:12)‒‒as those outside found animus and hatred. The Johannine letters represent a different and later historical situation from that of the Gospel. “The world” is still the problem, but “the world” in its most immediate or local representation is no longer Jewish; it is now more undefined, more like the larger concentric circles that can easily be imagined as points of reference in the Johannine rhetoric (1 John 2:15f.). Now the challenge has to do with the developing diversification of the Johannine circle itself. There is no consensus about how to define the circle, given competing claims about leadership and orientations. The extension of hospitality becomes an important index of belonging to the circle and love shared within the circle. The refusal of hospitality becomes a weapon or punishment, a way of defining another out of the Johannine circle, a way of marking one as part of “the world.” The pyscho-social experience of the circle responsible for the Johannine literature must have been such that hating the world helped to explain and reinforce solidarity against the world’s‒‒in terms of concentric circles, beginning with the unbelieving Jews of the local synagogue, then extending to all other power configurations‒‒hatred and derision of the Johannine circle.20 So the language of conflict and polarization seems to have been part of a circular dynamic: it was not only defensive and reactive‒‒to the far greater power of the different circles and configurations and orientations of “the world”‒‒it was also offensive, anti-structural, an inversion of the ethos, values, judgments, and orientations of “the world.” IV Informed by the summary treatment of the Johannine literature, I should like to focus on two major implications of early Christian otherworldliness. First, it can be argued that there is enough evidence for the nexus between the different rhetorics of otherworldliness and the different types of social formations that were early Christian to warrant serious study of the phenomenon.

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Again, I suggest that a history of early Christianity from the perspective of the development of its outworldliness can and should be done. This would involve acceptance of a methodological challenge that questions the validity of the (consensus) assumption that early Christianity is the history of secularization or world accommodation. It is to accept exploration of such a history as a rather radically diverse history of “loss of world” or world renunciation and its accompanying resocialization and world-building efforts. So the history of early Christianity, done from the emic perspective of otherworldliness, would nonetheless include attention to the necessary and complex world-building efforts with their different constructs, paces and levels of intensities, and rhetorics. What such efforts will evidence as the common touchstone or springboard of sorts is the ethos and worldview of being “not of this world.” Second, in our times, the times of resurgent fundamentalism, otherworldly visions, and orientations seem to warrant yet again more analyses and evaluations. But the analyses and evaluations should be not merely philological and tradition-historical, nor merely theo-ethical, but cultural-critical. Evidence for the modern-day dissatisfaction with and questioning of many forms and expressions of modern-day capitalist supported totalisms‒‒including theological modernism‒‒is abundant. The present situation, whether accurately termed “postmodern,” or “late capitalism”‒‒perhaps inspired by the weight of the many contradictions of modernity‒‒now seems to reflect a trend toward a relativizing of the modernist penchant for historicist distantiation, toward a reexamination and questioning of progressive-liberal embar- rassment over and disdain for the peoples, relics, and orientations of the past. This “anti-modernism” has inspired “new social movements” that seek “openings” onto forms of “cultural otherness,”21 relationships with other “worlds.” Never sure about what such relationships should entail, many within contemporary society are clear that they can no longer be satisfied with demythologization programs and ritualized “commemoration.” They seek genuine engagement with and challenge from other “worlds.” That these undefined, unstructured attempts can result in both fundamentalisms of the left and right is clear from our history and is warrant for the constant critique of every worldview. Thus, in our times and in our situation‒‒the late modern, if not post-modern era‒‒early Christian otherworldliness may with some profit be explored again and reconsidered. As opening onto cultural otherness, it stands as powerful challenge and potential social force. It represents one of the most powerful rhetorical and ideological legacies of early Christianity. It is just perhaps the only legacy deserving of our critical consideration in a situation of “late capitalism” and resurgent fundamentalism.

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The rhetorics of otherworldliness, like that of love and art, is hyperbolic. Although it may suggest only the negative or escapism, the social dynamics are much more complex. A legacy of critique, it is part of the “arts of resistance,” a complex of visions of world criticism and reform. It assumes that no world order is ever perfect. It represents perennial challenge, perennial review, constant renewal, not the dismissal of and escape from, but the relativization of, the world, an opportunity and a conceptual and psychical field for the reprioritization, rehierarchialization of the world. Early Christianity in all its diversity is a complex of rhetorics and a worldview aptly characterized by types of otherworldliness dramatically captured by the expression “not of this world.” Early Christianities, then, were discursive and rhetorical formations ever productive of new social formations—formations that represent not the inexorable verweltlichung, or development, toward world-church, but the constant cycle of problematization, protest, reform. Its social power lies in what it provides in imagination and discursive formation—“weapons” available to all, even the “weak”‒‒for real-world reform and renewal. It suggests that only radical, sustained problematization of world provides impetus for world change. V The tenor of our times‒‒more multicultural, less Christian and Protestant dominant, less sure about what the next socio-political directions should be, more anxious about meaning, constantly jolted by the resurgence of modern-day harsh fundamentalisms and their otherworldly orientations‒ ‒demand more than the usual exegetical answers to questions no one has been asking. Christian origins functioning as cultural critique, insofar as it allows the impetus for ancient (historical and literary) diggings to proceed from assessments of contemporary situations, can address the times in an honest, creative, and passionate way. This is what the foregoing preliminary and sketchy investigation of early Christian otherworldliness intends to represent; it is what the work of Burton Mack over the years has so elegantly modeled. NOTES 1. See Wayne A. Meeks, The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 12f., 50, 53–65, for discussion, which arguably approaches scholarly consensus.

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2. See Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 303–10. 3. See George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 4th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), and Ramsey MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), as two such attempts--both dated. 4. In J. McDowell Richards, ed., Soli Deo Gloria: Studies in Honor of William Childs Robinson, Sr. (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1968), 88–110. 5. Ibid., 104. 6. Ibid., 107. 7. See R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (New York: Cam­bridge University Press, 1990), especially 1:4, re: Augustine and Eusebius. And see Hans G. Kippenberg, “The Role of Christianity in the Depolitization of the Roman Empire,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), 261–79; and Die vorderasiatischen Erlosungsreligionen: in ihrem Zusammenhang mit der antiken Stadtherrschaft, Heidelberger-Max­Weber-Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 85f. 8. See S. N. Eisenstadt, “Introduction: The Axial Age Breakthroughs‒‒Their Characteristics and Origins,” in Eisenstadt, ed., Axial Age, 1–25. 9. See Benjamin I. Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” in Daedalus: Wisdom, Revelation and Doubt, vol. 104, no. 2 (The MIT Press, 1975), 3–4. 10. See his “Introduction: World-Building and the Rationality of Conversion,” in Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 13, 30, 43. 11. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 195–97; and John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), especially chap. 6, re: discursive practices; and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), chap. 5. Re: worldviews, see Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Exploration of Human Beliefs (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983). 12. Re: contradictions of the Roman empire, see Mann, Sources of Social Power, 306–10. 13. See Eagleton, Ideology, 196. 14. See Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8–11. 15. I am here drawing upon the language and conceptualizations of political scientist James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 16. See Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 50–51. 17. See Geertz, Interpretation, 126–27.

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18. See Norman Petersen, The Gospel of John and the Sociology of Light: Language and Characterization in the Fourth Gospel (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1993). 19. See Meeks’s now famous essay, “The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism,” in The Interpretation of John, ed. John Ashton (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 162, originally published in JBL 91 (1972): 44–72. 20. See Petersen, Gospel of John, 86. 21. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 389.

Chapter 4

“Like a Ship That’s Tossed and Driven” The Ascetics of Social Formation (2001)

“the form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31b) Fugitive life, More harmful than any beast Worldly life, sickly thing More fragile than the rose Worldly life, source of labors, Anguished, full of suffering Worldly life, evil thing Never worthy of love Worldly life, foul life Pleasing only to the impious I prefer to undergo death, O Life, rather than serve you

(Anon.; twelfth-century Latin hymn)1

I’m a-rollin’ I’m a rollin’ I’m a-rollin’ Through an unfriendly world

(Anon., American Negro Spiritual)

This chapter I hope will, among other things, model my cultivation of a type of multi-disciplinarily, with interest in the cultural-critical, social-historical, phenomenological and comparative interpretation of ancient and modern 59

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and ancient and modern and ancient phenomena-specifically, religion as expressed in social formations, orientations and practices, and in texts. My specific topic—asceticism as phenomenological wedge issue through which I am able to understand and explain the predominant currents and impulses behind what we call the New Testament and early Christianity—is one with which I have been associated during my entire academic career. With the treatment of this topic in this chapter, I am also allowing myself to combine three of the major research interests that have marked my career—African Americans; the New Testament and early Christianity; and asceticism. Here I allow the one interest to help problematize and address the others. And I shall attempt to model one way to continue to engage and challenge traditional approaches in the fields—biblical studies, early church studies (and related fields)—that govern these interests. This I shall do through my efforts to think “with,” about, and through a complex social, cultural, intellectual positionality vis-à-vis the world—I call this black-embodiment. (What this means in [a] substantive argument I hope to indicate in due course.) Accepting this positionality is important because it means that my scholarship is not turned into an instrument of my own silencing and invisibility. To the extent that I empower myself to think and speak self-reflexively and freely, to this extent I think I become a more powerful and compelling contributor to scholarship in my field. My critique of, and advancement beyond, still fairly traditional scholarly methods and approaches in my field I think quite ironically and deliciously mark me as an astute student of such methods and approaches. I am in relationship to some of the criticism I have leveled against historicalcritical methods and approaches, identifying myself as very much an ideological child or formation of such methods. This irony I recognize and embrace in order to complicate and render more honest and, I hope, more compelling, my agenda and thinking. I am thereby positioned to contribute something quite different and challenging to the construal and practices of the field. This is, at any rate, what I hope with this presentation to model. I should like to begin the fathoming of what is referred to as the “ascetical”/“asceticism” not as another entry in the encyclopedic list of items in Western historical theological thought or religious practices. What I should like to do is posit asceticism as a fundamental aspect or dimension of the complex process of social-cultural formation, using Black/African American experiences as heuristic wedge. Asceticism I argue should be thought of in terms of resistance and healing, resistance not so much in terms of the still dominant popular and historical-theological understanding of the matter—as opposition to temptation or desire—but as resistance to non-being, erasure, invisibility; and healing in terms of the practices of a complex weaving that leads to some peace, refreshment, perhaps, wholeness. The making/healing of African America can then be a provocative modern case study that can

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re-focus and challenge the traditional arguments, consensus positions, politics, and agenda of the study of asceticism. Studies in asceticism over the past two decades reflect a slow turn away from single-minded preoccupation with philological and historical-theological analysis, with focus mainly upon Western late antique and medieval (viz. European) societies, to some attention to the formation of culture and subjectivity, with heightened interest in and sensitivity to theory and comparative study.2 Among the most provocative of the fairly recent and differently oriented, theory-sensitive interpreters are literary critic and English scholar Geoffrey Harpham and New Testament and Christian Origins scholar Richard Valantasis. Their different disciplinary orientations notwithstanding, these two scholars share respect for the well-known modern theorists and historians of Western asceticism—including Nietzsche and Weber and Foucault, and contemporaries, such as Peter Brown and Elizabeth Clark. Because their arguments have recently provoked the most animated responses among current students of the phenomenon of asceticism, I should like to offer brief summaries of the arguments of these two scholars so that my own proposal might be then placed in the context of some of the most recent and ongoing discussion. In the book The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism,3 Harpham drew upon several earlier historians and theorists as he challenged us to think about asceticism in terms of culture formation and maintenance. But it is Harpham’s work that is now the most insistent in arguing that the ascetic impulse is what is common to all cultures. Cultures “structure” asceticism in different ways, Harpham insists, but they do not impose the structure. They have no need to do so because asceticism is everywhere that culture is found. Why is it that culture and asceticism are so inextricably linked? Because, according to Harpham, culture is fundamentally a matter of the ethical: in every culture, there is always imposed on individuals different types and degrees of asceticisms—“self-denial,” “resistance” to temptation, to appetites, to desire, to the impulse always to follow impulse. Asceticism “raises the issue” of culture by structuring “oppositions,” but without totally collapsing the oppositions. A dialectic of a sort is set up. In this respect, asceticism is the “cultural” element of culture, the “MS-DOS” of culture, insofar as it is the “fundamental operating ground on which . . . culture is overlaid.” Asceticism becomes the basis of culture insofar as it represents one of the most powerful forces for disquiet. Thus, asceticism remains the powerful evocative force in culture. In two provocative essays, “A Theory of the Social Function of Asceticism” and “Constructions of Power in Asceticism,” Valantasis challenged us to think about asceticism in terms of the cultivation of subjectivity and the integration of that subjectivity or self into culture. A “system of cultural

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formation.” Asceticism should, Valantasis argues, be considered a set of “performances designed to inaugurate an alternative culture, to enable different social relations, and to create a new identity.” He likens ascetic activity to the workshop and rehearsal method in theatrical performance in which the repatterning of activity, thinking and relationships enables an actor to enter (and become) another character. The purposeful patterned and repeated activity that is asceticism—prayer, silence, withdrawal, fasting, sleep deprivation, manual labor—inaugurates the new states and new identities.4 In expanding upon earlier interpreters and theorists and in offering some different provocative arguments that reflect the creative impulses of postmodern multi-disciplinarily, both Harpham and Valantasis challenge us to think about asceticism in terms of the performative formation of culture and of the self, going far beyond the longstanding treatment of the subject as a matter only of the history of (Western theological) ideals and practices in isolation or as the history of (primarily male) religious virtuosi within a particular historical trajectory (late antiquity) and religio-cultural complex (Western Christianity). It is now less likely, certainly less defensible, for the student of asceticism to restrict asceticism to a set of de-politicized historical theological ideas or to a type of benign spirituality to be recovered through the practice of a certain philological practice or exegesis. Although it by no means began with them, Harpham and Valantasis make the turn to the study of asceticism as the comparative study of society and culture (and the pertinent discursive formations) more compelling and more difficult to ignore among the traditional core groups of students of the phenomenon. Yet as provocative and as compelling as are the arguments of these two theorists they raise, as you might, expect more questions that they provide answers. The emphasis Valantasis places upon asceticism as performance is intriguing. He draws upon the work of theorist Richard Schechner5 and makes the theater workshop the primary reference point for this argument about performance. Extending Valantasis’s play with the notion of performance from the context of theater, we need to ask, what is the motivation? Why is a new subjectivity desired? What makes the search for it so compelling? Without focus on the social-political domains or contexts of the performances of religious virtuosi about which he argues, Valantasis’s “asceticism” seems in the end to be as unmotivated as the asceticism’s described by many traditional interpreters—ancient and modern. We need to know—who is drawn to such asceticism? Who needs to perform? And why? Using Valantasis’s categories, I now ask: who needs to be made new? And why? Harpham’s argument that resistance to desire is the main point of asceticism remains intriguing but also problematic. His argument, as I have indicated already, is more layered and nuanced. But some questions remain: Can resistance to desire possibly explain all asceticisms? Can it explain

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asceticisms across cultures? Can it, should it, account for asceticisms even within one cultural complex, with gender and status differences accounted for? Or is Harpham’s argument inherently gender-biased, status-specific and culture-bound? We should probably grant Harpham (and before him, Foucault and ancient philosophers) the argument that all humans may desire. But who in history has had special need for or the luxury of resisting desire? Of limiting, checking, denying the self as a sustained interest, as part of selfcultivation? Must we assume desire to be a perennial and universal problematic for human beings such that it always provokes asceticism? Why? If not, what situations raise the problematic of desire and resistance to such? What type of person finds desire an acute problem? How are such persons socioculturally constructed, situated, and defined? Even if we all were to agree with Harpham that resistance—understood as the suspension of two apparent opposites (in this context of discussion, the “soul” and the “body”) in a complex interdependence in which both “opposition” and “relation” are held up—is an “extraordinarily useful concept” for an understanding of asceticism, a question remains: Why must resistance be limited to the type of struggle—between desire and its opposites—that Harpham names? Must the struggle always be about self-denial? Must the struggle always be with the desiring, elevated, self? Should such struggle define and exhaust asceticism? Why has such struggle defined asceticism? As part of my effort to address some of these questions, I want to suggest the implications of thinking seriously about asceticism in other terms—viz., within a social-cultural framework and on the basis of histories different from what historically has been associated with the study of asceticism, including the works of Harpham and Valantasis; and because exegesis is not explanation, I should like to approach the phenomenon with different questions and issues, methods. These other terms and approaches involve first a radical step, a turn away from (a still un-self-reflexive obsessive canonical construal of) the ancient world to (a noncanonical, non-centered more accessible situation in) the modern world; it involves a “thinking with,” a “thinking through,” a thinking primarily about and with, peoples, not merely texts, but peoples and culture, peoples and what they do with their bodies. It is focus upon particular peoples and their formation and healing; it is an approach that is a modification of what social anthropologist René Devisch, in his Weaving the Thread of Life: The Khita Gyn-Eco-Logical Healing Cult Among the Yaka (1993), called “semantic-praxiological.” The object of such an approach is to discover how people . . . bring about meaning and empowerment from out of themselves—their dreams, fantasies, bodies, gestures, and actions, their social, spatial, and historical contexts—by relating these forces, significative phenomena, and webs of relations to one another . . . [And in turn how] they are able to

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produce new relations in order to overcome tensions, contradictions, or disconnections in which they had become inextricably intertwined.6

My modification of Devisch approach entails adding historical-cultural interpretation. Thus, a critical historical semantic-praxiological approach is advanced. With such as approach, I want to focus upon the peoples that have come to called African Americans as a provocative test case for the critical analysis of asceticism, a phenomenon long thought about almost solely in terms of the antiquity of the European West (through the psycho-politics captured in the trope of the translatio studii et imperii7). My argument regarding African Americans does not mean all African Americans; it covers all only those defining themselves in solidarity with those whose history includes the experience of slavery and the perduring related world abjection and humiliation. That some individuals do not fit the case is or should be obvious. My focus is upon broad patterns of a significant segment of a population. The focus should be understood not in terms of ethnic cheerleading and bogus claims; this would not be reflective of my agenda, my style, and sensibility. The issue here has to do with methodological challenge and gaining access to a sharp critical lens. I want to model a way to engage in critical interpretation that does not simply reinscribe the sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit claims about the canonical status of a culture, a period of history, certain historical figures, and cluster of texts and the traditional methods used to read matters, including asceticism. I characterize my approach as a critical Black/ African American African Americanist one, insofar as it reflects openness to a number of discourses, ultimately refracting a type of critical history. Its power is that it is multidisciplinary in approach, decentering in its substantive criticism, and as self-reflexive in thinking as possible. The claim to greater self-reflexivity is not a claim to having by natural right sharper or more powerful perception. It is really an argument about orientation and positionality. It is also an argument—so necessary for a person whose ordinary presence in this part of the world was involuntary—for taking little or nothing for granted, an argument for a critical disposition that must be hyper-suspicious and critical of the canonical in all forms. Given the history of erasure of the presence of the person now being generally called African American in all aspects of life, it is often necessary to force the issue of position and presence. This is the moment, I want to declare, for forcing this field-specific issue. Given the history of invisibility of Africans/ African Americans in the discourses of the academic study of the Bible (and related studies: historical studies in general; ancient studies in particular) in the United States and throughout the West, when it comes to the matter of position and presence, anything short of what Amiri Baraka referred to as the “scream”8 is inadequate. (Readers should be pleased to know that in this

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essay today I can only offer a compromise‒‒not a scream, but a low level but intense and persistent drone.) Most important in terms of linkage to the overarching theme of this presentation, African Americans can be a compelling focus because they are a dramatic, sometimes inspiring but also disturbing instance of modern worldmaking. In fact, they have been thought of as inaugurating, making, and defining the modern if not the post-modern.9 As survivors of the initial trauma of the translation from Africa to Europe and then as survivors of the system of enslavement in different national orders, their experiences beg critical consideration regarding survival and formation. Their survival, their self-creation and world-making were seen by dominants as threatening, as aggressive moves and sensibilities, as resistance of a sort. And some of these peoples, who were not meant to survive, have generally necessarily experienced and sometimes interpreted their world-making efforts as “work,” as discipline, as resistance, as struggle. These arguments challenge the usually linear and monocultural history of doctrines’ approach to asceticism. Valantasis’s notion of performance resonates with African American expressive culture. But Valantasis’s notion should be more consistently contextualized and politicized. He should name some of the specific domains of such cultural expressivity. Mimicry, Michael Taussig has taught us, can be either mere copying or it can be rich and poignant dynamics, the stuff of history.10 And Harpham’s argument regarding “resistance”? It should be construed differently so that it might reflect recursive movements and situations of struggle that are part of a more complex phenomenon than he named. The focus upon African Americans raises the question whether asceticism understood as resistance understood as self-denial is adequate explanation for comparative social-cultural analysis. Resistance may very well be at the core of asceticism, and asceticism may very well be at the core of and a necessary part of culture. But the resistance need not always be a matter of conflict, namely, the self against erasure, invisibility, that is, against the receding, depressed self over against its normal historical elevation or dominance. (I recognize here some resonance with the work of Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era,11 with her focus upon women’s experiences.) What we confront here is the lesson that the term “asceticism” should be used to describe more than one psycho-socio-cultural-political situation or dynamic or function. The interest in self-denial fundamentally and traditionally reflects a particular (male elite) social location, the particular problematic of male-specific auctoritas, a set of psychosocial dynamics and syndromes within particular types of (imperial and ascendant) socio-cultural complexes.12

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The juxtaposition of African Americans and asceticism (like the conjuncture of African Americans and the Bible) forces onto consciousness an embarrassing particularity that in turn forces one to come to terms with the consequences of the obfuscation, violent univeralization of terms, categories, phenomena in the traditional study of history and religion. This sort of juxtaposition forces the question about the different and sometime conflicting functions in different situations. And such a question in turn raises larger questions about what the term has meant in the past and continues to mean in our times in scholarship with their own interests and representations. The different representation or focus opens a window onto a rather different view of asceticism—beginning with the issue whether there is even anything to be isolated as a phenomenon in historical and textual analysis. Notwithstanding their attention to the rhetorics about the body, Harpham and Valantasis (and so many other interpreters) fall prey to such logocentrism insofar as they fail to give primacy of attention to the body as “genuine source of transformational symbolic creativity.” Forgetting that exegesis is not explanation, that liturgy or theatre does not exhaust and explain away ritual, their works remain focused ultimately upon the logocentric, the “representation and interactional plot,” and with the assumed need to reference a foundational script or myth.13 Because of their persistent position on the margins in U.S. and Western culture, African Americans seem to force the issue of critical approach and explanation. Their involuntary presence in the North Atlantic worlds made it necessary for them to conflate forms of expressivity—to use the body in different forms of creative mimicry. Thus, they suggest now the wisdom of a critical historical semantic-praxiological approach as a way to explain how they came to be. What African Americans on the whole have historically resisted is not the inflated and all-powerful self. Nor is it the “world” in general and abstract terms. What is generally resisted is the deflated self, the silent, invisible self. The goal of the resistance is self-recovery/restitution, healing, security. Here are clear differences—in power-structural situations and relationships and orientations, with powerful implications for the study of religion and cultures, asceticism and religious piety, in particular—that should be respected. It is uncanny just how common it has been for African American interpreters to describe the making of African America in terms of struggle and the work of contestation. In his now classic Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E. B. Du Bois, as he did so often on so many issues, provided in his use of the term “strivings” the appropriate even haunting language that captured the force of widely held sentiments regarding the existence of black folks in America. In

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Du Bois’s works, “Strivings” refers to the necessarily persistent “travail of souls” of slaves and sons and daughters of slaves “whose burden is almost beyond the measure of . . . strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race . . . and in the name of human opportunity.” Du Bois’s reading of the history of Black folks in the North Atlantic world makes it clear that “travail” generally characterizes their experience. In his poetic and haunting use of the language of “travail” and “strivings,” Du Bois was anticipated by many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century leaders, including Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Sojourner Truth, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry Highland Garnet. And some differences and even head-on conflicts on a number of issues notwithstanding, in using the language of struggle to interpret the existence of Black folk, Du Bois stood in agreement with famous early twentieth-century contemporaries Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey.14 Contemporary literary and cultural critic Houston Baker has in many of his writings done much to extend and make complex and provocative the notion of “striving” and “work” in African American life. His provocative thinking about the connections between African American “striving” and modernism make him particularly important in this context. His Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (1988), and Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writings (1991)15 constitute a “critical trilogy” that argues for the “inescapability” and power of theory as it also models a theory that is understood as a “sounding of Afro-American expressive culture predicated upon . . . spirit work.” It is in Modernism, in which Baker argues that the Harlem Renaissance should be understood in terms of African American modernist resistance work, that is to be found the most provocative challenge for my immediate interests in both “spirit work” and resistance. Baker identifies two different strategies of African American modernist engagement of the larger world—the “mastery of form” and “deformation of mastery.” Baker understands “form” “to signal a symbolizing fluidity . . . a family of concepts or a momentary and changing array of images, figures, assumptions, and presuppositions that a group of people . . . holds to be a valued repository of spirit” (17). Under particularly constraining circumstances—slavery and its aftermath—the mask becomes the most “apt” strategy for attaining the mastery sought after. That mask is a space of habitation not only for repressed spirits of sexuality, ludic play, id satisfaction, castration anxiety, and a mirror stage of development, but also for that deep-seated denial of the indisputable humanity of inhabitants of and descendants from the continent of Africa. (17)

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Baker at first argued that it was Booker T. Washington who represented the defining point of mastery of form in African America. Up from Slavery (1901) was considered the dramatic display of Washington’s agenda and discursive strategies in relationship to mastery of form. What was at issue was being able somehow to speak at all, to be articulate about genuine needs and interests. The mastery of form through the mask was seen by Washington and by many other as the only way in America to come safely into speech. One had to learn to manipulate dominant forms for one’s own ends, to find an effective public voice in dangerous times and places, as Zora Neale Hurston translated a folk expression, to hit a “straight lick with a crooked stick.”16 Baker also discussed the “deformation of mastery” as working strategy for African American world-building. According to Baker, it was Du Bois who was the exemplar of this strategy that involved “go(uer)rilla action in the face of acknowledged adversaries” (50). Du Bois was thought to exemplify the deformation of mastery in his refusal of “a master’s nonsense.” Such deformation represents resistance insofar as it “returns . . . to the common sense of the tribe”—often by “transmuting” “standard syllables” (56). This has been done mainly through revisionist scholarship and the arts. Acknowledging both the efficacy and the limitations of Washington’s representations of mastery of form as world-building strategy and Du Bois’s representations of the deformation of mastery as world-building strategy, Baker saw in the sensibilities and strategies in Alain Locke’s famous collection of essays entitled The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) evidence of the required “shrewd combination of formal mastery and deformative creativity” (72). This combination Baker called “extreme deformation,” “radical marronage”: “marronage on the grand scale” (76). Locke’s project was a cultural-artistic and political statement set “in direct opposition” to the practices and beliefs of a racist nation. It was understood to be a “communal project, drawing on resources, talents, sounds, images, rhythms of a marooned society or nation,” seeking its “inspiration in the very flight, or marronage . . . of millions of black folk” (77). The physical migration of masses from the rural South to urban areas in many parts of the country was made by Locke a metaphor flight from one state of consciousness and orientation to another: The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize . . . a chance for the improvement of conditions . . . a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance-in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from the countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.17

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Powerful as they are, Baker’s theses about Black modernism provoke several questions and issues. Baker himself has reconsidered some of his arguments. In his most recent work and issues, Baker himself has reconsidered some of his arguments. In his most recent work entitled Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. (2001), he changes his mind about how Booker T. Washington figures in the development of Black modernism. The modernism Washington was previously argued to have represented is now qualified as “mulatto modernism”—a damning agenda concerned only with a “clean, thrifty, rural, industrial, plain style,” with “domesticated immobility as a regimen for the black body of the “country districts.” So now, according to Baker, “Booker T.” ultimately is to be condemned insofar as he is associated with “a zealous aestheticization of slavery as modernity.”18 Baker’s “re-reading” of “Booker T.,” it is important to stress, does not represent abandonment of the latter’s mastery of form/deformation of mastery schema of Black modernism. Actually, what the revisionist argument about “Booker T.” leads to is further required differentiation and complexity of the phenomenon of Black modernism. And, of course, this re-reading of “Booker T.” on the part of Baker invites other re-readings and questioning. In light of Baker’s re-readings, I want to suggest that thinking about Black modernism be informed first by recognition of some of the different specific domains of struggle and “work” that have characterized much of the African presence in the North Atlantic world—the everyday ongoing individual survivalist (“trickster”) efforts among the folks, at work, in the schools, on the streets; the ongoing local and occasional large scale socio-economic-political collective campaigns (the freedom movements on the local and national level, with workers that range from the Martin Luther Kings and Malcolm Xs to those women, especially, and men who are never to be well known); the cultural arts-expressive works among artists, the well-known and not known or recognized at all; the intellectual work (among both academic professionals at prestigious institutions and the street inveiglers); and the religious virtuosi and ritualists. Consistent specification of such domains is important as constant reminder of the differentiation in the conceptualizations of and strides toward modernism among African Americans. I shall want to focus upon one of such domains—the religious ritualistic. Thinking about Black modernism ought also be informed by a clear and defensible approach or type of criticism that emerges out of and is suited to African American historical experiences, soundings, representations, sensibilities. In his Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (1988), a broader and deeper and more existential probing than was his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker called for the construction of analytic models for a “criticism of silence” (here drawing upon the

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work of Susan Sontag) in order to reach and fathom the deepest “low valley sounds,” soulful tunes, “inaudible valleys,” the “mystical states of being” of African American “spirit work.”19 Such silence, he argues, represents another language, another worldliness, or orientation. It is the work of those who have been erased, made to be invisible, those whose language and sounds have been deemed “other” that needs to be probed. So I should like here to respond to Baker’s call and in turn call for a criticism of the experiences of African Americans and their stratagems and regimens for survival and freedom. But such criticism needs to be intentionally more comprehensive and explicit than the criticism focused upon silence. It needs to be a criticism, I would suggest, in order to make more explicit the pointed implications on the analysis, of ascetics—the ascetics of invis​ ibili​ty/si​lence​/stil​lness​/igno​rance​. The criticism called for here will need to address the different ways in which the Black body—individual and collective—is or is not seen, heard, touched, and apprehended, what spaces it occupies and on what terms, and the nature of the Black body’s individual and collective labored response to the world. Construing criticism in this manner forces the issues of situation (and positionality) and agency to the fore in layered, complex, ironic, even paradoxical, terms. The terms of the criticism called for here also would seem to reflect the negative, the lack, being associated in the psyche of Europeans and Euramericans, at least as far back as the beginnings of sustained contact and the onset of modern colonialism and slavery. This is not an assumption or argument that African Americans on the whole have accepted the lack or the negative as essentialist truth about themselves. But it is an argument that African Americans have historically faced the reality of their situation in terms of what Baker calls the “black hole,” what I have called “reading darkness.”20 But whatever terms or tropes they have always sought to address themselves and the world accordingly, to think creatively, critically and realistically, and creatively about what they face. This suggests the need for analysis that seeks to explain the range of African American’s responses to such reality. I think of such responses in terms of world-building on the periphery and from the perspective of struggle. We always learn much from peoples so positioned. The struggle that Black folks as Black folks have faced in the North Atlantic World can and should be expressed pointedly in terms of the struggles against racism. The point here is that Black folks are never more ascetic, viz., never more disciplined, than when they are addressing/working against racism. Drawing upon but manipulating some of Baker’s conceptualization and terminology and his suggestions regarding the needed critical approach in Afro-American Poetics, I want to suggest now an historical schema for

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African American world-building/healing that has as its baseline a construal of ascetic practices as the working out of an ideology of contempt for the world, in response to the world that is perceived as holding the Black soul in contempt. My schema uses as point of departure of the orientations and sentiments that are implied in Baker’s “extreme marronage,” viz., resistance “converted” into “song, story, arts of liberation, guerrilla war” (95). I suggest now a three-part schema that is cyclical in nature-de-formation; formation; and re-form(ul)ation. But there is no end point in the development that would warrant the modifier “extreme.” The cycle implies that we have to do here not with a linear progressive-developmental schema—as though it were possible to approach an end to the struggle—but with overlapping, with differentiation and complexity. Only summary descriptions can follow. “De-formation” in my schema assumes a history of enslavement and suggests flight or marronage—sometimes physical, but always necessarily psychic, intellectual and spiritual—as the perennial goal. Flight is the necessary beginning of resistance and of the setting up of another shadow world. Here runaway slaves from the beginning to the end of slavery throughout the North Atlantic world and the mass migrations to urban centers in the United States in the early twentieth century define and dramatize de-formation.21 “Formation” refers to the ongoing work of setting up tent, building an oppositional world in marronage, on the margins. “Work” here must be understood broadly; all aspects and types and levels and arenas of effort— physical, intellectual, cultural-artistic, spiritual—are required to make the new world. The creation of powerful cultural forms of expression (music, literature, dance, visual arts); the North Atlantic reconstitution and reorientation of different forms of the African sacred cosmos; and the founding of independent institutions—these and other efforts have contributed to the formation of the new African American world. “Re-form(ul)ation” refers to the work of second-order thinking and creativity and orientation. It represents attempts to turn African America back to African American traditions and orientations with a view toward domestic bricolage work, recreating out of already established indigenous traditions. In the cultural arts—music and literature especially—one finds evidence of this work in different types of intersexuality or interfacings. Here established cultural performances are engaged and critiqued from the perspective of the interpretation of a different moment of development in marronage. In social institutional life, one finds evidence of the phase in the cycle in the critique, reformation and reorientation of established institutions and programs—churches, schools, and so forth. In continuation of the use of the metaphors and images used by Baker, the “re-form(ul)ation” work sounds black notes more clearly. Of course, this is due to the traditions that provide

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the frameworks and matrices for the clearer, crisper, and louder black soundings of a marooned people. This stage assumes a Black world in marronage. This cycle of social formation as I schematize it can be seen in many different domains of African American life, most dramatically across the different domains in terms of the “works” as “performances”—forms of cultural-arts and spiritual expressiveness. These forms of expressiveness both create and provide collective energy and focus to engage each part of the cycle. They constitute an alternate language that reflects and provoked alternate reality. They communicate dominated peoples’ sentiments about themselves. These cultural-expressive “works,” like the larger domains in which they take place, are of many types. That domain in which many African American culturalexpressive forms are fascinating, but still begging to be analyzed to the depth and with the sensitivity that they deserve, is religious ritual.22 We have learned much in recent decades about the workings of the spirit in the domain of religious ritual among communities of the Africa Diaspora from such scholars as R. Thompson, S. Stuckey, and Shelia Walker. Because of its sensitive and respectful engagement, its in-depth probing and comparative focus, the work of Joseph M. Murphy is especially important for my argument. In his Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (1994),23 Murphy examines the ritual ceremonies and practices of five different African Diaspora communities—Haitian Vodou, Candomble in Brazil, Cuban and Cuban American Santeria, Revival Zion movement in Jamaica, and the Black Church in the United States. His aim was to understand the self-understandings of these communities or movements as reflected through their relationships to African traditions and in the commentary on and critique of their different American experiences. Murphy’s focus upon ritual ceremonies is fascinating and provocative. He justifies the focus upon ritual because he holds that what is distinctive about African Diaspora communities is the way that the relationship between human beings and spirit is “worked out in community ceremony” (6). Recovering the sense of the (ancient Greek lingual and broadly multi-cultural Mediterranean) original understanding of “liturgy” (leitourgia) as “work” or “service,” Murphy took note of a creative confusion: He noted that diasporan ceremonies are “services for the spirit, actions undertaken by the spirit to inspire the congregation.” It is “service,” in all its “elegant multiple meanings,” that shows the dynamic quality of the spirituality of the African diaspora. The spirit is “worked” in the “service” to empower the community (7). In the ecstatic experience, that is the slaves’ ring shout and the subsequent contemporary representations of it that are part of the religious traditions of the Black community of the United States are dramatic examples of Murphy’s argument about the workings of the spirit. Respecting the complex diversity of African America, Murphy nonetheless rightly argued that the emphasis

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upon spirit long ago permeated “from below” (viz., working class Black folk) almost all African American religious communities. Although he focused in detail upon the ritual structure of a Church of God in Christ ceremony, Murphy understood that the spirit ceremonies represent “the construction of communion with the spirit through the rhythms of words and music, movement and prayer,” that such workings of the spirit should be seen as the results of the “ceremonial orientation to freedom,” a reflection of “the . . . quest for the entire people’s liberation.” Such “isomorphism” of experience—salvation and freedom viewed both as the “already in liturgy and not yet in history”—is declared to be fundamental to the structuring and communication of the spirit “work” of African America diasporan communities (154). But it is anthropologist Walter Pitts’s book Old Ship of Zion: The AfroBaptist Ritual in the African Diaspora (1993)24 that has done the most to advance my thinking about the workings of African diaspora spirit ceremonies. With its sensitive revisionist social scientific treatment of one of the major rituals of the African American working class, the book takes up and advances the work of Zora Neale Hurston.25 After becoming a part of and conduction extensive field research in several Black Baptist churches in central Texas, Pitts noted that the Afro-Baptist folk ceremony is divided into two (binary) frames—the somber melancholy first frame and the ecstatic trance of the second. Drawing upon Victor Turner’s work, which advanced three stages in ritual as initiation—structure (reflecting hierarchialization, formality and the dominant sociopolitical power base of society); antistructure (communitas, a moment of refreshment from structure or a moment of chaos in the reversal of structure), and restructure (a return to structure of a sort)—Pitts argued that the Afro-Baptist worship service is a type of initiation ritual. The ritual he focused upon functioned to transport participants from one psychological and spiritual state to another. But Pitts translated Turner’s “mutually indispensable opposites” into the binary frames of the Afro-Baptist ritual so that the first frame—the Devotion, which consists of prayers articulated in formalized, even archaic English and lined hymns—is a “structural component,” functioning as a reflector of control; and the second frame—the choir-singing and delivery of the sermon and the shouting that both induce—temporarily scrambles control and usurps traditional lines of authority before it returns all participants to such control. He viewed the first Afro-Baptist frame in terms of structure, the second frame in terms of anti-structure and restructure.26 Pertinent to my argument is Pitts’s interpretation of the Afro-Baptist ritual ceremony with its binary frame structure in terms of the discipline and harsh experiences that social formation and psychosocial transformation entail. (Here I think Pitts corrects what some critics, including, as I have pointed out, R. Devisch, have argued to be Turner’s over-reliance upon “representation and plot.”) Pitts understood the first ritual frame as “preparation”—“for the

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descent of the Holy Spirit.” This preparation required discipline, work, the serious work of exercising restraint in code structuring, consistently following through with routinization in actions or speech or song. This part of the Afro-Baptist ritual is akin to the part of the African initiation in which participants are required to undergo certain disciplines—seclusion, food deprivation—until the gods come to possess them. The effect of such discipline is transformation, the experience of an-other reality.27 The preparations, the disciplines, and the possession—these represent components of a form or type of askesis. But it is most important to note that the type of askesis registered here is not that which has as its aim purgation, or the cleansing of the unholy, the evil self or community. It is not about the need to bring low a spirit that is too elevated. It is primarily about social formation, the psychosocial translation that first names reality (structure) and then deforms (antistructure) and reformulates it (restructure). Such formation is always stormy, the experience that Pitts (155) rightly recognized was captured by Thomas A. Dorsey in his now famous song “The Lord Will Make a Way Somehow” (1943), sung even today throughout much of African America, with its haunting mixed metaphors and images: Like a ship that’s tossed and driven, Battered by an angry sea, ... The Lord will make a way some-how.

The translation of transformed consciousness is stormy—“like a ship.” (Here the recall of the slave ship is chilling, haunting! The intercalation of the slave ship within the image of the ship of Christianity can hardly be more poignant.) Much discipline is required for survival, then, to get into the flow, to belong, to be healed, to be whole. So testified one of the parishioners whom Pitts interviewed: You sit there [in Devotion] and want to be dignified, but you can’t help yourself. All of a sudden . . . you’re smilin’. At first you go to service poised and all . . . then all of a sudden everything is rocking and moving. If you get in with it, then you won’t be left out . . . You go along with the flow of the rhythm. (169)

The focus upon ritual, not so much for the sake of determining what it means, even what it achieves, but how it “works . . . in and of itself, having no author other than itself,”28 is the point of a sematic-praxiological project. And here then is our point of return to asceticism. The African American example raises many questions about resistance and asceticism; about performances and asceticism itself. Do we not have to do here with social formation and

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what attends such in the modern situation? Might this analysis have implications for the study of certain ancient moments and movements? My analysis took the focus away from the term and the abstraction, a some-thing called “asceticism,” away from canonical texts and figures and institutions. The focus is now placed upon the effort to try to understand how worlds are made and whether and in what respects it makes sense to explain such phenomena in terms of asceticism. Perhaps, all world-making efforts require work, struggle, and resistance. These world-making practices reflect the pursuit no merely of the negative, of renunciation, of repression of the will to power, but positive goals—wholeness and healing, the will to being/the will to social power/the will to speak/the will to be heard/the will to position the body freely. Such practices and goals can with qualification be termed “ascetic,” but this should be the case only if the reference is not reduced to fetishization—of texts, historical periods, cultures, and types of individual figures— and to spiritualization and depoliticization, and used as mystification and obfuscation of the real-life storms that are transmuted into social power, that is, into a psychology and “sociology of hope.”29 What we now refer to as “asceticism”—reading now comparatively the likes of Jerome’s late fourth century Life of Paul the Hermit alongside the likes of Howard Thurman’s late twentieth century autobiographical meditation With Head and Heart; reading Pseudo-Athanasius’s fifth century Life and Activity of the Holy and Blessed Teacher Syncletica alongside Jarena Lee’s early nineteenth century spiritual autobiography The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her call to Preach the Gospel; reading Musonius Rufus’s lectures to students of philosophy alongside Benjamin Mays’s mid-twentieth century chapel address to young black male college students as would-be agents of modern world change—these and other such expressions should be seen as the exercise of the religious imagination. They aid in creating what Richard Werbner, in Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey: The Process and Organization of Religious Movement (1989) calls “alternative images of space and place, of transition and passage . . . the recreation of . . . familiar locational imagery,” for example, the body or the home, so that such imagery is “given new significance,” so that order, the steadying of the ship of existence, is restored from the disorder and the felt contradictions of existence.30 “Asceticism,” then, read in terms of a comparative historical semanticpraxiological approach, should also be understood as social struggle that employs imaginative forms of “dissent and non-conformity” by which persons “direct themselves and others . . . to remake their environment.”31 The African American example is significant not because it represents a privileged perspective on the issues, but because such a people partly dramatically

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self-invented, partly dramatically invented by others as a result of being forced to undergo and thus help define the West, a modern people not meant to survive, a people still viewed as metonymic of peripheral existence in Western culture—such people with such experiences can teach much about the modern and ancient ascetics of social formation, about the persistence of certain construals of hope and certain strategies and practices for the transmutation of such hope into social power. Because hope and social power are still so desperately needed in so much of the world, the interpretive project that is focused upon such matters remains compelling. NOTES 1. Translation in H. Spitzmuller, Poésie de Moyen Age (XIIe-XVe siècle) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1975), 1:723–25; see Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 15. 2. I think it is appropriate for me to confess to having been a facilitator of some of the discussions that have taken place over the past fifteen years or so. See the history of some of the discussion and bibliography in Asceticism, ed. V.L. Wimbush and R.Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 3. Geoffrey Harpham, Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 4. See “Theory,” in Asceticism, 544f; and “Constructions,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63, no. 3 (Winter, 1995): 775–821. 5. See Schechner’s “Magnitudes of Performance,” in The Anthropology of Experience, eds. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 345. Valantasis’s discussion is in “A Theory of the Social Function,” 548. 6. Devisch, Weaving the Threads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 40. 7. See Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), for discussion of deployment of the trope. 8. See discussion re: Amiri Baraka’s poetic use of the “scream” in Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 204–207. 9. This claim may be debatable for some; but what is not debatable is that the forced presence of Africans in the North Atlantic worlds is inextricably tied to the onset of Western modernity. Africans in such worlds were forced to undergo radical disorientation, psycho-social death and the experience of radical newness. See Orlando Patterson’s discussion in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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10. See Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) for a provocative discussion about mimesis as both “faculty” and “history.” 11. Perkins, Suffering Self (New York: Routledge, 1995). 12. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); James A. Francis, Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 13. Devisch, Weaving the Threads, 37. 14. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), and his primary and secondary bibliographic references to Du Bois. I follow here the text included in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Henry L. Gates, Jr., and Nellie McKay, Gen. Eds.; New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996). Quotations from p. 619. 15. Houston Baker, Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Afro-American Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); and Workings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 16. See Zora Neale Hurston, Hitting a Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Genevieve West (New York: Amistad, 2020). 17. The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke. Introduction by Arnold Rampersaud (New York: Touchstone Simon & Schuster, 1197[orig., 1925]), 6. Emphasis mine. 18. Houston Baker, Turning South Again (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 19. See chap III. 20. In re: “’black hole,” see Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5, 144–57, 171–72. In re: “reading darkness,” see Wimbush (with assistance of R. C. Rodman), African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Text and Social Textures (New York: Continuum, 2000), 1–43. 21. Baker, Modernism, 49–51; 103–4. 22. The terminology used her should not confuse. The focus is placed upon the ritualistic “workings of the spirit.” Such workings are often found in complex relationship to larger institutions. But these institutions do not determine the shape and boundaries and meanings of these ritual workings. 23. Joseph M. Murphy, Working the Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 24. Walter Pitts, Old Ship of Zion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 25. It should be noted what Pitts reported about Hurston’s attitude about her consistent focus upon working class Baptists—“I do not speak of those among us who have been tampered with…I mean the common run of us who love magnificence, beauty, poetry, and color so much that there can never be too much of it” (5). His book focus and his empathetic orientation, including his embeddedness as part of his research focus suggest he clearly suggested he shared her sentiment. 26. See Pitts, Old Ship of Zion, 155f. Also, Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (trans. M. Vizedom and G. Caffee; Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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1969 [1903]); and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); and “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage,” in Reader in Comparative Religion, ed. William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (3rd ed.; New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 27. Pitts, 168–69, 172. See also Felicitas D. Goodman, Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 28. Devisch, 24. 29. See Henri Desroche, Sociology of Hope (New York: Routledge, 1979), for some interesting observations about how to approach the issues in social scientific and other broad theoretical terms. 30. Werbner, Ritual Passage (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1989), 299. 31. Ibid., 300.

Chapter 5

Contemptus Mundi The Dialectics of Modern Formation

In conversation with the theoretics of a number of modern critics, this chapter aims to challenge the still too often polar opposites in the analytics of asceticism—as being, on the one hand, about otherworldly piety, the self, the private sphere, and the renunciation of the public sphere; or, on the other hand, about types and degrees of institutionalization as signs of presumed worldly compromise or corruption of otherworldly piety and values. Instead, contemptus mundi, originally the expression of a particular social-cultural context (European Middle Ages) and discursive formation and valence (Christian ascetical), is complicated and made expansive and used to capture the historical and ongoing and cross-cultural—not ancient, Western-christian, and exceptionalist—complex of ideologies and politics and practices that confound the polar usual opposite analytics. Contemptus mundi is made to reflect the complexity of orientation that is renunciation as askesis for the sake of formation and its cycles. Modern and contemporary formations— including the modern African diaspora—are used as examples to think outside the traditional framework and categories, contexts and implications. My interest in the phenomenon that is the focus of this chapter—asceticism—goes back to my years in graduate school. There were not during those years available to me the categories that I needed to pursue what were my real interests—social texture and social orientation and politics. Ensconced in a program that was a hybrid, part scriptural exegesis and historicist/historical studies—Christian origins/early Christianity/late antiquity—I felt my options at the time to be limited. As these situations are meant to work, I appropriately policed myself: I stayed within the accepted boundaries and chose a text—an ancient Christian text—around which I based my thesis. I played the game. Yet, I realized that my real interest was in psycho-social and political formation; and in point of fact, in that social formation that I represented. 79

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Clearly, the most critical historical inquiry now concedes that our inquiry into the past is really always our obfuscated and obfuscating inquiry about the present and our enlarged selves in the present. We need only be careful how tightly we draw and work within the circle. After graduate studies and through the 1980s and into the 1990s, I continued with interests in askesis in connection with and through the engagement of what were considered the appropriate late ancient Christian texts. (It was supposed to be a sign of the liberal orientation of the program that non-canonical texts could be the focus of analysis.) I soon began to construe my work as collaborative project in association first with Claremont’s German-inspired Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (located at the edge of the desert) and later continuing on my own at Union Seminary in New York City (located at the mouth of Harlem). In the first context, I facilitated the collaboration in the 1980s that led to the publication of Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook in 1990.1 The collaboration and conversation led to what was at the time the unprecedented convening in the 1990s (again, in Harlem, no less!) of a large and multi-disciplinary and multi-field and multi-cultural conference on asceticism, with many different critical issues and problems addressed. Among such was the very important basic question about what the term askesis/asceticism references, whether it references anything at all; whether and in what respects the comparative study of asceticisms is feasible; and so forth. A remark made by well-known scholar Elaine Pagels on a panel that was charged with addressing asceticism in contemporary culture resonated widely at the time. The remark touched on the politics of the ascetical as she registered surprise that the venue of the conference on “this most unlikely topic” was a Protestant seminary, and recalled that her German Lutheran teachers had steered her away from interest in the ascetical because it was assumed that such interest in connection with the apostle Paul was part of an inauthentic, eccentric, and belated Christianism, part of “a complete misunderstanding.”2This was only one side or aspect of the fraught politics of asceticism that obtained and, perhaps, still obtains. One still has to come to terms with the tendency on the part of some privileged and overrated religious and academic institutions and discourses—what used to be called without apology or self-reflexive argument, patristics—to collude in making asceticism a privileged ancient phenomenon, needing to be defended. The resulting published volume from the conference, that made safe space for the raising of such questions and issues—also carrying the simple title Asceticism—was published in 1995. My sense is that it is far from being the last word on the subject, but it continues to be referenced as a touchstone. The success of the conference and the publication of the conference proceedings as a major volume inspired me to try to continue the momentum in conversation and collaboration. In 1993, I conceptualized and established,

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along with my conference and book collaborator and a few other colleagues, a rather unusual and probably unprecedented joint program unit of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), around the critical studies of comparative asceticism. Called “The Ascetic Impulse in Religious Life and Culture,” this program unit ran for several years, three years under my leadership; it ran a few more years after I passed the mantle of leadership on to others. What the program unit represented was the effort to expand and radicalize the concept and valence of asceticism—to make of it a wedge for inquiry into comparative social formation, history, and orientation. The idea was to detach the phenomenon—or the discourse about it—from its Western historicist-theological moorings, to question and interrupt the apologetic agenda, with its assumptions about cultural exceptionalism and religion and spirituality as the privileged if not exclusive domain of activity and interest.3 In just a few years—I think not on account of my absence and preoccupations elsewhere—the joint AAR–SBL program unit collapsed. This was on account of lack of interest in and commitment to—even, among a few, opposition to‒‒the agenda of critical and comparative studies in asceticism. Interest in asceticism on the part of the likes of literary scholar Geoffrey Harpham and the unbelievably prolific big-theory comparative social scientist S. E. Eisenstadt gave me encouragement to continue thinking and cultivating my ex-centric thoughts—even as I did so in circles different from those of theological and religious studies scholars, patristics scholars in particular. Harpham’s argument about askesis, especially that having to do with defining culture in terms of the ascetic impulse, and the latter in terms of resistance, was appealing and provocative. And Eisenstadt’s work on revisiting and expanding theorizing about the Axial Age in terms of the complex psychosocial effects of the otherworldly or transcendent gaze also intrigued me and inspired me to continue work on erecting bridges across field and disciplinary divides.4 I began to make connections between my critical studies and comparative approach to scriptures in terms of cultural phenomena and dynamics and asceticism in terms of social-cultural orientation. I have come to see these interests as being of one piece or in terms of one complex set of interests. They are about social texture and about forms of social and cultural expressivity and orientation and power. And it was of course the Axial Ageotherworldly oriented that also invented and traduced scriptures. Allowing myself to acknowledge such interest also freed me to transgress disciplinary and field boundaries, as needed, to pursue that which was important and compelling to me. I allowed myself to embrace the truth that I need not begin inquiry with a canonical text or canonical formation and canonical historical setting, according to the assumptions and practices of a discursive formation

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that hides itself from itself. And encourages me to hide from myself. I began my inquiry elsewhere—with my “world,” and with the modern world, refracting outward and even, with different assumptions, back in time. There were already along the way gestures and signs of my transgression—including the turn to the scriptures project that begin with the African Americans and the Bible collaborative project in the late 1990s that led to the establishment of the ex-centric and transgressive Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS). I had just a few years before writing an essay on a so-called ascetical Christian figure—all too oddly and provocatively named Black Moses—who seemed too “good” as an ascetic and too black to be believed or accepted as historical. I registered my historical skepticism as well as my first-brush assumption that the politics of ascet​icize​d-rac​ializ​ed/et​hno-c​entri​c-scr​iptua​lizat​ion here obtained without following up on the matter.5 But this foray was enough to convince me that asceticism and scriptures could and should be bridged, the one made to help explain the other. This is why I have turned to the likes of James Baldwin for some needed perspective. Baldwin’s always electrifying words have much to inform and provoke thinking about the subject of this chapter. He was never more eloquent than when he attempted to make of Black humanity a lesson for humanity in general: . . . the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation—this past, this endless struggle . . . yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful . . . That [one] who is forced each day to snatch . . . identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows . . . something about [one’s]self and human life . . . [one]e achieves [one’s] own authority . . . The apprehension of life so . . . sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children . . . who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent force of white supremacy . . . It demands spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced.6

What among so many issues that are instructive about this excerpt from the now famous work The Fire Next Time—in response to the dramatic challenges and fraught situation faced by African Americans and indeed all of the United States during the height of the civil rights movement—are the terms used to describe the behaviors and character of the Black folks. They are described as unsung heroes, as those who in the face of almost unspeakable

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odds and challenges, horrors, and humiliation, “endured” and even more modeled “something very beautiful” and realized their “own authority” and power and conquered “fear.” They showed themselves in the ways they “produce[d]” children who could “walk through mobs to get to school,” in the “great force and great cunning” they mustered “to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy,” in the “spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot was on [their] neck” they proved themselves to be “aristocrats,” part of a “long line of improbable aristocrats—the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced.”7 What Baldwin describes is in my view modern ascetics. They are those who are best characterized as those who having been held in contempt by the world signify on or resignify the contempt projected onto them. The humiliation, the enslavement, the death heaped onto them is played with and, through much effort, made into something that then helps establish a baseline for the formation and embracing of the world, the world of Black folk, African diaspora, the Black Atlantic, including African America. So much can be fathomed in connection with this complex phenomenon that has to do with nothing less than the making of modernity itself. But I should like in this chapter to focus on what Baldwin’s characterizations open up in terms of the resignification and recasting and re-imaging of the ascetics of formation or, more pointedly, formation as contemptus mundi.8 What Baldwin described as the ascetics of modern Black life in the United States (and in the North Atlantic worlds generally) other critics and theorists described in somewhat similar terms. Attention, even if limited and cursory, paid to some among such theorists is needed in order to see more clearly that to which Baldwin’s words point and what may be made of the formation of African America in relationship to thinking about asceticism and the modern world. In W.E. B. Du Bois’s famous Souls of Black Folk (SBF), originally published in 1903, the concept of the “veil” was pressed into service to identify and address the major challenges faced just after the turn into the twentieth century by the “folk,” or perhaps, more accurately, the type of black person he had known and had studied and reflected upon and thought himself to be, thereby complicating the matter of the direction and focus of address.9 In SBF, he challenges readers to name and analyze the “symbolic order” and structural arrangements that establish and hold in place “the veil” that names and positions the black self as marginal, as “other.” He also challenges Black and all other persistently marginalized peoples to discover and re-cover the use of tools and strategies and practices by which the veil can be rent (or resisted) and the construction (or “weaving”) of meaning and national/sociocultural formation, psycho-social empowerment, and healing “beyond the veil” can be sustained.

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Referred to more than thirty times, the metaphor of the veil in SBF is Du Bois’s attempt to define the existence of Black folks in the United States as those humiliated and forced into divided consciousness. Thus, the poignant meaning of the plural term “souls”—not as reference to the many souls or many persons, but as reference to the two “souls,” in the one representative body, or in each body, divided, warring against each other. This division was for Du Bois the psychologically felt reflection of the social-economicpolitical existence of black folks as the chronic persistent other, the subaltern, the enslaved/colonized living next to—and reduced to looking at themselves through the gaze of—the enslaver/colonizer. “Veil” is made to mean variously—as in the “veil of Race”;10 regarding the “Veil of Color”;11 as that which imprisons;12 as that within which Black folks are born and in which they grow up;13 as that which casts a shadow;14 as that against—above and beyond—which the Black self strives to live;15 as that world beyond which white folks live;16 as that which the Black self overcomes only in death;17 and that which, based on hope, is to be rent.18 Literary critics Shamoon Zamir (Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903)19 and Arnold Rampersad (Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois)20 have argued that with the metaphorization of the veil Du Bois drew most directly from Hegel, then from Emerson, and some other late nineteenthand early twentieth-century persons of letters; from nascent psychology; and from the Bible.21 It has also been argued that Du Bois picked up the term from Thomas Jefferson, who had raised the question about the inferiority of the “other [Black] race,” given “that immovable veil of black which covers all [its] emotions”22 It is certainly possible that Du Bois’s sources were multiple, varied, and inter-textual, and that such sources were sometimes foregrounded, at other times backgrounded, in one context of discussion. It was also sometimes the case that valences from one source were wedded to another. Zamir argues that Du Bois took directly from Hegel the idea of the veil and its effects on consciousness and wedded it to the Bible’s stories regarding transformation. Du Bois needed language and concepts through which he could articulate what he understood to be the profundity of the crisis of divided consciousness among black folks and the complexity of the ascetics and performativity of transformed consciousness. Hegel’s concern had been about the “unhappy consciousnesss” as part of the dialectics of the master–slave relationship and that moment in which such consciousness is transformed, when selfconsciousness discovers itself beyond the realm of appearances, that moment in which the “curtain” is drawn aside.23 But philosopher Frank Kirkland has rightly made efforts to see how Du Bois’s references to double consciousness fit more closely with historical black existence, most especially with Du Bois’s notions about the risings and fallings, the shared humiliations—the “strivings”—of black existence that have led to double consciousness. Kirkland has identified three different

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senses for double consciousness in Du Bois’s writings: (1) The first, least important, sense, according to Kirkland, is the “duplicitous,” in which according to Du Bois “one looks at one’s self through the eyes of others or measures one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” This is false interpretation, self-deception. (2) The second and most important sense is the “dualistic”/“duellistic,” in which “the contradiction of double aims” produces disorientation, irreconcilable strivings, ultimately, self-doubt. (3) The third sense, the most important for Kirkland, is “dyadic,” which represents for Du Bois “the merging of [a Black individual’s] double self into a better and truer self.” It involves the production of what Kirkland refers to as “a true self-consciousness” that rends the Du Boisian veil, lifts itself into modernity, and goes on to contribute to “civilization.”24 For Black folks—the chronic persistent marginalized in the United States, if not throughout most of the world—no merging of selves, no transformation of consciousness, no stepping into, and modeling of modernity can be effected unless the veil is addressed and problematized, then lifted or ripped. It is Kirkland’s “dyadic” sense of double consciousness that was for Du Bois the “norm” or goal and is elaborated upon in SBF. This is so because only this sense leads to the “rending of the Veil.” Although the veil had been in a sense lifted already (in the Emancipation Proclamation), this was partial and had, at any rate, been reversed. Full, unqualified, permanent rending/lifting of the veil is what Du Bois and his contemporaries hoped for. This could be done only through a certain fathoming of the past and discernment: orientation to the self, including the collective, the folk; and discernment that is critically self-reflexive, focused upon the history and meanings of the folks’ “deeds” in the world. The folk should be tuned into their own orientation, their own rhythms, their own ways of being in and responding to the world—informed by the shared past that includes slavery and disfranchisement. It was such an argument that led Du Bois to focus upon Black folks’ religion. This focus was the culminating discussion about the sorrow songs in SBF (“Our spiritual strivings,” “The faith of the fathers”). These songs helped Du Bois make the point about Black folks’ ongoing “strivings” and their orientation to time and space. Setting forth the terms and the timeline for the fulfillment of the hope can be considered Du Bois’s baseline agenda in SBF. Given the musical epigraphs for each essay in SBF, and given the placement of the essay about the sorrow songs at the end of the collection of essays, it seems clear that Du Bois intended that special focus be placed upon the songs. The latter were understood to hold a key to understanding the folks’ “reverence toward time” as part of their “strivings.” The songs make little sense except as they are connected to Du Bois’s metaphorization of the veil, understood and used in mostly negative terms, that is, as that which stands throughout most of the collection for the white-instituted

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color line and the pain and trauma it causes. The sorrow songs showed Du Bois the possibility of a rather different—positive—concept of the veil. This different concept of veil-ing—here understood as Black folks’ encoding of their deepest layered sentiments, feelings, and understandings in song—was poignant registration of black agency. At the end of SBF, after having consistently referred to the term “veil” to describe and provoke strong emotions about the separation and hegemony of Black folks from “the kingdom of culture,” Du Bois used it in a rather different, more positive sense—as the language of the slave songs that encodes or conceals the most profound and sensitive sentiments: In these songs . . . the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate. Words and music have lost each other and new cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment . . . the music is distinctly sorrowful. [They] tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.25 (emphasis mine)

As a type of veil-ing, these songs are nevertheless for Du Bois evidence of a serious grappling with the “veil” of the other negative valence, the veil that was to be overcome. The point seems to have been that a certain kind of veiling—a critical encoding as part of an interpretive strategy—was needed by those forced behind the veil. It was thought that for the sake of their safety—physical and psychological—they had to express their deepest sentiments in veiled terms, indirectly, “in other words.” Some of the implications of this thinking about veiling were not lost on critics and scholars of African American culture and its forms of expressivity. Folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston comes immediately to mind as well-known and provocative representative of interpreters of Black culture who have picked up on the encoding characteristic of African American expressivities. These interpreters, without consistent elaboration and problematization, without attempts to explain what was at issue, have nonetheless noticed the uses of the Bible (and other scriptures)—in the “sorrow songs” and in so many other forms of Black expressiveness—as part of the agenda of veiling about which Du Bois argued. That veiling, indirection, encoding, signifying are prominent in the interpretation of the folk is powerfully indicated in that favorite saying that Hurston picked up on in her field work and offered as a handle for “reading” the world and the self— “hitting a lick with a crooked stick.”26 In the manner in which she picked up on the full array of the lore and rhythms, the textures and gestures of Black folk, and in the connection she made between the use of the Bible and free liquid interpretation among them—“even the Bible was made over to suit our vivid imagination”—Hurston named some of the poignancy involved in

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critical interpretation about and among Black folks.27 Her reading of Black “readings”28 of the world points to the mysterious, the elusive, the uncanny, the “hidden meanin.’”29 Toni Morrison picks up on the connection between the Du Boisian metaphorical use of the veil and the vernacular uses of the Bible noted by both Du Bois and Hurston in order to problematize Black existence and orientation in her own work. First, she deepens and widens and problematizes Du Bois’s metaphoral rendering of the veil. The latter is associated not merely with racial segregation and other-ing. Second, she expands the Du Boisian notion of divided consciousness into an argument about a type of shutting off, occlusion and silencing—of the interior life/self—among Black folk. In an essay entitled “The Site of Memory,” included in a collection of essays edited by William Zinsser that is hauntingly entitled Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, Morrison addresses the matter of the veiling of the interior life of the Black self in terms of the muting, not the registration, of deeply felt sentiments, pain, stresses, trauma.30 With special attention to what were among the first of African American literary works written in English—the autobiographical slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—she identifies what is for Black folk the perduring problem of uniting the divided consciousness and accessing and probing and articulating the movements of the interior life: . . . no slave society in the history of the world wrote more . . . about its own enslavement. The milieu, however, dictated the purpose and the style . . . popular taste discouraged the writers from dwelling too long or too carefully on the more sordid details of their experience. Whenever there was an unusually violent incident, or a scatological one, or something “excessive,” one finds the writer taking refuge in the literary conventions of the day. “I was left in a state of distraction not to be described” (Equiano). “But let us now leave the rough usage of the field . . . and turn our attention to the less repulsive slave life as it existed in the house of my childhood” (Douglass). “I am not about to harrow the feelings of my readers by a terrific representation of the untold horrors of that fearful system of oppression . . . It is not my purpose to descend deeply into the dark and noisome caverns of the hell of slavery” (Henry Box Brown). Over and over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, “But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.” In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it they were silent about many things, and they “forgot” many other things.31

Morrison was here using the pointed metaphor of the veil as a way to think and make the point about occlusion. The one example from which she quotes, which includes actual reference to the term, comes from Lydia Maria Child’s

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introduction to Linda Brent’s “tale” of sexual abuse. This seems to be the reference that for Morrison makes clear the problem faced and suggests the language with which a solution can be found: I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I am willing to take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil drawn [aside].32

Morrison goes on to make her most important point—that it was striking to her that in the narratives there was “no mention of their [the slaves’] interior life.” [emphasis mine] As a writer thriving “not much more than a hundred years after Emancipation, a writer who is black and a woman,” she saw her job to be to challenge readers “how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate.’” Although Morrison does not in “The Site of Memory” seem directly to engage Du Bois, she was surely aware of and in conversation with Du Bois’s uses of the “veil.” Here I have in mind in particular her conversation with him about his intimation of what the “sorrow songs” signify, what they beckon, what they hold out as possibilities in helping Black folks to “rend the veil,” to unite a divided consciousness, to articulate powerful sentiments and yearnings. As I have already pointed out, it is ironic that the term Du Bois used to point to this work of rending the veil is “veiling.” That is, he thought that one powerful response on the part of Black folks to the dividedness of the Black soul was the music—especially, but not exclusively, the “sorrow songs.” The music was understood to be evocative and haunting; Du Bois found himself undone by it; he first experienced and then understood it as powerful carrier of veiled sentiment. The music, then, should be compared to the slave narratives as expressive form—retaining respect for the obvious different and shared possibilities and limitations. From her different social historical positioning, Morrison saw and argued about the limitations of both music and the literature that was the slave narrative. Regarding music, she argued in an interview that it “kept us alive, but it’s not enough anymore.”33 That she favors literature is clear enough: she thinks that fiction—in particular, the novel—can now speak most directly and powerfully to and for the early to mid-twentieth-century folk who have already migrated to the cities: I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction . . . for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people . . . The middle class at the

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beginning of the industrial revolution needed a portrait of itself because the old portrait didn’t work for this new class. Their roles were different; their lives in the city were new. The novel served this function then, and it still does. It tells about city values, the urban values. Now my people, we “peasants,” have come to the city . . . There has to be a mode to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization.34

Morrison in fact seems to see music, including the music that was the sorrow songs, as a continuing part of the problematic veiling—the veiling that needed to be ripped. Such veiling is in Morrison’s view that which keeps black folks from probing their interiority—and on their own terms. This problematic and the way outward seems to be precisely what Morrison addresses in most of her novels.35 In SBF, Du Bois anticipated some of the criticism that Morrison advanced about the type of black expressiveness reflected in the sorrow songs. In addition to his statement regarding some peoples’—self-styled moderns’— “irreverent” attitude “toward time” and their ignorance about human “deeds,” that is to say, their cluelessness about the meaning and import of certain peoples’ orientations to and forms of expressiveness in and about the world, Du Bois made the point that along with “unmeaning rhapsody” the songs reflect uses of the Bible—“conventional theology”—and in such usage “concealed” “much of real poetry and meaning.” The point here is that the concealment was not a negative, a simple lack; it was silence, but the silence was not the same as not saying or meaning anything at all. On the contrary—meaning to the contrary of Morrison—this “silence” was part of a conscious deliberate strategy to communicate an ongoing fathoming of the abject self and that self in the world: Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to Nature’s heart. Life was a “rough and rolling sea” like the brown Atlantic of the Sea Islands the “Wilderness” was the home of God, and the “lonesome valley” led to the way of life. . . . Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there . . . eloquent omissions and silences.36 (my emphasis)

The meaning of the “omissions” and “silences” is made clearer in an essay written by literary critic Houston Baker, entitled “Lowground and Inaudible Valleys: Reflections on Afro-American Spirit Work.”37 Baker argues that the interpretive orientation of Black folk culture is best understood as “silence”— that is, as holding back from normal/traditional uses of language, a turning away from the regular forms in order to express critique and healing. Drawing

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upon writer and critic Susan Sontag’s essay on silence, Baker called for a “criticism of silence” to “match the depths of a magnificently enhancing black sounding of experience”38 and it reflects the radical strategies of what he calls in his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance “flight” or cultural “maronnage,” involving “veiling/“masking,” “mastery of form,” and “de-formation of mastery” for the sake of the survival and building of a nation.39 This seems to me to resonate with Morrison’s language about “breakin’ the back of words.” It also resonates powerfully with philosopher Susan Buck-Morss’s argument in her brilliant and provocative book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, in which she argues, drawing on literary critic Joan Dayan’s equally brilliant and provocative Haiti, History, and the Gods, that African diaspora expressivities and orientation—reflected mostly in religious ritual—reflect the pummeling and violence, the ultimate loss and dispossession experienced, the “shreds of bodies come back,” and the resultant “decay of meanings.”40 The radicalism and power of the interpretive stance taken and shared by Morrison and Hurston, Du Bois, Dayan, and Buck-Morss, and so many others are in my view here summarized most eloquently by Baker: for black and subaltern critical consciousness, there is no meaning in any narrative, any script, any text, any tradition unless such is first ripped, broken and then “entranced,” blackened, made usable for weaving meaning. “Merely arranged in a traditional . . . problematic . . . words are ineffectual. Only when they enter into entranced performance . . . do they give birth to sounds of a new order.”41 The entranced performance about which Baker speaks is realized only when there is an addressing of the “lowground and inaudible valleys”— the deepest reaches of the collective psyche and sentiment—of the black folk. At such a point, the canonical arrangements and structures that present themselves and with which Black folk are forced to negotiate are exploded, into various expressions of contempt for the world and their politics. With this phenomenon, the veil is ripped, a tear obtains, even if not in absolute terms. There is flight, “escape,” from harshness, humiliation, contempt of the world, from the incessant violence done them in Western canonical “history” that erases Black folks, makes them invisible, mute, marginal. And the flight is registered in all sorts of ways and domains—from the physical and literal to the psychical and imaginary. That is why the songs, as poignant example of soundings, or an alternate speech, or a kind of silence, must not be set aside. In fact, they must be analyzed if the ascetics of formation are to be understood at all. The songs are sites of the plenitude of free, liquid articulations of meanings of the past that includes, according to Du Bois, slavery, but also a future: They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways . . . of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding: they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.42

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But let me be clear, the sign and image behind such songs is not that of a docile individual with head lowered and silent on account of fear. No, the better image, the image—if it must be of a representative individual—is that of the maroon. The figure imaged by J. G. Stedman in his Narrative of a Five-Year’s Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (London, 1796) is the more authentic, honest, and true to life representative figure for the Black African and Black diaspora person in marronage, whose gestures, movements, and soundings were part of the mastery of form and deformation of mastery about which Baker speaks. I think it an image more appropriate for the modern, in general, the modern whose experience gives us broader insight into what contemptus mundi may be made to mean or how it may be radically (re)signified—from focus on piety to social-political struggle. Or we might imagine, through the artistic offices of the poet Robert Hayden who in his poem “Runagate”43 has woven together perhaps one of the classic expressions and images of the modern ascetic registering contempt for the world—the runagate, the one, dramatically figured by Harriet Tubman, who runs from the mire and sin of slavery:   Wanted  Harriet Tubman  alias The General   alias Moses  Stealer of Slaves who, later, speaks,      Come ride-a my train         Mean mean mean to be free

The folk who are dark challenge us to run—away from dominance and its arrogations and hubris and toxic sentiments, onto “the ghost-story train,” into a “disrupting blackness” (T. Morrison), down into a “luminous darkness” (H. Thurman) where the process of the hard work of freeing the self can take place.44 They also warn us that ultimately there is no other way out—or around this contemptible world. It is thick, hard, impassable. That must have been what the anonymous song-poets of the sorrow songs meant when they crafted and sang: [It’s] so high, you can’t get over [it], [It’s] so low, you can’t get under [it], So round, you can’t get around [it], You must go right through the door.

These are the sounds and gestures that meant taking the received scripts/texts and making out of them songs that transport the “tropical imagination” of dark peoples outside the boundaries of the times and spaces of dominant discursivity (the most important instantiation of which we in Euro-American worlds continue to call “scriptures”/scriptura). But only when these songs and other

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such forms of expressions of the people made marginal come to be recognized for what they are, on their own terms, carrying their own significance, no longer behind the veil of dominant script/ure/s as texts or as canon, only when these songs are understood as expressions of complexly woven worlds and are (re)textualized (in the original meaning of the basic term) in critical/signifying relationship to “scriptures” (broadly understood) and the contempt-filled social orders they reflect can useful pasts and futures be created. It is only when we are able to make the category and phenomenon of asceticism more radically expansive—such that it includes the struggles and challenges of social and cultural and political formation, not merely forms of piety—and only when we make of it a more expansively radical or critical notion such that it includes gestures of all types, discourses of all types, including “scriptures” as part of formation politics—including the modern worlds that have determined us, only then will we begin to understand ourselves and our complex participation in systems of discourse and power. NOTES 1. Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990). 2. See Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 599. 3. In addition to the 1993 New York Asceticism conference, throughout the period of the 1990s I directed collaborative projects that led to publications, including Discursive Formations, Ascetic Piety and the Interpretation of Early Christian Literature (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992); Rhetorics of Resistance: A Colloquy on Early Christianity as Rhetorical Formation, Semeia 79 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999); and Asceticism and the New Testament, co-editor, Leif. E. Vaage (1999). These projects reflected orientation to theorizing asceticism beyond the discursive bounds of the traditional fields. 4. See Harpham’s The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and S. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 5. See my “Ascetic Behavior and Color-ful Language: Stories about Ethiopian Moses.” Semeia 58: Discursive Formations, Ascetic Piety and the Interpretation of Early Christian Literature, ed. V.L. Wimbush (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 81–92. A corrected version of this essay is included as chapter in this book. 6. The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993 [1963]), 98–100. 7. James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 342–43. 8. A difference ought to be recognized between the origins and uses of the expression contemptus mundi in a particular historical discursive situation and the longer and ongoing ideology/ideologization, orientation, and worldview often captured by the

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expression. As rhetorical and literary expression, contemptus mundi is notably first associated with a type of literature that developed in the late Middle Ages in Europe, particularly in the 11th and 12th centuries (even as it drew on earlier rhetorics and texts). See two important primary texts—Bernard of Cluny, Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny’s ‘De Contemptus Mundi,’ ed. Ronald E. Pepin (Medieval Texts and Studies No. 8; East Lansing MI: Colleagues Press, 1991); and Lothario Dei Segni (Pope Innocent III), On the Misery of the Human Condition [De miseria humane conditionis], ed. Donald R. Howard (Library of Liberal Arts No. 132; New York: the Bob-Merrill Company, Inc., 1969) that represent the advanced cultivation of the expression. And see discussion in Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of Western Guilt Culture: 13th-18th Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); and in Ann Ramsey, “Flagellation and the French Counter-Reformation: Asceticism, Social Discipline and Evolution of a Penitential Culture,” in Asceticism, ed. Wimbush and Valantasis, 576–87. 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books, 1989). I am following this edition throughout this chapter. 10. SBF, 55,56. 11. SBF, 127, 142. 12. SBF, 64. 13. SBF, 147, 148, 150, 156, 159, 165. 14. SBF, 149. 15. SBF, 76, 153. 16. SBF, 56. 17. SBF, 151. 18. SBF, 187. 19. Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See especially part 2. 20. Arnold Rampersad, Art and Imagination (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). See especially chapter 4. 21. In Exodus (LXX: 26:33) the “veil” (to katapetasma) separates the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary for the Ark of the Covenant, from everything else; in 1 Corinthians (13:12) Paul makes reference to humans, even repentant ones, as those who were able to see only partial truths—“darkly as through a veil” (en ainigmati); in the letter to the Hebrews (6:19) the unknown writer refers to entering into the domain of the “veil” (eis to esoteron tou katapetasmatos) to mark the change in those who, although having been enlightened, have in the face of persecution nevertheless “fallen away”; and, perhaps, most poignantly, the Gospel of Matthew (27:50–54), having depicted Jesus crying out loud and dying on the cross, indicates that “the veil” of the temple was “rent in two” from top to bottom (to katapetasma tou naou eschisthē eis dyo apo anōthen heōs katō). 22. From Thomas Jefferson’s essay “Laws,” from his Notes on the State of Virginia, in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 107. See also Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 167. 23. “This curtain [of appearance] . . . hanging before the inner world is withdrawn, and we have here the inner being gazing into the inner realm . . . What we have here

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is Self-consciousness. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain, which is to hide the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go there, as much in order that we may thereby see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.” From The Phenomenology of Mind, 212–13. Quotation from Zamir, Dark Voices, 135. 24. See Kirkland’s “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black,” The Philosophical Forum 24, nos. 1–3 (1992–93): 151. 25. SBF, 182–83, 185. 26. See Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Perennial Library, 1990 [1935]) 33, 218. Also, see above chapter 4, note #16. 27. Ibid., 3. 28. Ibid., 213–14. 29. Ibid., 125. 30. Toni Morrison, “Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 101–24. 31. Ibid., 109–10. 32. Ibid., 110. 33. Thomas Leclair, “‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (Amistad Literary Series; New York: Amistad, 1993), 371. 34. Ibid., 370–71. 35. Her novel Beloved, especially, should be explored for this emphasis. The title itself, as the epigraph suggests, comes from play with the letter to the Romans (9:22-26). 36. SBF, 182–83. 37. Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 88–110. 38. Ibid., 106. See also Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vantage, 1983), 181–204. 39. Houston Baker, Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), see chap 8. 40. See Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 127, note #112. Joan Dayan’s Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 35–37. 41. Baker, “Lowground and Inaudible Valleys,” 106. 42. SBF, 179, 180, 182, 186. 43. Robert Hayden, “Runagate, Runagate,” in H.L. Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 1506–08. 44. See Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992), 91; and Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1999).

Part II

“HITTING A LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK”; OR, READING DARKNESS, READING SCRIPTURES OBLIQUE CRITIQUE OF THE DISCURSIVE FORMATION

Chapter 6

Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures African Americans and the Bible—A Disturbing Conjunction and a Defiant Question (2000)

In a review essay of Toni Morrison’s Paradise entitled “The Scripture of Utopia,”1 author and poet Patricia Storace made the argument that Morrison like few other writers had always in her literary work challenged readers to see the full complexity of human emotions, perspectives, and orientations through African Americans. She has always understood the black presence to be central to any understanding of “our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination”2 Paradise, in particular, Storace went on to argue, draws that black presence forward from the margins of imagination to the center of American literature and history. . . . [Morrison] tells a story of an AfricanAmerican community in the Vietnam era which is also a story about colonial America . . . about pioneers laying claim to a country, and less explicitly, about the ways in which possession of this country has been extended and justified through stories . . . kneaded strongly into image of the country itself, so that the story of its claiming almost irresistibly evokes images of white founding fathers. Morrison does not waste her novelist’s energies criticizing or protesting that story or attempting to replace it with new myth. She does the work of art, not argument and . . . she uses the juxtaposition of founding stories to disorient the reader: Are we in the nation itself or an illusion of it? In Paradise, the story of America’s white founding fathers is moved from foreground to background—in the community of Ruby, Oklahoma, founded by African-Americans, the official national founding myth is a shadow of their own, in a community where shadows are not dark, but white . . . in laying frank and adventurous claim to a classic subject of American literature, Paradise subverts a kind of unspoken literary class distinction, the assumption that a story told with African-Americans 97

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or women in the foreground will necessarily be a story of impenetrably special experience and concerns, its subject somehow provincial, confined exclusively to itself, or to its response as a community to the power of the dominant community, a shadowy adjunct to the “real” normative story of national life.3

I was so struck by Storace’s arguments about Morrison’s complex, nuanced centering-foregrounding of African American experience in the literary imagination, and the corresponding back-grounding of the dominant white American story line, that I completely lost sight of her general criticism of Paradise as a novel. In the same way that Mary Helen Washington, in her 1997 presidential address before the American Studies Association entitled “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?”4 raised an intriguing question for Americanists to consider about the positioning of African Americans, I have questions I want scholars of the Bible, among others, to consider: How might putting African Americans at the center of the study of the Bible affect the study of the Bible? What impact might it have on the politics of the conceptualization and the structuring of academic guild study of the Bible? How might the academic guild of biblical scholarship in North America and beyond be influenced? What then would be the profile, the carriage, the orientation of the biblical scholar? Would or should the agenda of the study of the Bible then necessarily be focused around the identification of Africans as biblical characters? Upon the African origins of biblical traditions? What might be the implications and ramifications of construing the study of the Bible—its impetus, methods, orientations, approaches, politics, goals, communications, and so forth—on bases other than European cultural presumptions and power, interests and templates? How would the historical-interpretive, social-scientific, philosophical and theological, comparative religio-critical, culturalcritical, study of African Americans be affected? With the engagement of the Bible as intentional focus what might an interpretive history of African Americans look like? What would such a focus do to long-standing historical schemas of, and presuppositions about, the development and dynamics of African American life? How might popular and academic study of culture, in general, be differently construed and affected? How might studies of American and African American life be affected? With the interaction of the Bible and African Americans as case-study, how might a multidisciplinary study in the construction and re-constructions of societies and cultures in complex relationship to sacred texts be shaped? With sacred texts and African Americans in mind, how then might the complexities, the differences, as well as patterns, in cultural formation in general be understood and explained? With the complexity of African Americans as a social formation in particular in mind, how

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might the (phenomenological) origins and functions of the Bible and other sacred texts be understood and explained? How might the Bible and other sacred texts be explained more specifically in terms of orientation—bodily, psycho-social, sociocultural, and political? How might the Bible and other sacred texts be explained as cultural products and as shapers of culture? How might they be explained as types of cultural phenomena or practices? These are some of the questions that provided impetus for the African Americans and the Bible Research Project that has in turn inspired this essay as chapter. These questions and some of the presuppositions underlying them are complex, political, and academically and psycho-socio-politically transgressive. What follows is an attempt to articulate a theoretical framework within which the questions and presuppositions may be situated and engaged. READING THE WORLD—“DARKLY”: PROBLEMATIZING THE CONJUNCTION AND THE QUESTION (I use with some irony the King James Version’s term “darkly” here.)5 In what I find to be the most riveting line from his 1945 poem entitled “Pondy Woods,” Robert Penn Warren, a Southern Agrarian turned New Critic, has a buzzard opine to a Black male running away from trouble in a small southern town: “Nigger, your breed ain’t metaphysical.” In a “signifyin’” retort to Warren’s poem in a lecture given several decades later at Yale University, African American cultural critic and poet Sterling Brown, whose career stretched back to the Harlem Renaissance, reportedly said, “Cracker, your breed ain’t exegetical.”6 It is from Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that I get word of Sterling Brown’s retort.7 Unfortunately, I do not have access to the full text of Brown’s lecture. But we all have—as Brown must have had—the full text of Warren’s poem. What this part of the poem makes clear to me is that given its position the line that most stirred Brown and Gates, again, the one most disturbing to me—“Nigger, your breed ain’t metaphysical”—is likely the line that Warren intended to provoke the reader. Brown and others were right to respond to it. But I am now not so sure that Sterling Brown’s reputed response—as interesting for its parallel metrical pattern and syllabication as for its substance—addressed the most problematic aspects of Warren’s buzzard’s line. Brown and Gates seemed to have understood Warren to be saying that the black person does not and cannot wax metaphysical or theorize, cannot deal with complex conceptualizations, cannot intellectually transcend. In response, Brown seems to have said that the white folk do not and cannot see through the mists they themselves have created and now live in, viz., cannot

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critically parse or consistently deconstruct reality. On several occasions, Gates set up Warren and Brown in such sharp conflict, interestingly and ironically enough, not so much in order to castigate Warren and applaud Brown, but in order to advance his argument for the imperative of theorizing upon the black vernacular tradition.8 Gates believes, rightly I think, that no people, no “breed” is either naturally “metaphysical” or naturally “exegetical,” or naturally incapable of such.9 Warren’s lines and sentiments, Brown’s reactions to these and other lines and sentiments, and Gates’s and Baker’s uses of Brown’s reactions to Warren are most provocative because they help to point to and define a number of issues and problematics that have to do with the complexities and politics of interpretation—of the Bible and other sacred texts, of society and culture, of the Bible and other sacred texts in terms of social-cultural texturalization, of society and culture in terms of textualization.10 The most pressing among these interpretive problematics involve naming and dramatizing interpretation in relationship to social-cultural power, indeed, interpretation itself as a form of social power. These problematics include the power to speak and interpret on one’s own terms, in one’s own voice; the silencing of interpretation from the periphery; the power dynamics in the invocation and use of a mythic canonical story; the determination and overdetermination of racial and ethnic identity; the importance of a safe site of interpretation and enunciation; and the significance of the darkness in interpretation—of self, text, and world. In “Pondy Woods,” Warren seems to have intended by “metaphysical” to point not merely to theorizing, in general, and certainly not in a sense of a particular branch of philosophy but to certain recognized, approved set of Western principles, styles, forms, and practices of interpretation. Of course, Warren masks such things as natural and universal through the worldview and sentiment, the cranky speech and orientation, of the buzzard: the appropriate sociocultural disposition that is modeled as being not only (text) learned but also above it all, seeing things from a high and grand perspective, being philosophical (in the popular American sense of the term) and earnest in believing in the Christian myth; being patient, being willing to stay in the background for strategic purposes; being flexible; being willing to meet disappointment and surprise; being willing to wait for things to fall or come one’s way, being willing to wait for (the others’) death, then readying oneself patiently to swoop down and feed on the remains of the dead. Of course, the authoritative interpretive disposition is white. How could it be otherwise? The dramatic overrepresentation of Big Jim Todd forces the reader to assume that all others referred to or featured in the poem are white. The narrator and his world, certainly, must be assumed to be white. And the buzzard, if not white, then it is depicted at least as a spokesperson for or interpreter of white-world. As Warren here participates in the creation

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or perpetuation of “the nigger,” “the Negro,” “the Black,” does he not also participate in the creation of “whiteness” and “the white”?11 As for the Black runaway named Big Jim Todd, he was chastised for being like his whole “breed,” the opposite of the buzzard in every respect—impatient, passionate, always struggling and striving, always contesting and fighting in some form or another, even attempting to run away. It is not clear what precise immediate reasons prompted Jim Todd to run away; would anyone in Warren’s world have cared? What is clear is that in running away he had made a fatal move—he had essentially cut himself off from a world; he had established himself as a maroon, one who had to continue running and fending off the dogs, with slim hope that one day he might be able to settle down and build himself an-other world.12 According to the buzzard, Jim Todd does not realize, at any rate, that running away is no good, that his death should be embraced. Besides, according to the Christian myth, one of the defining myths of the larger world in which both buzzard and Jim Todd found themselves (Tennessee and beyond), death may not always be the end: Non omnis moriar, the poet saith.

This speech is demonstration of “metaphysical” interpretation. But here it is not merely a capacity for or penchant toward theorizing; it is instead a certain culture-specific mystical-spiritual experience, disposition and orientation encoded in a particular white Western reading of the Christian story. The buzzard’s exegesis of the Bible—specifically, his interpretation of the passion story (“The Jew-boy died. . . ”) through the lens of the Western classical tradition as evidenced in the reference to the Latin poet (“Non omnis moriar, the poet saith”)—is demonstration according to Warren of the capacity to wax metaphysical in a certain (white) key.13 Here is high dramatic display of the Western intellectual and religious tradition in a form of biblical exegesis. But how could the buzzard then go on to hold Jim Todd in contempt? Hard to miss and hard to avoid considering as explanation for the buzzard’s response to Jim Todd is the advanced state, one should even say, the corrosive, poisonous, blinding effects of the whitening or Europeanization of the ancient traditions—including the Bible—that the speech of Warren’s buzzard reflects. The Black figure, precisely because he is associated in the buzzard’s mind with the Christ figure, “the Jew-boy” referenced, becomes the figure par excellence of the outsider to the Western intellectual and religious tradition. Big Jim Todd is expressly said to be other (“Nigger, your breed ain’t metaphysical”), is rendered silent, and is not allowed to respond to the buzzard’s scholarly scriptural exegesis. As translator and interpreter of the Western religious and intellectual traditions, the buzzard is not interested in, indeed,

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cannot tolerate, Jim Todd coming into speech. In response to the possible gesture on the part of Jim Todd to hold forth freely the buzzard “drooped one wing and filmed the eyes.” Sterling Brown’s counterposing of the exegetical with the metaphysical raises the question about what the exegetical—the critical parsing—can mean and effect. Does it mean that with exegesis Big Jim Todd would have been able to see more clearly what his situation meant? With the facility for doing exegesis would he have been able to talk back to the buzzard, especially regarding the buzzard’s interpretation of the Christian myth? Regarding what the Christian myth means or could or should mean in terms of his plight and how he should respond to it? Would exegesis facilitate interpretation of self and world? Brown was right to signify upon Warren. He was right to pick up on the buzzard’s outrageous claim that his “breed” alone owned metaphysical speech. But both Brown’s and Warren’s assumptions about the practices and orientations associated with the terms may confuse and mislead us: Ironically, what the buzzard represented comes closer to the way in which biblical exegesis has actually functioned and continues to function in Western high religious and academic circles. An effort to put it in the context of cultural politics and power skirmishes is in order. Biblical exegesis has historically shared all the methods and approaches and presuppositions of philology, including the latter’s disingenuous claim about its objective engagement of the literature it calls “classics.” At least two underlying strategies have been associated with philology that are particularly noteworthy because they are particularly ominous: one is “the tendency to constitute a particular space as inherently timeless . . . or confined to its past”; the other is the tendency to deny to the many the project of power that is interpretation of the constructed mythic past through specialist techniques.14 By the end of the nineteenth century, classical philology had been turned into a rigorous and well-defined discipline (some called it “science”) that we now recognize in fields, such as classics, literature, or English and biblical exegesis.15 One of the most chilling descriptions of the modern claims and presuppositions of philology in evidence in its different field representations is offered by a contemporary scholar of English and Indian literatures in solidarity with postcolonial thinking. Philology, argues Vinay Dharvadkar, is principally concerned with the past, and not just with any portion of the past, but specifically with the earliest period in recorded history. The discipline conceives of the ancient world as the source, beginning, or origin of a civilization, race, people, or nation, and hence also as the explanatory frame of reference for its entire subsequent historical development, evolution, or descent. In effect, philology constitutes itself as a comprehensive historical discipline, by assuming

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that the present condition of a society or civilization can be understood only as the outcome of its past. In the regress of successively “past” moments that constitute a particular people’s history, the “first moment of true civilization” is historically and historiographically the master moment: if that epoch can be understood in its totality, then everything subsequent in time can be understood or explained by working out the requisite facts and principles of change. At the same time, philology constitutes itself as a textual discipline, practicing and perfecting the art of “slowly reading” words, documents, languages—the whole web of verbal significations that, in the first place, provides access to the past . . . Moreover, in this perspective, since language and thought are inseparable, and language and civilization, history and human beings, documents and societies, are all the intertwined means and ends of philological investigation, philology ultimately also calls itself a master-science of the human mind.16

The metaphysical penchant of Warren’s buzzard shows itself most poignantly in biblical exegesis. Far beyond what happens with the classics of literature, much is at stake (as in social stability) in getting the Bible right—or under control. Thus, the importance of biblical exegesis, which is part of the larger discourse of philology, with its history of high sociocultural respectability, currency, and influence. Few can be deemed authorities of the “classics” apart from certification of training in the “arts and sciences” of exegesis. Arguments and issues that have not been approved by the respective guilds are considered illegitimate. What the buzzard fetishizes and practices is not, as might be suggested by Sterling Brown’s reported retort to Robert Penn Warren’s chilling accusation against Big Jim Todd and his “breed,” the opposite of exegesis. It is far more promiscuous, complex, and insidious: it is a representation and valorization of exegesis that dramatically reflects a particular set of metaphysical and sociocultural foundations, politics, practices, and prejudices. If Big Jim Todd is understood as “nigger,” as one allergic to the metaphysical, as non-reader and non-exegete, then the buzzard must be understood as “cracker,” whose practices have resulted in a whitening of the Christian myth and the rhetorical and textual traditions associated with it. According to the buzzard (and Warren and company), no dark peoples can be deemed capable of fathoming the white mysteries. But what if we were here to take up and extend Sterling Brown’s signifying practice, honor its call for exegetical work and allow Big Jim Todd and his “breed” to speak and be the focal point of thinking? What if Big Jim Todd’s experience—an instance of an African American experience—were the starting and focal point for reading, for interpretation? What if the reading of and thinking about the Bible—that third rail of almost all discursive and ideological formations that have led to the constitution of the West—were read through African American experience?

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I suggest foregrounding African American experience for the study of the Bible not because the African American experience is the one experience that finally and alone is somehow the morally right focus that will lead all to the right interpretation of the Bible. Nor do I advance it for the sake of ethnic cheerleading or as privileged insight or wisdom for the privileged few of a certain hue. What it represents is a challenge to the still largely unacknowledged interested, invested, racialized, culture—and ethnic—specific practice of biblical interpretation that is part of an even larger pattern of such interpretation of literatures and of history in the West. Incredibly, there are some even today within academic professional circles and within popular religious discourses who fervently claim that their particular brand of interpretation (“exegesis”) is consistently carried out in (a scientific or disciplined or fairminded) neutral key or mode. Such fervid neutrality can be believed in and practiced correctly only by the dominants. No special pleading here. Centering the study of the Bible upon African Americans would be a defiant intellectual and political act. It is warranted because, as Toni Morrison has so poignantly expressed the matter, “black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis.”17 The substitution of African Americans as cultural-hermeneutical template in the study of unproblematized but haunting starting point of reference with enormous potential to trip biblical scholars and other types of scholars onto a higher level of critical (=self-) consciousness about their practices. The focus upon such a people will force the study of the Bible to begin with some fundamental self-inventorying, phenomenological and sociopolitical, sociopsychological questions and issues; it will not allow the study of the Bible to begin—as is typically the case in the field—in the middle, with much taken for granted about the Bible as phenomenon, as holy book, about what is done with such a book, for whom and why, and to what end. The African American engagement of the Bible is too much a rupture, a disruption, a disturbance18 or explosion of the Europeanized and white Protestant North American spin on the Bible and its traditions not to begin with the fundamental and open questions that can inspire the most nuanced intellectual work. How could one, having taken seriously the foregrounding of the African American engagement of the Bible, not begin with the fundamental question, which is not about the meaning of any text but about the whole quest for meaning (in relationship to a [“sacred”] text)? This proposal is obviously not without its challenges and problems. That different interpreters will have different understandings of what “African American existence” might entail, how its boundaries might be established, different views about how such “existence” ought to be interpreted, and so forth, is clear enough. But this would not, I think, be the first major problem. The diversity and even conflict of representations and views around the matter are to be expected and encouraged.19 But what matters most is an openness

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to beginning the study of the Bible (as it were) in a different key—in a different time,20 which means from a different site of interpretation and enunciation, with the necessarily correlative different presuppositions, orientations, and agenda. Among the many assumptions upon which the modern-world practice, that is the academic study of the Bible, rests there are several important assumptions about time. The study of the Bible, like the philological studies in which it participates, is about the past and about difference—the far-distant past that is radically different from the present. This past that is deemed so different from moderns is nevertheless held to be in some degree and in qualified ways recoverable, accessible, translatable. But such results are thought to be possible only through certain appropriate and legitimate interpretive methods, strategies, approaches—”exegesis.” The latter is claimed to be understood only by an elite core of shaman-like figures, “tribal theologians,”21 granted authority either by official church–state collusion (in most cases in historically socially homogeneous European countries and in their former colonies) or by unofficial (high) church-(high) society collusion (for the most part in the United States within which is found the oft-repeated but ironic claims regarding the separation of church and state). The problem with this situation is enormous and complex. Most important for the arguments of this chapter is the legacy of the whitening,22 viz., the Europeanization and EuroAmericanization, of the Bible, an example of Western cultural domestication and containment. It is as a part of this phenomenon that the interest in the radical separation of the past from the present has been fostered and made evident. To begin the study of the Bible as the past, and not in terms of the immediacy and trauma that describe African Americans’ engagement, is to assume something about the present—that the present is pacific and unified, uniform and consonant, ascendent and dominant, that it is constituted or determined by a fairly clear and dominant cultural myth and hermeneutical spin that needs continuously to be ratified and affirmed by the recourse to the past, to archivalization and memorialization.23 The silencing of the present with respect to the engagement of the Bible— most often signaled by the calls to “begin with the texts” to “stay with the texts”—reflects the European co-optation and cultural-naturalization of the Bible and the high cost paid by all, especially the other “breeds,” including slaves and ex-slaves, and many who are or were colonized. No matter what may be the actual representations in the biblical texts, the gendered and/or racial-ethnic “Others” that were constructed by modern dominants could not either read themselves into these texts or read themselves in affirmative ways as long as they had to begin not with themselves, with their places of enunciation, in their own times, but “with the texts,” viz., with the dominants’ places of enunciation, with their constructed pasts and the hermeneutical spins that

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continue to give legitimacy and social and ideological power to a present that was secured and justified by those pasts. The origins of biblical exegesis are in the ancient world; but in terms of its most serious perduring impact, the modern European-North American versions of it need now to be addressed and reconsidered.24 The call to stay always focused upon the (details of the) text and the past that the texts (according to the dominant hermeneutical spins) are claimed to represent has become a high cultural practice and art—“exegesis.” But one might more truthfully dare call this practice/art what it is—a class-specific cultural practice that is a fetishization of text that in turn reflects a fetishization of the dominating world that the text helped create. Insofar as the focus is upon the foregrounded past, upon the ancient text and the antiquity that it reflects, to this degree the backgrounded present can remain unexamined and unchallenged. The most serious impact of the modern-day practice of exegesis can be seen in the paralysis experienced by the typical seminary-trained, exegesislearned person who finds him or herself wanting and needing to address contemporary debates about social issues. The relevance and appropriate force of the Bible in the context of debates about contemporary social and political issues is understandably a matter of concern sharply felt among such persons. When they learn well the arts and sciences and politics of biblical exegesis, they learn that they cannot possibly hold forth with confidence about the Bible because it is after all too complex, too much a matter of other worlds the historical and cultural distance from which they must respect. They learn that they likely will never have at their command the requisite languages or the sophistication in critical methods and theory for serious engagement of the primary sources. In short, the gulf between biblical worlds and our own are too wide to bridge.25 Only the unsophisticated, the fundamentalist, thinks otherwise and will dare go beyond the point of paralysis. All too often the response of those trained at the highest academic (doctoral) level in the field of biblical studies is to cultivate essentially a mode of silence. This silence is a sign of the most important lesson that biblical studies teaches and cultivates in many seminary and religious studies curricula a respect for the mystifications of biblical scholarship to the point that little is said about the Bible in terms of its role in contemporary society and culture. The silence is reflected in a particular orientation and practice or preoccupation: “plumbing,” a digging deeply into the details, never to come up again for air, rarely to attempt to engage the broad issues of our (or any) time. The scholar of the Bible, then, so oriented, adequately silenced, comes to represent either innocuous antiquarian practices or a type of religio-cultural foundationalism and apologetics. The former representation includes the self-styled “secularists,” typically but not exclusively headquartered in colleges and universities; such types

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begin to stutter when asked to explain their interest in the Bible beyond reference to it as historical source, artifact or as literature. The stuttering sets in at the prospect of having to come to terms with psychosocial, phenomenological, or existential or political issues. Such scholars remain fairly irrelevant and unattractive to the thoughtful and sensitive; many insiders and outsiders to the religious life hold them in contempt for their principles’ blandness. The principled (“We study, we do not practice, religion here”) practitioners of “secularism” are ironically always having to explain and defend their very presence and their interests in the context of the “secular” academy. There is double irony in the fact that many students and faculty in the “secular”—private and public—academies are probably personally far more religious, including bibliocentric, than they know or can ever articulate. There is even more irony in the fact that the now “secular” old colonial and many other private colleges cannot understand their origins without recourse to the study of religious life and commitment and its political effects and institutionalizations.26 The latter representation, in the form of the apologists, is more dangerous because it has historically been and continues to be for good and ill more authoritative and effective. The idea of a radical, consistent critique of the Bible in which no question is blocked, no issue is held to be inappropriate, is generally deemed anathema. As suggested above, the fact that Ph.D. programs in the study of the Bible, with few exceptions, are carried out explicitly or implicitly under the banner of churches, viz., in church-controlled colleges/universities and in seminaries, is revealing of our late modern society’s inability to engage in radical sustained critique of its own history with the Bible. Even more telling is the fact that many among such programs, wherever they are housed, in the United States and in Europe, are oriented around “just getting the facts” in either the naiveté of “secular” antiquarianism or the religio-cultural apologetic politics of theological schools, both of which cultivate and model silence and containment. The silence and containment are intended to keep the finger held firmly in the dike that is the Bible, the engagement of which always otherwise holds the potential for explosive controversy, ideological, sociopolitical ferment. Who cannot know that the Bible represents nothing if not the consistent clarion and provocation for disruption and disconnection, critique and challenge? Who handling it will not come to read it as road map for exiting, for de-formation and re-formation? Who reading history will not associate the Bible and its readers with social and political hope, thus, social and political instability, whether of the right or the left? What better way to halt or subvert this reality and perennial potential than by cultivating biblical scholars as the silent types whose fetish for the textual, the “facts,” the “detail” can effect an intended obfuscation? What better way to

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secure the status quo than by sending Big Jim Todd to a mainline, progressive seminary and providing him excellent training in biblical exegesis, thereby rendering him forever mute or a stutterer? What is needed in the face of all of this? There are, to be sure, no cure-alls. Clearly, not all see a problem to be addressed. But some may agree that in order to frustrate what can be termed theological and religious miseducation of African Americans and others an intervention of some sort is in order. I suggest defiance and interruption—of the silence and of the grand hermeneutical spin that the silence facilitates. Surely there are several possibilities for addressing the situation as I have described it. What I now propose as only the beginning of theoretical argumentation and exploration is a bit of defiance—in the way that Warren’s Big Jim Todd would have been defiant had he spoken back to the buzzard in the language that Sterling Brown used. I mean here defiance of a cultural fetish dressed as academic tradition that would have me begin my serious thinking about the Bible in a remote and alien past and place, instead of in my own world. I propose that the whole discourse, the entire practice that is biblical interpretation, be reconsidered and differently construed. I propose that African American experience, or what African American experience can come to represent, be placed at the center of the serious study of the Bible, including academic study of the Bible. Rather than seen as an attempt simply to force a different dominant center in place, this “centering” of African American experience should actually represent an attempt at the decentering27 and explosion of all prevailing interpretive paradigms; it should represent the call to make room for and to take seriously what the study of the Bible should be about as a type of cultural practice, why it should perdure, and on what terms. Consider more specifically what it might mean to have African American experience be the springboard for the construal of the study or engagement of the Bible: 1. More consistent and intense and critical focus on the modern world and on the present and on the problematics of sacred texts in the present. The long history of the changes and attendant controversies around the designations by which persons of African descent refer to themselves and have been referred to by others—including the double nature of the current most popular designation (“African American”)—reflects much about the drama of the collective experience of the people at issue. Who are they? Whence do they come? How is it that they do not have one name throughout their history? Why would they refer to themselves, and others refer to them, in so many different ways through history? Do they have a history?28

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These questions begin to get to the heart of the complexity of African American existence. By definition, this complex experience represents a radical creolization, cultural bricolage. As much as if not clearly more than any other collectivity, African Americans are “moderns.”29 While many European conquerors and immigrants in the Americas were exercised, even experiencing some angst, over how much of the “old world” and its “medievalisms” to leave behind or to renegotiate, enslaved Africans faced a type of “social death.”30 Survival for Africans meant learning to assemble cultural pieces from radically and involuntarily shattered social-cultural experiences, from rupture, disconnection. It meant developing facility for taking what is left of shattered experiences and “making do,” learning what it takes to survive on what is at hand and forge an identity for themselves—“a new name” in strange settings and under most difficult circumstances. These people as people, it can be argued, were among the first who “experienced” (what has come to be called) the United States as a “new world.” They were, if not the first, certainly, among the first—because forced—to establish identity in the constructed “new world.” Were the African American experience, then, to become the center of academic biblical studies it would force a shift of focus from the past to the modern to the present, from preoccupation with interpretation of texts to interpretation of religious life as the creation of social-cultural life. Perhaps, most significantly, it would cause an interruption in the dominant cultural hermeneutical spin that in so many respects assumes modern EuropeanNorth American Christian culture as the natural modern reification and rightful interpreter of ancient biblical communities and traditions. African Americans interrupt the assumption and telling of the story of the EuropeanAmericanization of the Bible because African Americans beg explanation and definition: Their presence has to be explained. The story of how and why they came to engage and to embrace the (whitened European) Bible as sacred and as sacred text cries out for psycho-social, phenomenological, historical interpretive explanation. Thus, they challenge the telling of the story of the making of the West and America in terms of biblical history from the past to the present in any simple terms. Any effort to account for the Africans in the West must begin with modern slavery. And any effort to explain how and why they have survived that respects their own testimonies would have to include the religious—communities, orientations and practices, rhetorics, visions, texts. But the religious “testimonies” would function not as “texts” that would then serve as sources of the official or dominant spins on history or doctrine. They would instead serve as a storehouse of rhetorics and visions that function as “weapons of the weak.”31 Those who view their present in terms of struggle, conflict, resistance, and hurt are less likely to want to begin serious questioning and thinking in

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general, certainly not about meaning, anywhere but in the(ir own defined) time.32 The present experienced by such folk is grave, serious, traumatic; it should not be allowed to recede, to be taken for granted, to be easily manipulated, to function simply as the last dramatic inevitable part of the powerful ideological spin, the end of the devolution that is assumed by the socialcultural-religious “myth of origins” constructed by the dominant in order to help hold all things dominant in place. For those created and shaped by hurt in the modern world, the present remains the focus of thinking. There is no room for or any easy acceptance of the past seen in terms of antiquarian interest or as legitimation or even explanation of the present as inexorable. Informed by African American experience, the academic study of the Bible would then need to reconsider its primary agenda as the study of history and of texts. The African American experience should always dramatically challenge biblical scholars to ask whether biblical scholarship focused merely upon historiography or literary-rhetorical artfulness can ever be considered benign.33 It should always raise the question whether one can be or should be said to be a scholar of the Bible without taking seriously the problematics, including the determinants of historical-cultural receptions, of the Bible. With African American experience in the foreground, ancient history and literaryrhetorical artfulness as primary approaches to biblical scholarship would need to be made compelling, not presumed to be the right or the initial focus. 2. More consistent and intense and critical focus on the phenomenology of social-cultural formation and the creation and uses of “sacred” texts. The fathoming of the functions and understandings and uses of the Bible in contemporary African American society and culture should direct more attention upon an analysis of the problematics of the interaction of society and culture and sacred texts in general. The very broaching of the African American experience should cause a disease, a shaking of the historicism and, in all too many places old and new, the theological foundationalism that has been the hallmark of biblical studies.34 From the perspective of the African experience, in the Americas nothing now seems natural or a given. Now everything requires explanation, argument, a rationale. Sacred text? The Bible? These very categories now require more sharply critical consideration. If not the categories themselves, are the phenomena behind the categories universal? Or are the matters basically Western? Addressing the issue is important. With African Americans in the foreground, the addressing of the issue is critical; it is where the probing must begin. So—the Bible and African American society and culture? The “Bible” here to begin with clearly cannot be understood as a transcendent, ahistorical force; it must be seen as a decidedly sociocultural, political, historical construction but as such a nonetheless

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dangerous and powerful force. The danger and power and volatility of the construction are such that those dominant peoples most intimately associated with and clearly defined by the construction could never really decide whether those they enslaved and defined as “other” should be thoroughly inculturated through the agency of the Bible or should be kept far away from it.35 African slaves, for the most part, were also wary of and hesitant about the locus of power that the whites called “the Scriptures.”36 Beyond the power dynamics and maskings on the part of whites and the ambivalences on the part of Europeans and Africans in the early period of contact, how can the African American interaction with, and interest and even investment in, the Bible apart from the gaze and manipulations of whites be explained? Probings of the complex social-cultural orientation and formation issues should ensue. Did the people (re-)create the text? Did the text create a people? How did and how does one shape or determine the other? What are the indices of the influence of the one upon the other? To be sure, it would seem, on the one hand, that there must first be a people in order to create special rhetorics and visions texts, define them as “sacred,” and then engage them accordingly. On the other hand, it would seem that especially arresting, poignant, challenging rhetorics and visions, encountered via texts, have inspired and continue to inspire prophets, seers, inveiglers, inspire and shape causes, movements, form peoples, “breeds.” Again, the African American example can present a challenge. How could the formation of African America, as an example of a social-cultural formation in the West, be understood without heightened attention to the Bible, specifically, the manner in which the Bible was used as language world within which those violently cut off from their home could speak again? How could African America be explained except by reference to their decidedly political, self-defensive, and offensive use of the Bible in opposition to the uses to which white Protestants put it in the construction and confirmation of their world? When African slaves began to take up the Bible from sites of enunciation and on hermeneutical terms decidedly different from those associated with the white slavers, the jig was up, the hermeneutical-cultural dominant spin was interrupted, the most serious critical exegetical and metaphysical deconstruction work began: the tight, closed circle of reference—Bible leads to the dominant (white) West and to (white) America, the West and America embody the biblical story—all this was broken. The cultural-ideological spin, the hermeneutically closed circle, the appeal to the Bible as medium of divine legitimation of the reigning social-cultural formations are all in light of the African presence—now made to seem what they are—powerful constructions, fictions, but constructions and fictions nonetheless. This is because the African American presence is an interruption if not a weirdly and ironically

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belated “Christian” presence in a belatedly “Christian” nation, an utterly shocking surprise to the dominant collective consciousness in terms of sheer survival and endurance. Now it remains for all—biblical scholars, especially to come to terms with what this interruption should mean. “Sacred” texts are as much determined by society and culture as society and culture are determined by (among other things, to be sure) sacred texts. The recognition of the complexity of the interrelations of sacred texts and society and culture can be sustained, however, only through consistent focus upon forces that denaturalize the relationships between society (for example, the United States) and the sacred text (the Bible). Because of its obviously all-too-tragic-worldly beginnings, the African American experience with the Bible in fact can provoke a higher critical disposition: It makes it both reasonable and compelling to ask the following questions that must be prior to any engagement of texts: Why do people create sacred texts? To be sure, not all create and invest in sacred texts. Perhaps, the phenomena behind the phenomenon of the making of sacred texts are what should capture and command the attention and imagination of the scholar of religion.37 But it is precisely the raising of the question about the specific phenomenon that is the African American making of and investment in the specific sacred text that is the Bible that provokes the critical questioning about the general phenomena having to do with the creation and negotiation of sacred media. I do not think that I would have gotten to such a level of critical questioning apart from focus upon the African American situation. The latter has provoked me to ask: What are people doing when they create and continue to define themselves by, address each other through and on the basis of, sacred texts? What psychosocial dynamics are in place when such things happen? What sociopolitical dynamics? What status—and gender— specific dynamics? Toward what psychosocial, sociopolitical good and/or ill do these dynamics play? Until these and other such questions are addressed in the context of academic programs in Bible, no truly critical breakthroughs can be experienced. By this I mean breakthroughs not only in biblical studies, not merely in religious and theological studies, but in the study of social and cultural formation in general.38 The phenomenon of the sacred text is so tightly interwoven, so deeply imbedded, within so many aspects of the collective worlds in the West that I dare say no truly critical breakthrough is possible apart from addressing it. In it is a significant key to understanding who we are, what we have become, what we have decided upon and also decided in agreement to forget. It is the belatedness and complexity and transparency of the African American engagement of the Bible that may hold clues to a broader, perhaps, if not universal, phenomenon. The African American experience with the Bible points to what I think is an easily discernible cycle of social-cultural

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formation that begins with de-formation, proceeds to formation and re-formation that in turn necessarily leads again to de-formation. The Bible functions differently in different parts of the cycle. Although this cycle would not exhaust or explain everything in African American experiences, its potential explanatory power is great. About this cycle more is to be discussed below. 3. More consistent and intense and critical focus on the Bible as script/ manifesto that defines and embraces darkness. With African American existence as the starting point for the study of the Bible, a greater sensitivity to the Bible as manifesto for the exiled, the unhomely, the marginal, the critics, and inveiglers will be sustained. When African Americans are brought into focus, it becomes clear that the biblical legacy of radical orientation toward the world, including what the late ancients and early European medievals called contemptus mundi,39 what Nietzsche40 and Scheler41 among modern European interpreters referred to as ressentiment, and what Africans-made-slaves themselves meant when they said they were “trabelin’ on,” “travelin’ through an unfriendly world.”42 When African Americans are foregrounded, this legacy is then recovered and intensified and is necessarily made part of the conceptualization and orientation of religion in terms of social restructuring and ferment. Almost from the beginning of their engagement with it, African Americans interpreted the Bible differently from those who introduced them to it, ironically and audaciously seeing in it—the most powerful of the ideological weapons used to legitimize their enslavement and disenfranchisement—a mirroring of themselves and their experiences, seeing in it the privileging of all those who like themselves are the humiliated, the outcasts and the powerless. It was seen as a sort of rhetorical paint brushing of their existence and a virtual manifesto for their redemption and triumph. For African Americans to read Scriptures is to read darkness. By referring here to darkness, I do not mean to play the usual rhetorical-symbolization games that set up endless but predictable polarities and dualities. I mean here simply that African Americans’ engagement of the Bible points to the Bible as that which both reflects and draws unto itself and engages and problematizes a certain complex order of existence associated with marginality, liminality, exile, pain, trauma. In order to sharpen the point, I should like again to reference Warren’s poem: in it not only does the Bible—captured in and alluded to by the buzzard in the speech regarding the final dramatic acts in the Christian passion story— appear fundamentally to be about darkness, but Jim Todd as a runaway, an exile, an un-homely, silent one is depicted in the darkness as a type of biblical character, even, as argued earlier, a type of Christ figure. And, somewhat ironically, it is also the case that the ongoing general existence associated with

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the buzzard—the lonely high flying and perching, the long passive wait for relief that comes always at the expense (the violent sacrifice) of others—is darkness. But might or must this not be darkness of another origin and type? One of the most haunting interpretive issues that remain about both Warren’s poem has to do with whether and in what respects darkness is biblical. The presence of the black male figure in relationship to the Christian story that is alluded to in the poem makes the matter of darkness rather unavoidable and most problematic.43 To whom does the Christ figure belong? With whom is such a figure in solidarity? Is he a triumphant militant figure? A crafty and powerful political type? Or is he to be seen in relationship to the silent black runaway who can in turn be understood only in terms of violence and sacrifice, in terms of contempt and humiliation? The dark figure in the poem does not—is not allowed to—speak. But the reader cannot—because the cranky buzzard with the penchant for the metaphysical and the exegetical cannot—avoid thinking that there is a haunting relationship between the less than final death of the “Jew-boy” and the plight of the black runaway. That relationship is chilling, troubling; how could the wise old bird not have seen the point and explored it with Jim Todd? Or did he not see the point? As authoritative interpreter of the script(ure)s of the dominating culture is the buzzard a high church official? A professor of Bible? A writer of commentaries? A member of the Society of Biblical Literature? Again, Warren obviously thought it realistic and appropriate to keep Jim Todd and the world that surrounded him silent regarding such matters. Might Jim have come to see a relationship between the irrational persecution and execution of the “Jew-boy” and his own dark plight in Pondy Woods? Might he have come to understand that things are seen differently in and through the dark? That having been forced into the darkness, the darkness must be negotiated, fathomed? That darkness is what the story of “the Jewboy” is all about? That darkness is not necessarily the end, that one can survive it—non omnis moriar—and can see things differently in and through it? The depiction of the Black runaway in Warren’s poem points to the need to explore the history of the African Americans’ engagement of the Christian myth and of the Bible in general as dark scripts. This history of African American engagement of the Bible is likely to throw a different light on how the ancient radical contempt for the world and resentment rhetorics and orientations of the Bible—the problematization of darkness—came to be both reflective and evocative of some modern social de-formations and re-formations. As some interpreters have argued, much if not all of Western Christian culture (including the United States) can be explained as a biblical formation,44 as a complex of biblically inspired social-cultural nations. Yet what remains to be explained are the processes and dynamics by which such marginal outworldly collectivities became outworldly nations, even including

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supra-national outworldly powers. As much in need of explanation is the development that resulted in these outworldly nations not simply becoming “secular,”45 but falling into a sleep, a kind of forgetfulness with respect to their origins, especially the originary impulses behind them. This forgetfulness has led to the betrayal of those very impulses such that other successive outworldly individuals and groups are not recognized.46 On account of their origins in the North Atlantic, their formation as a people in the modern world in connection with the engagement of the Bible as manifesto of outworldly sentiment, African Americans represent a rather fascinating window onto the psychosocial ramifications and power dynamics, including the infra politics, involved in social formation, especially the formation that articulates the internal dynamic and responses to the outside world in relationship to sacred texts. As “moderns,” that is, as those who have had to forge identities even as they were cut off from their roots, languages, traditions, and heritages, those who now call themselves African Americans became a people not exclusively so but to a great degree through creative identification with and the creative engagement of the Bible. The latter was compelling because it contained the stories of those whose experiences mirrored the experiences of the uprooted, un-homely Africans. So there are in the challenges presented in this essay implications and ramifications for different academic disciplines and fields and in general for thoughtful persons of different backgrounds and persuasions: This project presents to academic biblical studies the most defiant challenge: it argues that the point of departure for and even the crux of interpretation not be texts but worlds, viz., society and culture and the complex textu(r) alizations of society and culture. Furthermore, it argues that this point of departure should begin in a different time—not with the (“biblical”) past but with the present, that is, with the effort to understand how the present is being shaped by the Bible (which then provides warrant for forays into the past). This is also a demand especially for the United States, that biblical studies should for the first time be indigenized.47 It may not be the only culture so relevant here, but I have little doubt that the focus upon African America and the Bible will force and facilitate in a powerful manner the Americanization of biblical studies. The very concept of indigenization in such a complex multireligious, multicultural, multidimensional, and still youthful society will surely provoke a number of questions and challenges. The call for the indigenization of the academic study of the Bible is a call to open up a host of possibilities for reconceptualizing and restructuring theological education and religious studies. Imagine what might develop if just a few graduate programs in the United States were to take seriously our situation in the United States—not that of Europe! as primary conceptual basis for the academic study of the Bible!48

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The whole matter surrounding Jim Todd and the buzzard raises the question about what is at stake for academic professional biblical studies in having Jim Todd speak or having the buzzard alone continue to hold forth. What if the likes of Jim Todd were to read and to speak and write about the Scriptures? Given such a figure, given whence he comes and what he must do (run), in sum, given his otherness with respect to the discursive traditions represented by the buzzard, his reading of Scriptures would inevitably be “strong,” critical, revisionist, an effort to find his own “original relation to truth,” to “esteem and estimate differently”—it would, in sum, be a necessary “misreading.”49 The latter would represent empowerment not only for the reader, but a challenge to biblical studies to rethink its interests and agenda and orientation. For African American studies and cultural studies in general, it will henceforth be rather difficult to imagine that any serious multidisciplinary study of African America would not need to fathom the dramatic history of engagement between people and the text in order to get at the texture of the people. I think the sort of project that this essay calls for will make it less acceptable for scholars of African American culture to continue the artificial separation of religion and culture, religion and history, as though religion were in some sort of bubble, somehow impervious to thoroughgoing comprehensive criticism of African American life, something to be set aside as a matter for the “religious” to pursue. Because the conjunction that is African Americans and the Bible already presumes a certain high level of critical sophistication and breakthrough regarding religious sentiment and practices as cultural sentiments, sediment and practices, and because African American studies has still on the whole not figured out what to do with the religious orientations and practices of African Americans,50 the focused attention upon this topic will most likely have a powerful impact upon the shape of African American studies. Impressionistic statements and generalities about African American religious life and African Americans and the Bible offered from any quarter will be less defensible in the wake of this collection of essays and the research project behind them. For phenomenological and comparative studies, the engagement of the textual for the sake of mediating the sacred and articulating and negotiating the most important issues would help scholars parse African American and many other cultures to ever finer degrees. The focus upon the Bible as a sacred text is both broader and narrower than the focus upon religion and culture. Such focus would surely inspire a more consistent comparative approach than has been seen before. The sacred text, although not necessarily universal, is a category that is broader and more expansive than Christianity and church, than doctrine. The heuristic significance and potential of this category for comparative study of cultures has not been pressed as far as it should. The African American history of engagement of sacred texts invites and makes

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compelling the comparative inquiry that comes out and addresses the most immediate sociocultural situation. The pressing of the matter will have radical implications far beyond the interpretation of any one text: it will matter a great deal for the study of comparative religions, culture, and worldviews. In an era of significant social-cultural balkanization, whatever helps us understand more clearly the codes through which so many of us communicate within our different circles or worlds is no small contribution. Imagine the possibilities for conversation and debate were we all across many different traditions to be able to ask of one another‒‒what are we saying about ourselves and about the others, and what are we doing when we scripturalize? But far beyond possible reform and reorientation of any field or discipline, much is at stake in the existential, psycho-social, and cultural-political challenge represented by a focus upon African Americans and the Bible. Imagine a person of color (especially) not having to decide whether to undergo the experience of the receding or splitting of him- or herself in the academic study of the Bible. Imagine that person not having to face the matter of foregoing seminary education or religious studies altogether in order to address and critically probe the black religious self and that self in relationship to sacred texts. The other way—the way of probing deeply the European history of the naturalization of the Bible and European cultures—has been tried. Dark figures learning the tools of the classics-philological trade in an effort to convince the buzzards (and all that they represent) of their humanity has been tried, but it has not resulted in intellectual or cultural repentance or reform on the part of buzzards—just ask Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke and Sterling Brown, Howard Thurman and Benjamin E. Mays, Francis Harper and Zora Neale Hurston. These and many others mastered the forms and styles,51 the metaphysical and exegetical arts and sciences, of the world that the buzzard represented in hopes that such a world would in turn engage them. Would Warren’s Jim Todd have been addressed differently had he read and recited Latin or Greek? Would this have facilitated Jim Todd finding his way to safety out of the darkness? Only the most simple-minded or the most prejudiced will read this essay as an argument against the African American or any other group learning of Latin and Greek, of metaphysics and exegesis, and so forth. This essay is a challenge not to read less but more; it is a challenge to read more widely and deeply‒‒and more critically. It is a challenge to begin not with ethnic celebration or cheerleading but with serious multidisciplinary collective probing. And such probing should begin not in the co-opted past that legitimizes and renders obscure the shape and control of the present, but in the present—the complex, troubling, problematic present, the present that is mixed in psychosocial effects, the sometimes silent and loud, pathetic and tragic present, the sometimes embarrassing and coarse, but always fascinating present. This is

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where the probing can and should begin for many of us so that we may learn first how to recognize our positionality and how to relate that positionality to critical probing. Then we can determine what questions we shall need to raise and what problematics we shall need to identify, what languages we need to study, what verbs we shall need to parse, what research agenda we should adopt and why. And all of this will be understood in relationship to that complex of tradition, literatures, rhetorics and visions, and history we call “the Bible,” now for us the very meanings of which and the research agenda around which are to be determined. A reading of darkness as psychosocial reorientation, as self-possession and critical point of departure, as a higher critical gaze, can reorient and redefine the agenda of interpretation. A reading of darkness is a type of reading of Scripture that is a form of exiting of culture.52 The African American experience with the Bible suggests that the Bible is viewed as a reflection or reading of this darkness, this “black (w)hole.”53 Anyone can read darkness. Darkness is here to be equated neither with a simple negative nor with any one people or class. It is a particular orientation, a sensibility, a way of being in and seeing the world. It is viewing and experiencing the world in emergency mode, as through the individual and collective experience of trauma. Such viewing and experience is not the unique experience of any one people in any one place or period in history. But all readers should take note: Because the darker peoples of the world are the ones of necessity consistently making a dramatic and compelling argument that to read darkness is to scripturalize and to scripturalize is to read darkness, they ought to be heard on this matter of reading darkness and reading “darkly.” Those who may be identified with the perching buzzards—the still dominant interpretive spin on “authoritative” texts—ought now to turn toward such people and first listen to and then engage them and their dark soundings and all that to which such soundings point. The remaining issue, then, may be whether an important challenge is taken up: to take note that the difference such people and their soundings may make lies not in interpretation of (the culturally overdetermined) sacred texts but in the construction and manipulation of “world,” and of meanings in relationship to—including the “misreading,” even the “not-reading,”54 the going beyond and against such texts. READING DARK PEOPLES READING THE WORLD DARKLY This chapter represents the beginnings of an attempt to focus the study of the Bible upon African Americans and to identify and address some of the

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implications and ramifications, issues and problematics that attend such a focus. The categorization of framing issues that follows represents my attempt to facilitate the focusing and critical discussion regarding some of the implications, ramifications, issues, and problematics that are logically inherent in and behind the conjunction that is the topic “African Americans and the Bible.” Such categorization is made all the more defensible and compelling if the conjunction of African Americans and the Bible is, as I think it must be, posited as a particular exemplum of a set of broader, nearly universal, comparable conjunctive categories—sacred text and social texture. This essay, it needs to said, with all the power of paradox that can be applied, is both specifically about African Americans alone and not at all about African Americans. Only those readers who will seek to understand what is at stake in such a paradox and the complex political thinking and modulation and positioning that it demands will ultimately understand the impetus behind and the potential reach of this chapter. Focus is on African Americans and their interactions with the Bible not because the former represent or reflect something altogether unique in history, but because they rather dramatically and poignantly reflect a fairly widespread if not universal set of experiences. Yet it is the peculiar rhythms of their experiences of that history (of interactions with the Bible, as example of the category “sacred text”), with their lags, that nonetheless challenge greatly the interpreter’s compass and sharpness of consciousness.55 I have sought to categorize the important issues to be engaged in terms of three different types of interactions between sacred text and society—with African Americans as exemplum. These three types of interactions represent a cyclical history of a quality of experiences and orientations. The discussion about them is appropriately framed by material that provides historical contexts and other points of reference; thus, the three major framing sections— Pre-Texts; Con-Texts; and Sub-Texts. All such sections in turn provoke further categorization, development, or movement. The first of the major internal sections—Pre-Texts—functions to provide some general orientation to serious thinking about the conjunction of African Americans and the Bible. This category can be further divided into subsections that include focus upon: historical streams of influence upon the African American engagement of the Bible (Africa; African diasporic communities; early Euro-American religious traditions and culture), as well as historical and contemporary social matrices that are argued to be determinants or useful comparisons (American culture; African cultures); (preliminary) ethnographic work and social-scientific analysis the object of which is the contemporary situation; and possibilities for a phenomenological-hermeneutical framework. In providing some general orientation to the complex topic of this general essay, this section makes clear how important it is for the interpreter

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to begin not with the text, but with world or social texture. This point is made most compelling as the case is made for beginning the serious thinking about African Americans and the Bible in the present. Both the impetus and need for, and a schema or outline of, an interpretive history of African Americans’ engagement with the Bible are suggested by the questions and issues and problems found through attention given to the engagements of the Bible among contemporary African Americans. Only by taking stock of and analyzing the persistence of African Americans’ interactions with the Bible can an interpretive history be conceptualized and structured in a manner that allows the interpreter to locate him- or herself, identify his or her interests and agenda, and thereby have a chance to register such in the identification and treatment of pertinent sources. The second major framing section‒‒Con-Texts‒‒is the logical response to the first section. Here might be added possible selected56 essays or projects that isolate and analyze particular historical situations in which an African American or a group of African Americans engages the Bible. The section might draw attention to selective sources that provide the opportunity for going beyond the lining up of projects on the basis of an all too common unimaginative linear or chronological narration often based on the adventures of elite individuals or institutions. What is offered here is a step toward the proffering of a creative interpretive history of a complex people based upon interactions with a complex phenomenon. Because it necessarily respects all types of interactions with the Bible—whether literary or rhetorical and oral, whether official ecclesiastical or street-based, whether strictly religious or self-styled secular and anti-religious, whether academic and studied or decidedly anti-intellectual—such a history has the potential to explain or illumine more of the twists and turns of African American life than many previous histories, academic or popular. I propose such a history through the isolation of three thematic subsections that reflect respectively the world-making dynamics of: (1) flight or marronage57 (de-formation); (2) settlement and building on a site of marronage (formation); and (3) self-making, self-naming, and negotiation with the outside world from the site of marronage (reform[ul]ation)—respectively entitled in the themes: “You Better Run . . .”; “I’m Buildin’ Me a Home . . . ” ; and “Talkin’ Mumbo Jumbo and Following the Neo-HooDoo Way.” Each subsection represents an important moment or phase in the making of African American life in relationship to sacred texts.58 I do not intend for any one phase or moment to cancel out the others; I intend only to indicate that each moment represents movement, change, diversification, complexity in orientation in African American life. Each potential project entry may in fact include sources that could warrant that essay’s placement in more than one or in a different category altogether; this much it is important to concede. But

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it is, I think, more important to establish heuristic categories and criteria for evidence for the dynamism, the movement, change, and differentiation in the construction of African America in relationship to the Bible (and other sacred texts) than it is for all interpreters right away to agree upon and freeze the actual evidence for such.59 (see fig. 6.1.) The history that is reflected in the schema is more cyclical than linear: since this history is really all about self- and world-making, and since such “work” is never complete, there is always (at different speeds) the necessary return. The African American exemplum commends itself as particularly worthy of focused attention, I want here to stress again, not because African Americans are unique in experiencing these moments or phases but on account of the nature of their experiences—the lags or intensities or depressions that enslavement and aftermath represent—in the cycle.60 Such difference, such a slowdown or disturbance in the larger Western instantiation of the cycle, may teach much about the nature of the more universally experienced cycles. The analytical schema that I propose here assumes that the relationship between African Americans and the Bible is complicated—the one does not absolutely determine the other in any direct or simple manner; but there is an interrelationship that begs explanation. Insofar as the schema classifies African Americans’ relationships with the Bible in terms of the history of

Figure 6.1  The Life Cycle of Marronage.

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struggles for social construction, it intends to help explain not merely what happened but how and why. I want with this schema to provoke thinking about what the folk who interacted with sacred texts were doing and what they thought they were doing. I should like this proposal to challenge interpreters to reflect upon the making and manipulation of language worlds that interactions with sacred texts facilitated—and with what effects. The first movement takes its title—“You Better Run . . . ”—from an African American sacred song in the public domain. It captures a widely shared African Americanized Christian and perhaps a nearly universally shared human sentiment and longing for flight,61 escape from, de-formation of, dominance, whether in the form of old sociopolitical regimes in general, religious tradition, traditional social (class and gender) orientations, arrangements and associations, and certainly, enslavement and imprisonment. The Bible figures in this movement among African Americans in supplying many exemplary figures of deformation or flight. The need for flight is, perhaps, never fully met or satisfied. And there have been instances in which flight has necessarily been mixed with ongoing dynamics and the infrapolitics of dominated groups.62 But there are also periods in which the pressing need is to run for one’s life. Issues in this category of formation and the sources upon which there may be focus provide dramatic evidence for such a movement among African Americans. Flight can be associated with certain clearly delimited periods in the history of African Americans. But the whole point of this interpretive schema is that one can discern the deep rumblings and yearnings and articulations of meanings of African American life by actually refusing to delimit such a movement to traditional periodizations. Flight is evident as primary movement or phase in the larger cycle of return, but it is also ever present in particular sub-groups of African American life and, of course, among many individuals—those for whom the trauma continues to be most palpable and persistent. Jim Todd, the character in Warren’s poem “Pondy Woods,” discussed above, clearly represents the flight that captures an aspect of or moments in African American life. Warren’s depiction of the black male in flight—in marronage—is not in itself problematic; it is significant because it provokes the reader—some readers, this reader!—to beg for clarifications about such matters as the principal impulses and motives behind and meanings, as well as the ultimate direction and outcomes of, the running for Jim Todd. As already pointed out above, Warren’s “maroon” does not speak. But we must now insist upon hearing from maroons themselves and finding out who they are, why they run, where and how they end. This interest in turn provokes consideration of other parts or movements of the cycle. The second movement—“I’m Buildin’ Me a Home”—also draws upon the words of a song.63 Although not very old, the song nonetheless touches

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old chords or sensibilities. As a medley of a sort of other traditional spiritual songs, this song draws upon sentiments that have been long resonant in African American culture, articulated most vividly and poignantly in religious culture. This second movement in the making of African America is the settlement or formation phase. Obviously, it builds upon the first phase insofar as the turn toward settlement and building presumes escape from domination, at least a degree of freedom from danger, and a different and relatively safe site of enunciation and work.64 And again, I think it important for the reader to be cautioned against associating this movement with the traditional periodizations of African American history. As is the case with flight, the building-of-home or formation phase is also recurring in the larger cycle of African American life. To limit such a movement to one period in history or even several pointed periods— Reconstruction or Harlem Renaissance or the civil rights era—is to miss the deeper meanings of the motif. The point is to seek to understand what may be happening, what the people may mean in any one time when they foreground “working on the building.” What the Bible may offer is code for what the effort is all about. The title of the third phase or movement—“Talkin’ Mumbo Jumbo and Following the Neo-HooDoo Way”—is my effort to press the rhetorics and sentiment of creative writer and inveigler Ishmael Reed65 into the service of representing heightened collective criticism, sharply cut articulations of identity, and efforts at self-making, self-naming, re- formation, re-formulation, and re-orientation among African Americans, as well as negotiation with the outside world. These representations range from the most conservative to the most radical, as well as many different representations in between.66 Reed is in my view an exemplary figure in African American literary history, arts, and criticism. I am not interested in defending or opposing Reed’s particular views; they are important and controversial and should be discussed and debated on their own terms. His rhetorics provide categories for the heightened self-criticism of, the circling around and turning back upon, African and African American traditions—all for the sake of re-form and re-orientation. Following upon and taking cues from but not necessarily agreeing in all matters with Reed, “Mumbo Jumbo”67 here refers to a specifically accepted African American language or discursive formation, a certain “stylin’” or “signifyin’” embraced ironically in spite of what the term means among dominants. “Neo-Hoodooism”68 refers to a specifically heightened African and African American self-consciousness, sensibility, orientation to the world, practices in the world. The term, including the qualifying prefix, is deliberate and important: it reflects sharp criticism of American and African American mainstream society, including its religious culture. It also reflects

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the challenge to return to and privilege traditional African and African American traditions and sensibilities. Most important to note here are the self-critical sensibilities and agenda that are in Reed’s rhetorics. Behind the rhetorics is Reed’s penchant for parody, paradox, irony and pungent humor, exaggeration, understatement— in short, all sorts of rhetorical and discursive strategies employed in order to level critique against the self, against African American culture and, of course, against “the world.” These strategies are put in the service of pressing African Americans to look critically at themselves and their translations of their own and others’ traditions and histories. Quite obvious is the fact that this movement or phase presumes the other two movements. The level and intensity of self-criticism practiced by the likes of Reed makes sense and is realistic only after a people has been able to escape immediate and pressing genocidal conditions and has assumed fairly independent sites of worldbuilding, can call itself by names of its own choosing, and so forth. Yet again it must be stressed that this heightened self-critical phase must not be limited to any one particular period in history; particular segments of the African American world may be identified on an ongoing basis with such practices. The African American world on a larger scale has certainly tended to return again and again to more or less heightened critical modes. That this work of criticism and return called for and practiced by Reed (and others) is categorized in terms of esoteric language and religious tradition is particularly important. Projects conceptualized with this movement in mind will certainly need to make it clear how important religious language and vision have been in the call to reform African American society and culture. In this effort, the Bible has figured quite prominently and has functioned in quite different, even contradictory ways, legitimizing a wide range of different sociopolitical collective and personal orientations. These different orientations may not square with Reed’s politics and orientations; this is not the critical issue; but Reed’s language challenges interpreters to consider what it means for a people to be positioned to look back upon traditions on certain terms and in a critical way. The call to embrace the “neo-hoodoo” way and to talk “mumbo jumbo” is a call to take unto the collective self all that has gone before it and sift it carefully and deeply. This practice never comes to closure precisely because neither the past nor the sifting will be understood in the same way by different groups in different eras or even different groups in the same era. How does the Bible function, what and how does the Bible “mean,”69 in relationship to these different movements or phases as outlined? The subsections in Part III here outlined as movements in the making of African American culture are not, and should not be, argued to have been necessarily and directly influenced or mandated by the Bible. No single directional flow

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of influence or determination or simple causation can be established. On the contrary, what the focus upon African Americans in my proposed interpretive schema of movements suggest is that in the Bible was found a rich storehouse of languages and rhetorics, including stories of heroic individuals and groups, songs, visions, poetry, exhortative and excoriatory/denunciatory discourses—all of which have reflected and continue to reflect some parallel phases in African American formation and strivings.70 But this means that the Bible was less the source of, the impetus behind, the explanation for, the movements, than a record or mirror of such. Put another way, it is arguable that these movements of human striving and formation are (with due concessions to the usual appropriate qualifications) universal or nearly universal, that the Bible does not so much cause such movements as it—in arresting and compelling ways, to be sure—records or captures them. In this respect, it is found to be most compelling to those individuals and groups experiencing most profoundly the lags of the human cycle—persistent hurt and trauma, the palpable immediate need to escape. Insofar as the Bible is record and reflection of the generalizable, if not universally experienced, movements sketched above, it can be argued that in their cycle of formation African Americans in a dramatic way are themselves a biblical people. And insofar as it records human striving and formation work, the Bible is in a most dramatic and poignant manner dark script, written for the most part by and for the marooned, who have been and continue to be for the most part dark peoples. It is not that the cycle of striving and formation is exclusively Black or African American; on the contrary, it is universal. But among the many complex meanings of African American existence, that of the persistence of flight, formation, and reformation—biblical themes all— resonates. The persistence of such realities—the socioeconomic-political and psychosocial, existential lags that are the result of enslavement—as part of what defines African American existence does not so much privilege African Americans in any absolute sense in terms of claims about the Bible, but it makes compelling the focus upon African Americans as a window onto the Bible as both cultural product and cultural signifier. African Americans are not somehow the people of the most profound insight into the interpretation of any particular part of the Bible. In fact, on the whole they have historically not so much read as they have practiced, as mentioned above, a type of “notreading,” and have striven to attain heightened consciousness of their experience as that which the Bible rather dramatically and poignantly records. They are not so much the keenest interpreters of the Bible as they are, as modern maroons, the modern extensions, social actors, of the Bible’s dramas; or, put somewhat differently, they are the persons, if not the flesh/bodies, against or by which the Bible is read. On account of having been forced into experiencing a chronic lag in the cycle of human formation, African Americans have

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become an example of a modern collective social reification of the Bible, modern social instantiations of the Bible. And through focus upon them, the Bible becomes intelligible and poignant as reader of human striving and a manifesto for its movements. Much more needs to be unpacked in connection with these issues. What might be considered the third and final major section—Sub-Texts— for critical project drawing together the issues referenced above beckons and encourages even more wide-ranging reflections for the sake of perspective on different social and religious worlds, generations, professions, settings, fields and disciplines, and orientations. Collaborators should include clergypersons, experienced academics, students, other types of professionals, activists. What makes this part of the project important is that it presents and facilitates and encourages a great range of different understandings of and responses to the topic to surface. Individuals may be asked to address the matter of the implications and ramifications of the general topic that is the conjunction African Americans and the Bible from their varied perspectives and situations. It is all the more fascinating to take note of what issues and problematics, what questions and implications and ramifications are addressed—not resolved—in the different reflections. Writers of short reflections might attempt to answer the most basic questions—what does the topic African Americans and the Bible mean? To and for whom is it addressed? What difficult issues and questions were confronted or avoided? By whom? What challenges are directed? To whom? The reflections included in this section might help retain the complexity of the topic or project focus. They also poignantly name the salient issues that were behind the research project. They facilitate the engagement of some of the issues that will continue to demand intentionally un-disciplined and honest and courageous thinking. The project will have served an important function if many come to recognize how fruitful can be the fathoming of the conjunction of African Americans and the Bible for serious thinking, academic or otherwise, beyond traditional fields, programs, institutions assuming they should have control of thinking and orientation. It will have met its goals if many come to recognize that the days of the adequacy of impressionistic thinking and statements about the relationship between African Americans and the Bible are over, that only serious, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches and sensibilities and collaborative work will prove adequate in addressing the issues. The challenges of the conjunction of African Americans and the Bible as historical and perduring cultural phenomenon are too complex and compelling to be ignored or to be taken lightly: again, because it is at the same time shockingly specific and also easily generalizable, the conjunction is in some respects easily grasped, easily subject to some scientific means of scrutiny and verifiability. Nevertheless, because

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it provokes concerns that are and have always been politically and ideologically destabilizing (in some cases seen as “the third rail” in matters of social and cultural control and identity), and even the threat of transgressive and promiscuous academic disciplinarity; and because of the numbers and diversity of discussants that might be beckoned, it can be argued that the project here being called into being is less a(nother) published book of essays but a phenomenon or an event,71 the beginnings of a movement of a sort that argues for the heuristic power of allowing the chronically marginal72 in American society to become the basis for thinking seriously about the self and the world it inhabits. In this sense, thoughtful persons, whether Americanists, including African Americanists, cultural critics, theologians, philosophers and phenomenologists, social scientists, or biblical scholars, whether African American or not, whether in or of the United States or not, can no longer easily deny or downplay the challenges and issues named by the conversation that this essay and the program it inaugurates and facilitates. Reading African Americans in terms of marronage, marronage in terms of experiences forced, especially upon dark peoples,73 and the creation and reading of Scriptures in terms of the darkness of marronage—all these “readings” can be made compelling. I can no longer go back to the Bible—or to discourses about the Bible—whether for teaching, engaging in research, or for self-(re-) construction, except through darkness. For me to read “darkly” (en ainigmati) is to attempt to read the enigma that is (human) existence through and on the basis of—not turned away from!—my dark flesh and through its hyper-signification in the world. It is the reading of the dark self (not the text[s] !) that is important and aweful—both illuminating and freeing and disrupting and frightening. Henceforth, let all serious readers beware. NOTES 1. Patricia Storace, “The Scripture of Utopia,” New York Review of Books 45, no. 10 (June 11, 1998): 64–68. 2. Ibid., 64. 3. Ibid., 64–65. 4. Mary Helen Washington, “Disturbing the Peace,” American Quarterly 50, no. 1 (March 1998): 1–23. For a similar impulse in the arena of biblical studies, although without the explicit substitute agenda or program proposal, the reader should note the two different collections of essays, the one edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah, Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (London: SPCK, 1991); and the other by Cain H. Felder, ed., Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991). Although the second collection was edited by Felder, it was the result of years of collaboration and discussions

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among African American biblical scholars (x-xi). Felder had offered a sketch of his own proposal for biblical studies in the publication of a collection of his essays, entitled Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class, and Family (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989). Another example to note in biblical studies is the provocative work and career of biblical scholar Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza. For decades if not during her entire career, Schuessler Fiorenza struck a chord similar to the ones struck by Mary Helen Washington, but in terms of the focus upon women in the study of the New Testament and the earliest period of Christianity. Among her several works see especially In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983) for a model of the substitution scholarship. And see her most recent publication on the politics of biblical scholarship, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999). This work is an elaboration upon Schuessler Fiorenza’s presidential address delivered before the Society of Biblical Literature in 1987. She became in 1987 the first female president of the then more than one-hundred-year-old scholarly organization. 5. From the King James Version of 1 Corinthians 13:12. The Greek expression is en ainigmati (for the New Testament an expression occurring here only), meaning “in an enigma.” As problematic as the translation is for so many reasons, it is poignant here. What is enigmatic is existence, the traumatic nature and emergency mode of existence-its origins and perdurance. It is this trauma and emergency that the Bible and African American existence reflect and that African American cultural representations interpret most consistently and intensely, but never with any closure or finality. 6. See Robert Penn Warren, New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985 (New York: Random House, 1985), 319–21. 7. Houston A. Baker, Jr., in his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), made reference to the retort in the context of a discussion about the import of the title of Alain Locke’s famous edited work The New Negro: An Interpretation: “Exegesis, hermeneutics, the offices of interpretation and fitting analysis vis-a-vis Afro-America, according to Locke’s title, are now the project of the black spokesperson him­or herself’ (72). See also Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic; It’s All Greek to Me,” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirk et al., Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 225 and n. 11. 8. Gates, “Authority,” 252–53. 9. Ibid., 255. 10. Note the title of the Research Project and the International Conference behind it: “African Americans and the Bible.” The conjunction here is important: it signals a radical openness to identifying and addressing a wide range of problems and issues. This openness is also inviting of a rather wide range of questions and problematics, disciplinary discourses, their methods, approaches and orientations from the very beginning of the inquiry. This orientation seems to me to be far different from the usual penchant of determining from a safe and controlled disciplinary perspective whether other disciplinary methods and approaches can be engaged and to what

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degree. The Research Project that inspired this essay, like the study of the Bible, in my view, cannot belong to or be controlled by the politics and orientations of any one discourse or discipline. In my view, such control has been the most significant problem that I have had to face in the field of biblical studies. I assume that I am not the only one to face such a problem. The African Americans and the Bible Research Project is my attempt to address the problem. This is being done by opening up and modeling the study of the Bible to many more possible interests and projects. 11. On the subject of the construction of whiteness in American culture, see Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds., Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999); and Valerie Melissa Babb, Whiteness Invisible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 12. Warren’s slim development of the escaping Jim Todd character is enough to remind the reader familiar with the African experience in the United States and in the Americas in general of the dramatic history of black runaways, especially runaway slaves, often called maroons. For historical and comparative perspectives on the maroon, see Richard Price ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 [1979]). Now available to address the lack of scholarly attention to the phenomenon in the United States, students of marronage can consult Hugo Prosper Leaming’s published dissertation, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas, ed. Graham Hodges, Studies in American History and Culture (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995); and John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). According to Price, the English word “maroon,” like the French term marron, derives from the Spanish cimarron. In the New World contexts cimarron originally referred to cattle that had escaped into the hills in Hispaniola, as well as to fierceness and wildness in general. Later, it was applied to Indian slaves who had escaped from the Spaniards. By the early sixteenth century the word was used to refer primarily to African runaway slaves (pp. 1–2, note 1). See Houston Baker’s use of the term in connection with his argument about African American struggles to face the modern in his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 76–79, 95, 100, 103. 13. How otherwise can the reference to Jesus (‘Jew-boy”) in juxtaposition to the “nigger” be explained? Whose categories, labels, distinctions are these? In relationship to whom are these figures the others? 14. See Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, “Orientalism and Postcolonial Predicament,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, South Asia Seminar Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 17; and Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially chapter one, with Erich Auerbach as starting point, on the history of philological, biblical interpretation and literary criticism. 15. The latter are mostly housed in theological seminaries (mostly in the United States) that are independent of universities or in divinity schools that are part of

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church-founded church-related: sometimes still church-controlled universities. It is rare to find a university without such history and/or continuing influence and with a thoroughgoing critical program ill the study of the Bible, viz. without any conditions upon the agenda and presuppositions of such a program. Given my primary professional location at an independent theological seminary, I explain my own ironic “flight” from the traditional expectations and assumptions and orientations to be partly the result of the influence of a few very bright students of varied backgrounds who, as they find themselves located at the mouth of Harlem engaged in the academic study of the Bible, clamor for something other than the old obfuscations called exegesis. But this means that such students--as they continue the journey with me--want not less rigor but more, not a lesser but a sharper critical approach, not the acquisition of the western theological foundational “facts,” but ways to go deeply and honestly inside themselves and come up as more complex and articulate beings by equipping themselves to engage on a different level in a different analytical key. Thus, the whole process represents a disentangling (de­forming) from and reshaping of that tightly wrapped and elusive psychosocial and sociopolitical construction we all through the much freighted shorthand simply have called the Bible/(as our western example of) scriptures. The irony of it? That such a school can be both a complex maze and a path outward. Only those students who are interested, who are invested in coming to terms with themselves and their world and how it is made and why it is made the way it is are likely to want to travel this way. I am not sure that the typical “secular” university student (whether in religious studies or not) would want to travel this direction. For many there will remain too many rigors--intellectual, psychological and political--to want to cut the deal. 16. See his “Orientalism and the Study of Oriental Literatures,” in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism, 175–76. 17. See this provocative argument as part of the exchange in connection with her William E. Massey Sr. Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1990 and published as Playing in the Dark (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), viii. 18. Again, note here the arguments regarding African American disruption of discursive spin advanced by Mary Helen Washington in her address before the American Studies Association. See p. 2 and n. 4 above. 19. For a sophisticated discussion of some of the different and conflicting views from the perspective of religious studies and cultural criticism, see Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Criticism: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995). 20. Regarding the matter of the “time-lag” that minority and diaspora discourses represent, see the arguments of Homi K Bhabha, in his The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 191–92, 198, 199, 237, 246–56; and in Breckenridge and van derVeer, “Orientalism, 18. Clearly, much more attention needs to be given to this notion of the “lag,” especially to the matter of persistence of the experience of trauma that attend the lives of so many within minority groups. In the case of African Americans, slavery and its aftermath must be addressed if there is to be any possibility for understanding the “lag.” Statistics of all sorts can certainly help establish the

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facts of the perduring otherness of African Americans in American society- another way of explaining the “lag.” 21. This expression is used by Jonathan Z. Smith, in his essay “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon,” 52, in his collection of essays entitled Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). There is in my view nothing inherently wrong or inappropriate about being a “tribal theologian,” as long as one understands to what tribe one belongs, for what tribe one works and plays. The extent to which this point is understood the impetus behind and the import of the African Americans and the Bible research project will be grasped. 22. Note again in Warren’s poem the extent to which Jim Todd is characterized specifically as a black person who because of such identity must be outside the bounds of Christian traditions and the legitimate interpretation of such. And see Breckenridge and van de Veer, 3–28, regarding the manner in which other ancient literatures are Europeanize and Euro-Americanized, and other peoples are made outsiders as readers and interpreter The dominants effect this situation through the construction and maintenance of a chasm between ancient situations and traditions and present condition, which they control. 23. See here Krister Stendahl’s discussion in his 1983 Society of Biblical Literature presidential address, “The Bible as a Classic and as Holy Scripture,” Journal of Biblical Literature l03, no. 1 (1984): 3–10, especially 3, regarding linkage between interest in the past and cultural placidity and dominance. “Could it be that preoccupation with history comes natural when one is part of a culture which feels happy and hopeful about the historical process? Hegel’s pan-historic philosophy belongs, after all, to the ascendancy of western imperialism -it was even said that other parts of the world were “lifted into history” when conquered, colonized, or converted by the West.” 24. On ancient exegesis see the comprehensive article “History of Interpretation,” in Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 305–24. Jewish, Early Christian, and Middle Ages to Reformation sections most relevant. See also the section on Modern Biblical Criticism in the same article 318–24. And certainly Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza’s 1987 SBL presidential address, “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship,” Journal of Biblical Literature 107, no. 1 (1988): 3–17, and the elaboration upon the same themes in her recent book, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies. It should be part of any reading on the history and politics of modern biblical scholarship. 25. See in John H. Hayes and Carl R. Holladay, Biblical Exegesis: A Beginner’s Handbook (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987), 14–18, the quite (guild-) traditional handling of the matter of the exegete’s relationship to his or her own present worldnamely, in terms of the enormous distance or gap between the modern reader and the ancient texts. Only “specialized exegesis” can bridge the gap. Those challenging such a stance include contributors to Fernando Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, eds., Readings From This Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995); Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998); and the Bible and Culture Collective, The Postmodern

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Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). See also Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism, for the broadest perspective on the impetus behind and implications and ramifications of the roots of modern biblical scholarship: While the Middle Ages had no historical understanding of antiquity…and the Renaissance felt only a certain distance from its old models, the Reformist return to original texts…brought an acute sense of division between the two parts of the Scripture and the two levels of experience, the present and the past. With the erosion of feudal and church power, and concomitant advances in astronomy, colonialism, and trade, the harmony of religious and secular spheres collapsed and the possibility of alternative world orders gained in appeal ... the success of the Protestant churches and the achievement of Renaissance humanism gave the seventeenth century the sense of a new order ... and a new beginning (modernity) ....As for the chronological meaning of the Modern, it involved an acute sense of separation from the past, specifically for antiquity. This historical sense was the belief in an ancient and extinct integrated civilization…which was usually identified with Hellas. With this nostalgic belief, a long process, which had begun with the removal of the Scripture from the purview of the church for the bourgeois reader’s personal edification, was completed some one hundred years later: as the modern state won the battle of the Book against the church m the name of the individual, the past (of both state and individual) was declared History and called Greek, while the present was proclaimed Modern and defined as Judaic (38–40). An easy substitution for the “Modern” brings us back to the African American situation as opportunity and challenge. 26. See George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield, eds., The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), for historical perspectives and discussion of a wide range of issues. 27. See Schuessler Fiorenza, “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation,” esp. 13–17. 28. See the article on “Black Identity,” by Cornel West, in Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, vol. 1, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996), 353–60, and Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness, for treatment of pertinent issues and problems. 29. See Houston A. Baker’s argument about the origins of African American “modernism” in his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 12, 93, 96, 101. 30. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 31. See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), for wide-ranging discussion of pertinent issues. 32. See Bhabha, Location, 178; also Deborah McDowell, “Negotiations between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom–Dessa Rose,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 147. 33. This view certainly squares with those of Schuessler Fiorenza. See her Rhetoric and Ethics Part One. This discussion includes but goes beyond her SBL presidential address.

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34. See the provocative essay written by Timothy Fitzgerald, “The Ideology of Religious Studies,” Bulletin: The Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 28, no. 2 (April 1999): 39-41. This essay is a revised excerpt from Fitzgerald’s forthcoming book by the same title, to be published by Oxford University Press. 35. See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Nathan 0. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds., The Bible and America: Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), for comprehensive discussions of the events and issues. 36. Although it needs to be updated, Harold W. Turner’s discussion of Africans’ responses to missionaries’ efforts to teach them the Bible provides important historical background and comparative perspectives. See his Religious Innovation in Africa: Collected Essays on New Religious Movements (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 271–88. See also Samuel D. Gill, Beyond “The Primitive”: The Religions of Nonliterate Peoples (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 226–28; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 239–43; and my exploratory essay, “The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretative History,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 81–97. 37. This is the focus of my next publication project. 38. Here I am sharing some arguments waged over the years by Wilfred Cantwell Smith regarding the importance of phenomenology of Scripture as part of the academic study of the Bible. But I think I am sharpening his arguments by suggesting what specific ways biblical scholarship might be reoriented. I am also addressing as part of an attempt to understand more clearly the larger phenomenon of scripturalizing what is arguably the most dramatic modern local cultural example of scripturalizing practices, an example totally ignored by Smith and his students. See Smith’s What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); Miriam Levering, ed., Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). But note now Barbara Holdrege’s contribution to this volume. 39. See extensive treatment of related themes in Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of Western Guilt: Thirteenth-Eighteenth Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), and in Ann Ramsey, “Flagellation and the French CounterReformation: Social Discipline and the Evolution of a Penitential Culture,” in Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Two most important primary texts that expound upon the theme are in Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny’s De Contemptus Mundi, Latin text with English translation and introduction, ed. Ronald E. Pepin, Medieval Texts and Studies 8 (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1991), and Lothario dei Segni (Pope Inno­cent III), On the Misery of the Human condition [De miseria humane

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conditionis], ed. Donald R. Howard, Library of Liberal Arts 132 (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1969). 40. See most especially Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, with Ecce Homo (New York: Van­tage, 1967). But for fuller bibliographic listing and collection of important critical essays, see Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Among the most important es­says are: Richard Solomon’s “One Hundred Years of Ressentiment: Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” and Ruediger Bittner’s ‘‘Ressentiment.” 41. See Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994). 42. See Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afra-Baptist Faith (Westport, Corm.: Greenwood, 1979), esp. 52, 101, 109, 118, 126, 227, 229, 246–47, for treatment of the motif in African American slave traditions. 43. See Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, DC: Civitas Counterpoint, 1999), 218–19. My thanks to Union New Testament and Christian Origins Ph.D. student Marie Case for leading me and the seminar on the Passion Narratives I led spring semester 1999 to this book and its controversial argu­ment regarding notions of sacrifice in the Christian west, specifically, the United States in connection with African Americans. 44. See as provocative contribution from a scholar outside the fields of religious studies and theology, Harold Bloom’s The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). See also the following different treatments on the theme: Martin Marty’s Religion and Republic: The American Circumstance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971); Richard T. Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds., The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); James Oliver Robertson, American Myth, American Reality (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980). A most fascinating addition to the discussion is the work of biblical scholar Charles Mabee on the functions of the Bible in particular in American culture. See especially as part of a series he edits his Reimagining America: A Theological Critique of the American Mythos an d Biblical Hermeneutics, Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 1 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985); and Reading Sacred Texts through American Eyes: Biblical Interpretation as Cultural Critique, Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 7 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1991). In an effort to join Mabee in conversation a select group of students at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University contributed essays to this general topic. See their contributions in The Bible and the American Myth: A Symposium on the Bible and the Constructions of Meaning, ed. V. L. Wimbush, Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics16 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999). From within the circles of biblical scholars, Mabee and again Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza stand out in terms of their direct

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challenge to the guild of biblical scholars to deal with the politics of modern biblical scholarship. 45. See Marcel Gauchet’s provocative discussion about the complex origins of the “secular” world and related issues in his The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Birge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 46. Is the cultivation of such forgetfulness among the respectable religious of the culture part of the sensibilities and agenda of modern biblical studies? How otherwise can its benig­nity within the academic and religious culture be explained? How can a practice that entails the handling of psycho-social and cultural explosives be otherwise explained? 47. Of course, the Bible has been so indigenized, here meaning Americanized, among “common folk,” for some time. This explains its continuing relevance and power and some­times problematic presence in American culture. But academic discourses about the Bible on the whole and academic programs in the study of the Bible have not at all been Americanized. This is the challenge that the academic study of the Bible faces in this country. 48. I am serious enough to imagine here the same sort of creative initiatives and theoretical work in the study of religion finally with thoroughgoing unqualified critical focus upon sacred texts in American culture that have been developed in other arenas--political and legal theory, sports, medical science, and so forth. That there has not with very few exceptions been developed and sustained in the academic study of Bible and other sacred texts recognizably American orientations, orientations that have taken the fact of being in the United States and taking the pulses of the United States into consideration, is surely a long and dramatic story about religious and academic politics that histories of interpretations rarely touch upon. 49. See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3–4. 50. This separation or blindness can be seen most dramatically in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). There was not a single section or even essay focused upon religion! There was not a single major entry in the index having to do with religion! (The exception was a single minor subcategory entry on the “Black Church,” under the major entry on “Black institutions.”) The editor, a senior scholar with an appointment in a history department in a large midwestern university, and contributors, historians of American and African American history, of varied backgrounds, reflected the virtual silence about the religious life of African Americans in historiography on African Americans in the past, and obviously, did not find it compelling enough to think it would or should be part of the future work in the field. I would like to think that the situation that obtained in the mid-1980s no longer holds at the dawn of the new millennium. But I am not aware of a sea change in attitudes and in scholarship. What is clear to me is that a willingness and capacity to address the phenomenon of the interaction of African Americans and the Bible presumes a high level of sophistication regarding the religious orientation of African Americans. Perhaps religion in general for many scholars, but certainly the Bible in

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particular, as critical subject matter, is considered “third-rail” stuff: touch it and one either is shocked to death or comes alive in a frighteningly different form. 51. See Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, xviii, 8, 22, 31–32, 47, 50, 67, 85–87, 93, for a fascinating discussion regarding African American “mastery of form.” 52. See the discussion regarding scripturalizing as cultural practice and as exiting of society and culture in Wesley Kort’s “Take, Read”: Scripture, Textuality, and Cultural Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). John Calvin, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Blanchot are treated in creative ways as theorists of what it means to read Scripture in western culture. 53. This notion of reading of Scripture as reading of darkness I have come to realize squares with Houston Baker’s arguments in his brilliant book Blues, Ideology, and Afro­American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 144–57, about the “black ‘blues life’”--life still all too often defined by “poverty hunger-ridden days ... restless moving ... meaningless pain and endless suffering” (146), and the “black (w)hole” as the African American expressive selfhealing response to it: ... in the script of Afro-America, the hole is the domain of Wholeness, an achieved relationality of black community in which desire recollects experience and sends it forth as blues. To be Black and (W)hole is to escape incarcerating restraints of a white world (i.e., a black hole) and to engage the concentrated, underground singularity of experience that results in a blues desire’s expressive fullness. The symbolic content of Afro-American expressive culture can thus be formulated in terms of the black hole conceived as a subcultural (underground, marginal, or liminal) region in which a dominant, white culture’s representations are squeezed to zero volume, producing a new expressive order (151–52: emphasis his). But in making African American “life-crisis” (including the “black blues life” and the healing that the “black (w)hole” represents) an “inevitable event,” equivalent to such other life crises as birth, puberty, and death, Baker, in my view, made a serious misstep. Drawing upon anthropologist Arnold van Gennep’s (The Rites of Passage) schema of three rites of passage meant to explain (typical? universal?) transformation from one stage of social life to another, Baker posits three stages or “rites of the black (w)hole”: separation from white society; renewal of desire and instruction in black life in the “betwixt and between”; and aggregation or reintegration (153–57; see diagram on 156). Most important to note is that Baker assumes the irreversibility of the transformed experience. Once you go (into the) black ([w]hole) you do not go back! Baker focused for the most part upon fiction, in particular the work of Richard Wright (especially Black Boy), as the basis for his arguments about African American “black blues fife’· and “black (w)hole.” I agree with him that Richard Wright’s work serves as an important and appropriate “mediating textual ground” for meditation and argumentation, especially because of the various charges leveled against him that he was insufficiently tropological, too much the protest writer, in sum, as writer, too dark! Yet Baker’s focus upon Wright unfortunately led him to think that Wright had done more than problematize “the black (w)hole”; he thought that Wright had in fact

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detected the “set pattern of rites marking the Afro-American underground experience” (152). Baker’s mistake was not in focusing upon Wright. Nor was it in his interpretation of Wright. It was in not seeing the Bible not only as a most important “mediating textual ground” for African Americans, including Richard Wright. Because the interaction between African Americans and the Bible, as this essay suggests, registers a quite different pattern of rites for African American experience—more circular than progressive and irreversible—and because African Americans and the Bible represents a much longer and more complex his­tory of interaction than does African Americans and Richard Wright, it must be taken into account. If the interaction between African Americans and the Bible is taken into account, certain questions about the inevitability and linear progressive nature of the development of African American life will need to be raised. The perduring interest in the Bible among African Americans clearly has and deserves multiple explanations. But one I offer for consideration is most relevant here: the Bible actually does not resolve problems, “it” raises—or we with it make it raise—the questions again and again in story or different forms of speech. It is because there is little or no closure that the Bible remains compelling, addressing from generation to generation and ‘Within each generation the same issues of the world as problem and a puzzle, as being unfair, unjust, hurtful, and the need to escape from it, and so forth. African Americans’ continuing intense interaction with the Bible suggests that Baker’s and Wright’s views regarding darkness need to be qualified by reference to the interaction between the folk and The Book. 54. See the discussion regarding “not-reading” in Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Dias pora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 103–21, 123, 135–36, 175. According to Gundaker, “Not-reading . . . is a coexisting difference, a cosmological break-pattern that cuts across literacy, not devaluing reading, writing, or alphabetic script but momentarily illuminating and provisionally displacing them” (121). 55. I have in mind here the fact that African Americans share some experiences with other types of historically marginal groups--other ethnic minorities; women; religious minorities. But they also clearly are quite different in many respects from such groups. See R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), for interesting discussion of some of the exempla and some of the pertinent issues. For a fascinating study of one of the groups included in Moore’s company of religious outsiders, see Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). (Interestingly, women are not isolated by Moore as one of the groups of outsiders. They are listed in the index under Christian Science, the nineteenth century, and Pentecostalism.) African Americans, I want to argue here, are not exotics: they are not unique in the world in terms of experiences with sacred texts. But they should not be lumped with others without seeing what peculiarities they represent even as legitimate representatives of humanity. Some groups deemed outsiders by Moore should now probably be taken off the list. It may have been defensible to regard Mormons as religious outsiders in the past. But they now

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exercise considerable economic, political and socioreligious control in the western United States. Some even claim that they own their own state! But beyond their “state,” they find it not impossible, as a group, in most parts of the country, to blend in. Women? As a group? Clearly the matter of outsider status is complicated. I assume that in the way that Moore’s index included women as qualifications or exceptions, and so forth, in terms of the major categories of religious movements, so women as a group should qualify arguments regarding African Americans. But none should deny that today African Americans surely belong to the list of those deemed outsiders in several respects. In fact, every relevant index is likely to show that such a people are the chronic and persistent outsiders--others. Susan Mizruchi, in her The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Social Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), a fascinating and provocative and comprehensive study of the notion of sacrifice in Western, especially American, culture, argues (see esp. p. 7) that sacrificial thinking with all its attendant horrors (from ancient crucifixion to modern lynching as forms of cruelty) was inspired by and coalesced around those who could be easily labeled strangers, and, in the case of black folk in particular, the “relentlessly alien.” This is startling. But the issue for me in this essay is not whether African Americans are such according to every relevant index, but what sorts of implications and challenges—heuristic and political—the perception of such status presents. For the hint of an understanding of what such a challenge may be that anticipates to some degree but does not understandably go as far this collection of essays, see Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Bloom includes African American religion in his discussion of what constitutes the American religion (chapter 15). In fact, he argues that African American religion--of the folk variety or strand that historically has been centered in but is not at all limited to black Baptist traditions--is the paradigm of the American religion. By focusing upon African American sensibilities, especially its negotiation of freedoms--for and from the self--a deeper understanding of American religion and the American collective self can be had. Bloom’s understanding of the importance of the African American exemplum in the study of the American self also informs this collection of essays about the study of the cultural practice that is scripturalizing. 56. The number and the diverse spread of essays included in this section notwithstanding, it is clear that for a number of reasons not all worthy topics could be included. Yet I maintain that the selection of essays included in this section is sufficient to advance and defend the historical-interpretive schema and the conceptualization behind it. I should also indicate that essayists were not asked or forced to select topics that fit the schema. I invite readers to challenge decisions made and to offer other possibilities of topics for inclusion in the discussion. This must be done in order to advance the discussion about the issues. 57. With the terms “de-formation,” “formation,” and “marronage” I am drawing upon Houston Baker’s reading of the social dynamics that led to and flowed out of the Harlem Renaissance. See his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: de-formation, 49–51, 56, 67, 75, 92, 99, 103–4, 107; for references to marronage, see also note 12 above.

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I remind the reader that for historical and comparative perspectives on maroons, Richard Price, Maroon Societies, Leaming, Hidden Americans, and Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, should be consulted. See n. 12 above. 58. This sacred text, as the selection in this book indicates, has been and remains for the most part, but not exclusively so, the Bible. That there are other such texts-the Qur’an, among others, traditional and newly created-is not disputed or taken for granted. I concede that the representation of the engagement of such other texts is not adequate. More attention to filling in the gaps should remain among the research challenges that this book can identify. 59. It was the reading and re-reading of the arguments of the different essays submitted for consideration that convinced me of the defensibility and heuristic power of the schema. But my close colleagues and my students know that I have wrestled with some of the same sources and issues for some time and have offered summary and preliminary versions of the schema presented in this essay. See my essay, “The Bible and African Americans: Outline of an Interpretive History,” 81–97; “African American Traditions and the Bible,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12–15; “The Bible and African American Culture,” Encyclopedia of African-American Culture, vol. 1, ed. Jack Salzman et al. (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996); and “African Americans and the Bible,” HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, Paul Achtemeier, gen. ed. with the Society of Biblical Literature (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 15–17. For other interpretive schemas by African American biblical scholars see Renita Weems, Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible (San Diego: Lura­Media, 1988); Cain H. Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters (1989); Stephen B. Reid, Experience and Tradition: A Primer in Black Biblical Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990); and Brian Blount, Go Preach! Mark’s Message and the Black Church Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998). 60. To return to the matter of the cultural “lag,” see note 20 above, and the reference to Bhabha, Location of Culture. I think it important to stress here that African Americans’ experience of the arguably universal cycle of collective human movement or striving scram­bles normal time: their experience slows down the cycle of human movement, not due to their own making, but on account of the other-ing, alienation and liminality that modern racism is and effects. It is persistence of such that so slows down African Americans’ movement through the cycle that they are made a compelling case study in human striving. For example, so necessary is it for this modern homeless people to engage constantly in “flight” from danger, etc., that it seems imperative to focus upon them as a way to understand what “flight” means in human history. African American fiction (Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon as a great example) should certainly be mined for the images and stories that keep alive the folk tradition about flight and its various purposes. 61. The song continues:” ... you better run to the city of refuge, you better run!” This an related themes about the need for those who were traveling through an “unfriendly world, who found themselves in “this world” that was “not my home,” were common in spiritual and other songs. See “The Vernacular Tradition,” by Robert

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O’Meally, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, gen. eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 5–6. And see again Mechal Sobel’s discussion of the motif of “trabelin’” in Afro-Baptist, and by extension, a significant segment of African American culture, in her book Trabelin’ On, passim. This motif captures much but not all that I intend by the notion of flight. 62. Regarding infrapolitics of dominated but resisting groups, with sensitivity to Africa American history, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, chap. 7. 63. Composed by Uzee Brown, professor of music, Morehouse College. The composition draws upon other traditional songs. 64. In his introduction to Maroon Societies, Richard Price creatively addresses the matte of the challenges of the settlement or formation of maroon societies, 10–30. See also Sall Price and Richard Price, Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), for a rather different and fascinating approach to the subject of formation. This matter of the challenges of formation after de-formation (or flight) is in many ways what Houston Baker’s argument in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance is all about. Se especially xvii, 8, 22, 31–32, 47, 50, 67, 85–87, 93, for arguments about “mastery of form.” 65. See Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (London: Macmillan, 1988); Neil Schmitz, “Neo-HooDoo: The Experimental Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical journal 20, no. 1 (January 1974): 126–4 and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 217–38, for comprehensive treatment of Reed work and responses to it. I am less interested in the various critical responses to Reed than am in what Reed’s work represents in terms of a view and representation of African American existence or stance in the world. 66. The few studies on marronage have tended not to isolate the challenges that I address here as part of a separate movement or stage. Such a separate movement, it seems to me is necessary in order to explain the circular or cyclical aspect of human formation. What goes around does come around again-and again. But certain intensities and pressures are needed in order to sustain the movement. My third stage represents nothing else if it does not represent intensification of sentiment and heightened pressure. 67. MumboJumbo (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972). No “definition” can capture what Reed wanted to challenge readers to consider. His own attempt at providing a definition—vintage Reed—at once sensitive to and contemptuous of the lexicographical meaning and the world that constructs such meaning (7). Reed apparently could not resist taking and satirically fathoming the fourth and final dictionary entry-under the heading “Gibberish (Note The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ed. William Morris [Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1969– 76).) What we confront in Reed here is an attempt to capture a type of language or language world, a set a practices—African, African Caribbean, African American— that translate a world. According to Gates, Reed makes the point about what African

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Americans are or ought to be positioned by “signifyin(g)” on tradition: “Mumbo Jumbo is the received and ethnocentric Western designation for the rituals of black religious as well as for black languages themselves....Mumbo Jumbo, then, signifies upon Western etymology, abusive Western practices of deflation through misnaming, and ... serves as a critique of black and Western literary forms and conventions, and of the complex relationship between the two” (220–21). 68. See his “Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto,” in Ishmael Reed, Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 20–25. These are rather complex works, often very difficult to decipher. But in Reed’s explanation of what “Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto” entails one can find evidence of all of the emphases I think are characteristic of this third part of the cycle of African American existence—re-formist, re-vivalist, at once radical, hyper-critical, cynical and biting and old landmarkist and fundamentalist. These seemingly contradictory emphases are all registered in the interest of trying to re-define and re-capture a compelling, vital essence and core that was viewed as lost in the shuffle or the cycle. The call for the mix of old and new religious symbolization and hermeneutics—within the regime of scrituralization (as I might put the matter)--should be noted. 69. On the matter of what symbols “mean,” see Caroline W. Bynum’s essay, “On the Complexity of Symbols,” in Experience of the Sacred: Readings in the Phenomenology of Religion, ed. Sumner B. Twiss and Walter H. Conser, Jr. (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1992), 265–72. With her challenge to students of religion to take into serious consideration the fact that all people are “gendered,” that all symbols come from “gendered” users, she argues rather persuasively about the necessity of being open to and clarifying positionality: “It is not possible ever to ask How does a symbol--any symbol--mean? without asking For whom does it mean?” (267). Only a little effort is needed to extrapolate from this argument that of course one should not be permitted to ask what a complex symbol such as “Bible” means without asking for what “gendered” self and for what people, their “genderedness” notwithstanding. Such notes were struck in The Postmodern Bible, passim. 70. The term “strivings” here comes from W.E. B. Du Bois’s use and meaning of such in his provocative section entitled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in “The Souls of Black Folk.” See The Souls of Black Folks by W E. B. Du Bois, ed. and with introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (New York: Bantam Classics, 1989), for background and critical discussion and bibliography. 71. On the basis of the total numbers (more than sixty) and the wide ranging diversity of contributors in terms of field and disciplinary as well as ethnic representation, and the generally shared awareness on the part of contributors that this publication may signal another new moment in the collaborative study of African Americans, especially in terms of religion and culture, I am thinking, humbly enough, of the 1925 publication of The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke as an appropriate comparison. But I shall defer final judgment about such comparisons to future readers and reviewers. 72. Here it is clear that not every single African American, but only African Americans as a historical collectivity, should be included in this category. The differences in experience among African Americans are to be respected in this argument.

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Some should be included here among the chronically marginal on the basis of historical-genealogical linkage; others on the basis of consistent solidarity and commitment. Such a basis allows many others varied ethnic backgrounds to be included among the marginal and among those who see and read darkness differently 73. The possibility of persons of every ethnic background and class being in solidarity with the chronically marginal peoples of the world notwithstanding, there is no more shocking and poignant connection that can be made between marronage and dark peoples than the reported by Richard Price in Maroon Societies, 14. Having drawn upon George Woodbury’s book, The Great Days of Piracy in the West Indies (New York: Norton, 1951), Price made the point that in the colonial “New World,” especially in the Spanish territories, many “alliance convenience” were struck, including that between pirates, enemies of the Spanish, and e (blacks as) maroons. Such alliances were sporadic and based on opportunism. Most fascinating is the fact that the pirates, many of whom were slave traders and slave owners themselves, came to use the verb “to maroon” in reference to “the form of punishment meted out [by the pirates] to backsliders from their own numbers.” This sub-cultural popular understanding makes rather dramatic the historical and perduring connection in the modern West between marronage and darkness of experience, marronage and dark peoples.

Chapter 7

“Naturally Veiled and Half Articulate” Scriptures, Modernity, and the Formation of African America (2008)

I aim in this chapter to build upon my ongoing work on the history of a people—Black peoples in the United States, now more generally called African Americans—and specifically, on the arguments made and theorizing advanced in connection with Black peoples and the dynamics of the scriptural, touched on in earlier work and in chapters included in this book. I should like here to build on the arguments and theorizing found in such work. Still generally perceived to be “marginal” to the currents, dynamics, and indices of power in the United States and the West, Black peoples are complex and beg more textured study and research. I pursue such history as a scholar of “scriptures.” I use the people’s engagements of the Bible (and other scriptures) as sharp analytical wedge and as focal point of investigation. I am especially interested in addressing some of the larger ongoing implications and ramifications of a history of such engagements for the sake of understanding African Americans’ orientations, especially to history itself or to the notion of, and efforts to invent, an affirming, “usable past.” I have in different forums and platforms tried again and again to stress that as a scholar of “scriptures” I define my work less as textual critic than as a historian of culture, less a practitioner of historical criticism than a scholar of critical history. I am interested not in the exegesis of ancient texts but in the comparative phenomenology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, psycho-politics, and forms of representations and expressivities associated with scriptures and through such with cultures around the globe. I remain fascinated by the work that we make “scriptures” do to and for us in societies and cultures. I am challenged by the phenomenon that involves the invention and uses of texts (scriptures and other objects) as Scriptures. With the focus upon scriptures and peoples, I am showing my interest to be in the archaeology and politics and social psychology of interpretation, in relationship to 143

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the centered/centering “texts,” here, for the sake of general reference, and as provocative synecdoche, we may call “scriptures.” I begin the archaeological work at home—that is, with the conjuncture of “scriptures” and the people now generally called “African Americans.” This conjuncture is important for several reasons, not least of which has to do with what window it may open onto the problems and challenges of modern psycho-social formation, especially from positions on the margins. I join other critics who have argued that Black peoples open wide windows onto the psycho-social dynamics and politics involved in coming into consciousness in modernity, especially including the issues having to do with contact between worlds: colonial and colonized, enslaving and enslaved, extensiveimperial and local-traditional. I am particularly interested in exploring how scriptures are variously made to function in such situations. DU BOIS AND THE VEIL I shall continue to take seriously and focus on some of the challenges and problematics presented in one of the most creative and provocative works of critical analysis of the modern, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (SBF).1 The two problematics that I focus upon in this chapter in relationship to SBF have to do with: (1) Du Bois’s challenge to us to name and analyze the “symbolic order” and structural arrangements that establish and hold in place “the veil” that defines and positions the black self as marginal, as “other” and (2) his and others’ challenge to Black and all other persistently marginalized peoples to discover and re-cover the use of tools and strategies and practices by which the veil can be rent (or resisted) and the construction (or “weaving”) of meaning and national/socio-cultural formation, psycho-social empowerment, and healing “beyond the veil” can begin and be sustained. Originally published in 1903, SBF was Du Bois’s attempt to identify and address the major challenges faced just after the turn into the twentieth century by the “folk,” or perhaps, more accurately, the type of Black person he had known and had studied and reflected upon and thought himself to be, thereby complicating the matter of the direction and focus of address. The major motif he used in order to discuss the major problems of the folk was the “veil.”2 Notwithstanding their internal differentiations and infrapolitics—of which he as historian and social scientist was keenly aware—all Black folks, Du Bois argued in SBF, had been placed—no, forced—behind the “veil.” This was the result of the anti-black construction of the world. Referred to more than thirty times, the metaphor of the veil in SBF is Du Bois’s attempt to define the existence of Black folks in the United States as those forced into divided consciousness. Thus, the poignant meaning of the plural term

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“souls”—not as reference to the many souls or many persons, but as reference to the two “souls,” in the one representative body, or in each body, divided, warring against each other. This division was for Du Bois—as though anticipating Fanon and others—the psychologically felt reflection of the socialeconomic-political existence of Black folks as the chronic persistent other, the subaltern, the enslaved/colonized living next to, and reduced to looking at themselves through the gaze of, the enslaver/colonizer. Two of the most famous references to the veil—the one a riveting recollection of a personal experience, the other a reading of the history of world civilizations—show something of what was at stake for Du Bois in naming and probing the concept: he viewed himself and others like him on the other side of the “vast veil” as having no “true self-consciousness.”3 “Veil” is made to mean variously—as in the “veil of Race”;4 regarding the “Veil of Color”;5 as that which imprisons;6 as that within which Black folks are born and in which they grow up;7 as that which casts a shadow;8 as that against—above and beyond—which the black self seeks to live;9 as that world beyond which white folks live;10 as that which the Black self escapes only in death;11 and that which, based on hope, is to be rent.12 Literary critics Shamoon Zamir (Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903)13 and Arnold Rampersad (The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois)14 have argued that with the metaphorization of the veil, Du Bois drew most directly from Hegel, then from Emerson and some other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century persons of letters; from nascent psychology; and from the Bible.15 It has also been argued that Du Bois picked up the term from Thomas Jefferson, who had raised the question about the inferiority of the “other [Black] race,” given “that immovable veil of black which covers all [its] emotions.”16 It is certainly possible that Du Bois’s sources were multiple, varied, and inter-textual, and that such sources were sometimes foregrounded, at other times backgrounded, in different contexts of discussion. It was also sometimes the case that valences from one source were wedded to another. Zamir argues that Du Bois took directly from Hegel the idea of the veil and its effects on consciousness and wedded it to the Bible’s stories regarding transformation. Du Bois needed language and concepts through which he could articulate what he understood to be the profundity of the crisis of divided consciousness among Black folks and the complexity of the ascetics and performativity of transformed consciousness. Hegel’s concern had been about the “unhappy consciousness” as part of the dialectics of the master–slave relationship and that moment in which such consciousness is transformed, when self-consciousness discovers itself beyond the realm of appearances, that moment in which the “curtain” is drawn aside.17 The hope for changed consciousness was not necessarily on the terms and the timeline according to the most popular sentiment or assumptions.

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There were many persons Du Bois encountered and engaged who thought Black peoples not quite ready or suited for the challenges and opportunities of modernity; there were persons who thought them suitable for participation in modernity only to the extent to which they would commit themselves to moving forward and forgetting the past. Included among such persons were notable Black thinkers and leaders—some among Du Bois’s “talented tenth”—who thought it best that Black folks turn away from the past, or at least from obsession with the past, especially the humiliations of slavery: “We have no reference to ancient times—we speak of modern things.”18 This rather pointed statement—made by Martin Delany, the well-known nineteenth-century leader often considered one of the foremost conceptualizers and leaders of classical lack nationalism as the vehicle for blacks’ entry into modernity—reflected the thinking of many. And the following statement from Alexander Crummell, a revered, activist, intellectual prelate whom Du Bois considered a mentor, elaborates upon the sentiment in a commencement speech delivered at Storer College in 1885: We are fashioning our life too much after the conduct of the children of Israel. Long after the exodus from bondage, long after the destruction of Pharaoh and his host, they kept turning back, in memory and longings, after Egypt, when they should have kept both eye and aspiration bent toward the land of promise and of freedom . . . What I would fain have you guard against is not the memory of slavery, but the constant recollection of it, as the commanding thought of a new people, who should be marching on to the broadest freedom of thought in a new and glorious present, and a still more magnificent future . . . there is a broad distinction between memory and recollection. Memory . . . is a passive act of the mind. It is the necessary and unavoidable entrances, storage and recurrence of facts and ideas to the understanding and the consciousness. Recollection, however; is the actual seeking of the facts . . . the painstaking endeavor of the mind to bring them back to consciousness. The natural recurrence of the idea or the fact of slavery is that which cannot be faulted. What I object to is the unnecessary recollection of it.19

Crummell and other persons who agreed with his sentiments articulated above were judged by the Du Bois of SBF to be arrogant and ignorant— “irreverent toward Time” and “ignorant of the deeds of men.”20 I take it that with these expressions Du Bois meant to indicate that such persons were unable or unwilling to understand and respect the importance of the Black past that included enslavement and persistent social-political-economic disenfranchisement, and of course, the ongoing complex forms of expressiveness that necessarily recalled the past of slavery. According to Du Bois, there could be no moving forward into the future of the modern world for

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Black peoples, except insofar as they allowed themselves to remember their past. Manipulating Du Bois’s language a bit and putting the matter in positive terms, Black folk must be a people “reverent toward time,” a people who look complexly at the past for the sake of imagining a future. They can hope to have a future and contribute to “civilization” as they fathom their past as a humiliated, enslaved people. The fathoming of the past is not mere intellectual exercise, and it is not the gathering and dissemination of the facts of the past. Du Bois’s challenge was actually about a type of orientation and discernment: orientation to the self, including the collective folk, and also discernment that is critically self-reflexive, focused upon the history and meanings of the folks’ “deeds” in the world. The folk should be tuned into their own orientation, their own rhythms, their own ways of being in and responding to the world, informed by the shared past that includes slavery and disenfranchisement. The focus upon Black folks’ religion (in “Our spiritual strivings,” “The faith of the fathers”) leads to the culminating discussion about the sorrow songs in SBF. These songs helped Du Bois make the point about Black folks’ ongoing “strivings” and their orientation to time. Setting forth the terms and the timeline for the fulfillment of the hope can be considered Du Bois’s baseline agenda in SBF. Given the musical epigraphs for each essay in SBF; and given the placement of the essay about the sorrow songs at the end of the collection of essays, it seems clear that Du Bois intended that special focus be placed upon the songs. The latter were understood to hold a key to understanding Black folks’ “reverence toward time” as part of their “strivings.” The songs make little sense except as they are connected to Du Bois’s metaphorization of the veil, understood and used in mostly negative terms, that is, as that which stands throughout most of the collection for the whiteinstituted color line and the pain and trauma it causes. The sorrow songs showed Du Bois the possibility of a rather different—positive—concept of the veil. This different concept of veiling, here understood as Black folks’ encoding of their deepest layered sentiments, feelings, and understandings in song, was the registration of Black agency. A great part of the purpose of SBF was to celebrate the social power and social giftedness and contributions of the people forced behind the veil. Celebration was experienced through emphasis placed upon forms of black expressivity, including music, literature, and religion. To be sure, Du Bois understood the veil itself and Black folks’ forced positioning behind it to be problematic, to be got rid of, ripped. In spite of the fact that, after many decades of intense engagement, Du Bois removed himself from the situation here in the United States, there is no doubt that the legal changes that were wrought here in connection with the civil rights struggles of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s represented a degree of rending of the veil for which he had hoped.

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Yet even as the matter of the degree of amelioration of social-economic position among Black folks continues to be debated, the veil as a metaphor for Black existence has proved to be elastic and expansive, communicating more than one message. At the end of SBF, after having consistently referred to the term “veil” to describe and provoke strong emotions about the separation and hegemony of Black folks from “the kingdom of culture,” Du Bois used it in a rather different, more positive sense—as the language of the slave songs that encodes or conceals the most profound and sensitive sentiments. In the songs, he argued, the slaves “spoke” to the world, but in terms muted and coded—“naturally veiled and half articulate.” This was in language much like “Bible phrases.”21 As a type of veiling, these songs are nevertheless for Du Bois evidence of a serious grappling with the “veil” of the other negative valence, the veil that was to be overcome. The point seems to have been that a certain kind of veiling, a critical encoding as part of an interpretive strategy, was needed by those forced behind the veil. Such folk thought that for the sake of their safety—physical and psychological—they had to express their deepest sentiments in veiled terms, indirectly, “in other words.” Some of the implications of this thinking about veiling were not lost on critics and scholars of African American culture and its forms of expressivity. The folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston comes immediately to mind as provocative representative of interpreters of Black culture who have picked up on the encoding characteristic of African American expressivities. In the manner in which she picked up on the full array of the lore and rhythms, the textures and gestures of the folk, and in the connection she made between the use even of the Bible and free liquid interpretation among them—“even the Bible was made over to suit our vivid imagination”—Hurston named some of the poignancy involved in critical interpretation about and among Black folks.22 Her reading of Black “readings”23 of the world points to the mysterious, the elusive, the uncanny: . . . Now all y’all heard what Ah said . . . Dat’s just an old time by-word . . . I done heard my gran’paw say dem very words many and many a time . . . There’s a whole heap of them kinda by-words . . . They all got a hidden meanin ‘, jus’ like de Bible. Everybody can’t understand what they mean. Most people is thin-brained. They’s born wid they feet under the moon. Some folks is born wid they feet on de sun and they kin seek out de inside meanin’ of words . . . .24

Du Bois’s impatience with the impatience of the likes of Delany and Crummell and so many others regarding the need for Black folk to move into the future, leaving behind the pains of slavery, reflected his emotional

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solidarity with the folks as they are represented in Hurston’s lore about Black folks, especially regarding the fathoming of the uncanny, the mysterious, the “hidden meanin’” of life. Du Bois translated some of these types of folk sentiments into arguments about the Black past. He can be read (at least in SBF) as having understood how Black folks seek out the “inside meanin’” of things, how they mean and read and interpret things and themselves, how they express themselves. And, of course, it is important to note that Hurston had her character compare this “hidden meanin’” with the Bible and that Du Bois recognized the Bible as perhaps the most important depository for the interpretation of the uncanny as registered in the sorrow songs. DU BOIS, SCRIPTURES, TIME AND SILENCE AS CRITICAL VEIL-ING In SBF, Du Bois anticipated some of the criticism about the type of Black expressiveness reflected in the sorrow songs. In addition to his statement regarding some peoples’—self-styled “moderns”’—“irreverent’ attitude toward time,” and their ignorance about the human “deeds,” that is to say, their cluelessness about the meaning and import of certain peoples’ orientations to and practices in the world, Du Bois made the point that along with “unmeaning rhapsody,” the songs reflect uses of the Bible—“conventional theology”—and in such usage “concealed much of real poetry and meaning.” The point here is that the concealment was not a negative, a simple lack; it was silence, but the silence was not the same as not saying or meaning anything. On the contrary, this silence, with its “eloquent omissions,” was part of a conscious deliberate strategy to communicate an ongoing fathoming of the abject self in the world.25 The meaning of the “omissions and silences” is made clearer in an essay written by the literary critic Houston Baker entitled “Lowground and Inaudible Valleys: Reflections on Afro-American Spirit Work.”26 Baker argues that the interpretive orientation of Black folk culture is best understood as “silence”—that is, as holding back from normal/traditional uses of language, a turning away from the regular forms in order to express critique and healing. Drawing upon Susan Sontag’s essay on silence, Baker called for a “criticism of silence” to “match the depths of a magnificently enhancing black sounding of experience.”27 The radicalism and power of the interpretive stance taken and shared by Du Bois and so many others are here registered by Baker: for Black and subaltern critical consciousness, there is no meaning in any narrative, any script, any text, any tradition unless such is first ripped, broken, and then “entranced, blackened, made usable for weaving meaning.” “Merely arranged in a traditional . . . problematic . . . words are ineffectual.

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Only when they enter into entranced performance . . . do they give birth to sounds of a new order.”28 The entranced performance about which Baker speaks is realized only when there is an addressing of the “lowground and inaudible valleys”—the deepest reaches of the collective psyche and sentiment—of Black folks. At such a point, the canonical arrangements and structures that present themselves to the world and in which Black folk are forced to negotiate are exploded. And the veil is ripped. John Coltrane’s 1961 version of Richard Rodger’s 1959 arrangement of the song entitled My Favorite Things is a splendid example—from a different genre of music—of Black folks’ “lowground and inaudible valleys” and veil ripping. Coltrane’s piece can be experienced and understood as the use of a canonical or standard arrangement for the sake of getting to and articulating some deep and difficult emotions in contrast to the fairly light emotions of the original. These emotions are so different that they force the question whether in relationship to the canonical version Coltrane’s riff can be considered to be somewhat silent, focused upon some other things, things of a different time and place. The literary critic Kimberly Benston argued that Coltrane’s performance of the song implied more than met the ear; it suggested that unchecked expressive inquiry—the articulation of the moment’s disposition, desire, and intuition—was [Coltrane’s] ‘favorite thing’ . . . [his] New Thang . . . Interpretation thus serves not as either assassination or acknowledgment of the prior but as an agitative intervention that propels a dazzling movement of substitutions . . . . By . . . exploring a tune in order to thematize the plurivocality of its enunciation, Coltrane signaled that his project was not just that of producing new meanings but of reopening the question of meaning’s production . . . .29

Coltrane’s performance, like the performances that were associated with the sorrow songs that Du Bois heard, represented a fathoming such that memories, reflections of the past, are stirred up and flow through and among and out of the collective self. The songs—Coltrane’s songs and the sorrow songs and others like them—then become “sites of memory” of the sort discussed by Pierre Nora in his essay “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” in which he makes the argument that such sites facilitate “escape from history.”30 The songs of Black folk are an “escape” from the incessant violence done them in Western canonical “history” that erases them, makes them invisible, mute, marginal. The songs are sites of the plenitude of free, liquid articulations of meanings of the past that includes slavery and a future.31 Singing so—“in other words,” in words with “hidden meanin’ just like the Bible”—has been and remains useful and compelling in order to address complexity and pain and trauma. As was the case with Du Bois and Hurston, like Coltrane and Morrison, interpreters all, it means taking the received

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scripts/texts and making out of them songs that transport the “tropical imagination” of dark peoples outside the boundaries of time and space of dominant discursivity, the most important instantiation of which we in English call “scriptures.” But only when these songs and other such forms of expressions of the people made marginal come to be recognized for what they are, on their own terms, carrying their own significance, no longer behind the veil of dominant script/ure/s as texts or as canon, only when these songs are understood as expressions of complexly woven worlds and are (re)textualized (in the original meaning of the basic term) in critical/signifying relationship to “scriptures” (naturalization of social hierarchies and arrangements, of speech, bodies, laws, codes) can useful pasts and futures be created and social therapy begin. NOTES 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, Bantam Classic (New York: Bantam Books, 1989). I am following this edition throughout the essay. 2. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “veil” has a rather interesting etymology: Middle English veile, taken from old North French, ultimately taken from Latin vela, plural of velum (sail, awning): used allusively in various prepositional phrases, such as behind, beyond or within the veil: Tyndale 1528, Wollaston 1722, Tennyson 1850, E. Fitzgerald 1859, A. J. Ross 1877; to conceal from apprehension, knowledge or perception, to disguise: D’Israeli 1841. At the time of Du Bois’s writing, these uses were very much in the air of high but popular discourse and writing. 3. Du Bois, SBF, 2–3. 4. Du Bois, SBF, 55, 56. 5. Du Bois, SBF, 127, 142. 6. Du Bois, SBF, 64. 7. Du Bois, SBF, 147, 148, 150, 156, 159, 165. 8. Du Bois, SBF, 149. 9. Du Bois, SBF, 76, 153. 10. Du Bois, SBF, 56. 11. Du Bois, SBF, 151. 12. Du Bois, SBF, 187. 13. Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See especially part 2. 14. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). See especially chapter 4. 15. In Exodus (LXX: 26.33) the “veil” (to katapetasma) separates the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary for the Ark of the Covenant, from everything else; in 1 Corinthians (13 .12) Paul makes reference to humans, even repentant ones, as those who were able to see only partial truths —“darkly as through a veil” (en ainigmati); in

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the letter to the Hebrews (6.19) the unknown writer refers to entering into the domain of the “veil” (eis to esoteron tau katapetasmatos) to mark the change in those who, although having been enlightened, have in the face of persecution nevertheless “fallen away”; and, perhaps, most poignantly, the Gospel of Matthew (27 .50-4 ), having depicted Jesus crying out loud and dying on the cross, indicates that ‘the veil’ of the temple was “rent in two” from top to bottom. 16. From Thomas Jefferson’s essay “Laws,” from his Notes on the State of Virginia, in Race and Enlightenment: A Reader, ed. Emmanuel Eze (Malden, MA: Blackwell 1997), 107. See also Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 167. 17. “This curtain [of appearance] . . . hanging before the inner world is withdrawn, and we have here the inner being gazing into the inner realm . . . . What we have here is Self-consciousness. It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain, which is to hide the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go there, as much in order that we may thereby see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen.” From Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, 212–13. Quotation from Zamir, Dark Voices, 135. 18. Martin Delany, “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852],” in Negro Social and Political Thought: 1850–1920; Representative Texts, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 4. 19. Alexander Crummell, “The Need of New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era,” in Africa and America: Addresses and Discourses (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 14–15, 18. 20. Du Bois, SBF, 186. See Kirkland’s discussion of the matter in “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black,” 156. 21. Du Bois, SBF, 182–3, 185; emphases mine. 22. Hurston, Mules and Men, 3. 23. Ibid., 213–14. 24. Ibid., 125; emphasis mine. 25. Du Bois, SBF, 182–3. 26. Houston A. Baker, Jr, Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 27. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, 106. See also Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” m A Susan Sontag Reader, with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: Vintage, 1983), 181–204. 28. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, 106. 29. Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 131, 133, 134. 30. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 284–300. 31. Du Bois, SBF, 179, 180, 182, 186.

Chapter 8

“No Modern Joshua” Nationalization, Scriptures, and Race (2009)

Several years ago, as I walked on one of the campuses of the Claremont Colleges, a white middle-aged woman—I assume she was a visitor, but cannot be sure about this—accompanied by a younger white female, approached me from the opposite direction. Just as we passed each other, the older woman turned my way and commented, “You look just like Frederick Douglass.” I was taken aback, approaching befuddlement if not shock, but without slowing down, I turned back in her direction and responded with something approaching, “Oh, yes, seen him around lately?”‒‒ I am not Douglass. My beardedness notwithstanding, I do not look like Douglass. Douglass does not walk among us today. I never knew Douglass. Douglass was not a playmate of mine in the days of my youth. All of this I know with firm conviction. Yet, there is something about this encounter that I must address. I cannot help thinking about it‒‒not so much about what was going on with the woman who addressed me (how could I really ever know what was going on there?), but about my reaction, my quickness, my sharpness. Did I think that the woman was somehow oddly touching upon some strange truth about me, or about Douglass, that I could not grasp? And why Douglass? Was this experience a type of haunting‒‒by Douglass and other “ancestors”? And what might their haunting of me be about? I wonder‒‒and wander‒‒in this chapter about the matters that come from that disturbing experience. I suspect that my having been then, and finding myself even now, on a college campus and a member of (a particular little corner of) the academy has something to do with the sense of a haunting. The discursive houses in which I find myself in the academy, including but going far beyond religious/biblical/Christian Scripture studies, constantly reverberate with questions and issues about the ongoing meanings of “the past,” about centers and canons and authorities and their continuing power. And, of 153

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course, my being a dark man with a voice in those discursive houses beginning in the latter part of the twentieth century and extending into the twentyfirst century lends more sound and fury to the reverberations. How could I not be persistently haunted by the invented and invoked pasts—”antiquity,” “early Christianity,” “the West,” “America,” and so forth—that define the discursive houses in which I find myself? How could I escape being haunted by (the invocation of) a dark man of a dark past? It is likely that Douglass is a representative—a powerful one, indeed—of the “ancestors” who accompany me so much these days, some familial in the narrow sense, others in the broad sense. They help me to forget some things, and never to forget some other things. Almost all of these things are disturbing. For me, as for many others, no one has modeled the approach to such matters with more style and poignancy than Douglass: Without putting my head to the ground, I can . . . hear the anxious inquiry as to when [the] discussion [regarding] the Negro will cease. When will he cease to be a bone of contention? . . . it is idle, utterly idle . . . to dream of peace anywhere in this world, while any part of the human family are the victims of marked injustice and oppression.1

These words are part of an address entitled, “The Unites States Cannot Remain Half-Slave and Half-Free,” which Douglass delivered in the Congregational Church, Washington, D.C., on April 16, 1883, on the occasion of the twentyfirst anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia. The year 1883 was an important commemoration year, but not only in the District of Columbia: throughout the nation, it was an emotional marker of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Black folks were determined—through marches, parades, special forums, special public speaking events—to mark the year so that the nation would not forget what had taken place. It was a difficult chore: the South had begun a poisonous turn toward the reactionary violence of Jim Crowism; the North had turned its back on Black folks and turned its attentions elsewhere. Douglass’s riveting and fiery words quoted above reflect this situation, and they reflect his characteristic intensity and lifelong work in challenging the regime of slavery, racialism, and racial apartheid that had defined and corrupted the United States. These words also register a particular rhetorical and political strategy on Douglass’s part that has some implications for social historians and religion critics. Like so many public figures of his time, Douglass used the Bible to think with about the shape of the larger world and of the United States in particular. This tendency of speaking the biblical worlds into the contemporary situation was so common in the United States of that time that it was hardly noticed and rarely questioned as a strategy, even by parties

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diametrically opposed to each other.2 It is instructive that Douglass, a man who in his mature years tended to keep himself at a critical distance from organized religion, nevertheless continued to the end of his public-speaking life to use biblical rhetorics rather creatively.3 The words from the Washington, D.C., speech quoted above open a sort of window onto Douglass’s views about the use of one of the most popular biblical stories in the American culture of his times—the Exodus story. Used even before the founding of the republic to help make the case for the idea of the chosen-ness of those who had left Europe and who had—to put the matter most euphemistically—“by God’s grace” “discovered” and “settled” the land that they would come to call the United States, the Exodus story was made the story by which, with few exceptions, each new theocratic commonwealth, colony, and state, then the new nation as a whole, was first defined and made meaningful and “legitimate.” For all the differences between the various colonies (and, later, the states), as reflected in national origins and ethnic-tribal-denominational associations, geography, climate, and local and regional economies, these paled and blurred into insignificance in relationship to the ideological-discursive framework within which almost all the dominant European settlers and their heirs belonged. Within such a framework, the white settlers/ colonizers made common assumptions, the most important of which was that their experiences, and actions were inscribed in the texts they deemed sacred or defining of their destiny. They understood that they had been commissioned by the Divine to take and settle upon the land and build a new world as “God’s new Israel.” In some places, these ideas even intensified during the decades following the founding of the first Republic into the second founding of the Republic in connection with the Civil War.4 As an astute public figure and student of United States and world history, Douglass was keenly aware of the history of the uses of the biblical story of Exodus in United States public and political discourse. He understood well the dominant group’s use of the story as a moral about the country’s chosenness and the divine approval of its actions. He knew well how “American” deeds were read into the biblical story as antitype in relationship to how, for example, the country was understood as a privileged people, a new Israel, having escaped the Egypt that was Europe; how such people were ordained to settle new lands, subdue the people on them, and enjoy liberty and prosperity; how George Washington, especially, but also some other white, landed male figures of the Revolutionary War era, were considered “founding fathers,” especially commissioned to lead the people in the tradition of Moses; and how divine providence continued to guide and approve the new Israel in its settlement and expansionist projects and most importantly, in preserving its unity, especially following the trauma of the Civil War.5

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This sort of biblical hermeneutics functioned as part of a civil hermeneutics heard throughout Douglass’s lifetime in public forums on the lips of politicians and public figures, and also printed in books and newspapers, It represented an ideologizing of the nation as a biblical nation by sacrificing, erasing, or rendering invisible non-white settlers, first native peoples, then Black peoples, The latter were not considered an official, explicit, and honest part of the story the nation told about itself. The text that was one of the most important sources for nationalization, the Bible, was (indeed, had to be) made into the white Bible. The epic stories in it were understood to be about the elevation and progress of what now—in the era of first contacts and slavery—came to be defined as white peoples. Others—non-whites, especially Black peoples—were either ignored or assumed to play minor or marginal and dependent roles in the epic story spun by the dominant and popular hermeneutic.6 In light of the continuing racial apartheid, social, political, and economic inequality and violence directed against Blacks in the United States, the aged but stalwart Douglass decried this civil-nationalist biblical hermeneutics. He unsparingly denounced the hypocrisy of Bible-believing, Bible-toting American Christians who actively participated in the enslavement and the continuing repression of non-white peoples. And the silence on the part of the nonslave-holding other whites was considered by him to have been even worse. In response to this situation, Douglass’s rhetorical strategy involved spinning around the nationalist hermeneutical spin. He took white Americans’ use of the Exodus story which likened the Jews’ oppression by the Egyptians to their own struggles against British oppression and went a step further than the typical strict inversion found in the popular Black interpretation of the story, according to which the United States was viewed as the oppressive Egypt in relationship to enslaved and oppressed Black folks.7 The aforementioned 1883 address was given at a time when Douglass had hoped that his faith in the war effort and in the political process would pay off and usher in a new era in race relations and in advancements for Black folks. But he had to face the reality that, in the 1880s, little had changed, and in many respects, life was as harsh, if not harsher, for most Black folks. His address expressed the exasperation he felt in the face of the persistence of problems, challenges, and virulent opposition. Yet, it was also an expression of hope that the persistence of the widespread-worldwide-discussions about the situation of Black peoples in the United States would lead to the radical changes for which he and so many others had long hoped. This led Douglass to a different sort of play—signifying—with the biblical story of Exodus: it was not enough to invert directly the dominant American identification of the brutal Egyptians and the long-suffering people of Israel. Douglass signified

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on this interpretation, not by switching the roles of those featured in the biblical story but by transforming the story from one about liberation through progress, to be realized through the offices of an anointed charismatic leader, Joshua, to another type of story altogether. The new story Douglass construed is one in which the United States was enthralled in and transfixed by discussion and debate about the very existence of Black people. Why were they still a presence? How did they survive? What now to do with them? How to think about them? How to talk about them? How to address or engage them? Given the subjugation, humiliation, and violence that such people had endured and yet survived, there was no wonder, Douglass argued, that they had made themselves “the most prominent and interesting figures . . . of the world” and had inspired a “resplendent orb of popular discussion.” They represented a haunting: Men of all lands and languages make [black people] a subject of profound thought and study . . . an object of intense curiosity. . . Of the books, pamphlets, and speeches concerning [them], there is literally no end . . . [They are] the one inexhaustible topic of conversation at our firesides and in our public halls. (356)

Of course, given the fact that Douglass travelled in some pretty heady circles all over the country and throughout Europe, his characterization of the widespread nature of the situation was very likely class- or status-specific. Douglass understood the widespread and intense preoccupation with Black peoples as a mixed blessing; it was exhausting, annoying, sometimes humiliating: “It is a sad lot to live in a land where all presumptions are arrayed against [the Black person], unless we except the presumption of inferiority and worthlessness” (357). Yet, he understood that it was ultimately better to be the subject of ongoing discussion than not to be discussed at all: One ground of hope is found in the fact [that] the discussion concerning the Negro still goes on. . . . Without putting my head to the ground, I can even now hear the anxious inquiry as to when this discussion concerning the Negro will cease. When will he cease to be a bone of contention. . . ? Speaking for myself I can honestly say that I wish it to cease. I long to see the Negro utterly out of the whirlpool of angry political debate. (358–59)

Then Douglass makes the main point in the speech by registering the strongest possible adversative: “But it is idle, utterly idle to dream of peace anywhere in this world, while any part[s] of the human family are the victims of marked injustice and oppression” (359). This strong statement, in turn, rhetorically sets the stage for the rereading and restructuring of the Exodus story:

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In America, no less than elsewhere, purity must go before tranquility. Nations, no more than individuals, can reverse this fundamental and eternal order of human relations. There is no modern Joshua who can command this resplendent orb of popular discussion to stand still. As in the past, so in the future, it will go on. It may be arrested and imprisoned for a while, but no power can permanently restrain it. (359; italics added)

There are several issues in this statement that beg consideration and comment. First, Douglass assumes that the United States is to be identified with the stories of the Bible. This reflects Douglass’s acknowledgment of his socio-cultural location and his participation in its discursive-rhetorical framework. The United States and the colonies and states that predated the founding of the United States were for the most part biblical formations. Second, it is assumed that identification with the story in the Bible about ancient-world wandering bands of people in the wilderness is an appropriate and compelling reading of the nation that is the modern-world United States. This also reflects Douglass’s acknowledgment of his location and the dominant socio-cultural psychology and politics. Michael Walzer has captured what I think Douglass very likely noted: Since late medieval or early modern times, there has existed in the West a characteristic way of thinking about political change, a pattern that we commonly impose upon events, a story that we repeat to one another. The story has roughly this form: oppression, liberation, social contract, political struggle, new society. . . . We call this process revolutionary . . . . This isn’t a story told everywhere . . . it belongs to the West, more particularly to Jews and Christians in the West . . . its source, its original version, is the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. . . . We still believe what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics and about its proper form: —first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt; —second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land; —and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.”8

Third, it is assumed by Douglass that the Exodus-reading of the United States as a wilderness-wandering people must be recast. Nothing short of a second founding of the nation is required. That Exodus-reading nation is now in Douglass’s time promiscuous in social—that is, racial and ethnic—composition. In this respect, Douglass seems to depart most radically from traditional readings.9 His view was shared at certain dramatic moments by only thin segments of the populations on both sides of the North Atlantic. He obviously thought the nation should be radically, that is, racially, pluralistic.10

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Fourth, it is assumed that the situation in which the United States actually finds itself is not so much in forward progress toward any sort of “promised land,” but instead “in motion” about issues having to do with racial inequality and oppression and thus a “resplendent orb of popular discussion.” According to this interpretive framework—a signifying on reigning interpretive traditions with a vengeance—Egypt, then, is not the imperial British. King George is not Pharaoh. And those wandering in the wilderness are not simply or exclusively Black or white; they are the mixed rabble that had always constituted the nation and that, in Douglass’s view, should properly so constitute and define the nation. They are now recognized for what they are. Fifth, it is assumed that in such a situation, with Lincoln having been assassinated, and the North and the United States Congress having betrayed Black peoples, there is no “Moses” to lead the people forward. Perhaps Douglass mused about Lincoln having approached the status of Moses, or thought that had Lincoln not been assassinated, he would have developed into a “Moses.” The reality was that there was at the time no one who could be across the spectrum thought of in such terms. And there was no prospect—certainly not in the White House—of the appearance and offices of a “modern Joshua,” a successor to Moses to lead the rabble onward and upward in the exercise of, or in resistance to, white dominance and possession. Douglass imagines the entire mixed-rabble nation to be situated in a type of wilderness, that is, in the aftermath of the long, ugly, and brutal experience of slavery, the entire nation was thrown into utter confusion and so lacked direction and moral purpose, somewhat traumatized. Most interestingly and paradoxically, Douglass assumes the wilderness to be both problem and salvation. The rabble is depicted as being in the wilderness of incessant debate, chatter, and anxiety about Black peoples, presumably without coming to any conclusion or resolution about what to do next. Such debate, chatter, and anxiety could easily be understood as preventing the people from forward movement out of the wilderness. But the “wilderness” of conversation and debate was for Douglass the only way forward: for him there could be no going forward, no progress, until the race question or racialism was addressed. Not merely talked about, but addressed—with the necessary socio-political, structural, and cultural transformation of a mixed rabble into an ideologically monogenetic or racially unified nation. So although the “popular discussion” about race that rages all around was found to be exasperating, it was the only way out. For Douglass, the nation’s fate—whether the way of destruction in or liberation from the wilderness—depends upon staying in motion, that is, continuing the “popular discussion” around and resolution of the problems and challenges having to do with black enslavement, oppression, and the achievement of racial justice.

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This is the reason a “modern Joshua” is not needed: Douglass understood such a figure to represent an effort to lead the people out of the “wilderness”—that is, away from focus upon the race question. But only in that place, with earnest and honest focus upon the race issues, can the mixed-race nation of justice and equality for all begin to emerge. A “modern Joshua” is really a threat, a problem: such a figure would make an attempt to get the people ironically and poignantly to “stand still,” to go silent, regarding racial conflict. This may mean being oriented so as to forget, to ignore, to erase, to render Black folks and the race issues invisible. It may mean a return to framing the nationalization project in non-racial but nonetheless decidedly racist terms, only to make the majority dominant white race into the default unspoken socio-political template or baseline. This would mean a “fall” back into the confounding and dishonest language of universals—ironically, through such terms as “man,” “men,” “mankind,” “people”—while meaning only (or sometimes mostly) white men and (perhaps, some of) the women associated with them. It may entail a going forward out of the wilderness with deadly silence—the type of silence that represents denial of the problem, a glossing over the roughness of the pain and deep humiliation of the enslaved and the corrosiveness of the enslaver with obfuscating exegetical practices. The latter may sometimes represent bold efforts to provide divine legitimacy for the brutal order; at other times, they offer the cover of silence about everything having to do with such an order. But Douglass did not accept “standing still” on the part of the people of the nation. The ramifications were too negative. He remained hopeful that the “resplendent orb of popular discussion” would lead ultimately to nationalization of a different type: The voice of popular complaint, whether it is heard in this country or in other countries, does not and cannot rest upon dreams, visions, or illusions. . . . The Negro is now, and of right ought to be, an American citizen in the fullest sense of the word. . . . The amendments to the Constitution of the United States mean this. . . . What Abraham Lincoln said in respect of the United States is as true of the colored people as of the relations of those States. They cannot remain half slave and half free. You must give them all or take from them all. Until this half-and-half condition is ended, there will be just ground of complaint. You will have an aggrieved class, and this discussion will go on. (360)

What Douglass came around to thinking—in something of a shift, if not reversal of sort—was that there should be no lull, no quiet, no peace in the meantime, that is, while racial justice remains elusive. The clatter, the talk, the debates must rage on; the speeches, the sermons, the writing of essays and books must drone on, must continue as a type of “movement” of the people. It

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should be plain to all that this represented an exegetical tour de force regarding the Exodus story, essentially rewriting and recasting it for the sake of the welfare of the people with whom he was in solidarity, and for the sake of manipulating and making compelling Jewish-Christian scriptural traditions. Over a period of many decades, Douglass was himself one of the most widely known and regular participants in the national debates about the “racial problem.” He remained open to engaging almost anyone and any issue in connection with the matter. He tended to respond to any critic raising any sort of question about the ultimate goal or hope. And he also tended to draw upon many different sources and perspectives in order to facilitate and make compelling his stand on the issues. For example, although he obviously entered into partnerships and campaigns with religious people—lay and clergy—in his mature years, he grew wary of and came to distance himself a bit from organized religion. Yet, as his interpretive spin on the Exodus story makes clear, he drew heavily upon the religious language and symbolism that marked the “Christian” nation in which he lived in order to make his case about issues of the day, most especially the issues having to do with racial injustice. What can be seen in Douglass’s treatment of the Exodus story in the 1883 Washington, D.C., speech is a type of reading practice in which he interpreted the nation in light of Scriptures (as he created and used them) and Scriptures in light of the nation (as he envisioned and structured it). This reading practice was obviously informed by Douglass’s own experience as a slave and— even when he was not fully apprised of the facts on the ground about others’ experiences—his continuing solidarity with those who remained enslaved and who continued to suffer from brutal racist policies. Douglass’s reading practices foregrounded the plight of Black folks and forced the nexus of the religious and the political in a particular way. He read the religious as a registration of the political and the political as a registration of the religious. There was no attempt to separate the two. Such reading practice was understood to be important as part of the campaign to effect racial justice. Two examples are in order: First, Douglass seemed fascinated by a book written by a British cleric turned American missionary named Morgan Godwyn. In 1680, Godwyn had published a little book with one of those typically tortured but, in this case, most arresting titles—The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, Suing for their Admission into Church: Or a Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the Negros and Indians in our Plantations. Shewing that as the Compliance therewith can prejudice no Man’s just Interest; So the willful Neglecting and opposing of it, is no less than a manifest Apostasy from the Christian Faith. Douglass saw the publication as a provocative and important example of the use of Scriptures:

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This [publication] was . . . the starting point, the foundation of all the grand concessions yet made to the claims, the character, the manhood and dignity of the Negro . . . a book to prove the Negro’s right to baptism seems ridiculous, but so it did not seem two hundred years ago. Baptism was then a vital and commanding question, one with which the moral and intellectual giants were required to grapple. . . . Slaveholders of that day were sharp-eyed and keen-scented, and snuffed danger from afar. They saw in this argument . . . the thin edge of the wedge which would sooner or later rend asunder the bonds of slavery. . . . They contended that [baptism] could only be properly administered to free and responsible agents . . . who in all matters of moral conduct, could exercise the sacred right of choice. . . . Plainly enough, the Negro did not answer that description . . . [he was] no more fitted to be admitted to the fellowship of the saints than horses, sheep, or swine. . . . But deeper down . . . there was a more controlling motive for opposing baptism. Baptism had a legal as well as a religious significance. By the common law at that time, baptism was made a sufficient basis for a legal claim for emancipation. . . . I should have been baptized if I could have gotten anybody to perform the ceremony. For in that day of Christian simplicity, honest rules of Biblical interpretation were applied. The Bible was thought to mean just what it said. When a heathen ceased to be a heathen and became a Christian, he could no longer be held as a slave. Within the meaning of the accepted word of God it was the heathen, not the Christian, who was to be bought and sold, and held as a bondman forever. (363–65)

What Douglass does with Godwyn’s biblically inflected argument—“a literary curiosity and an ethical wonder” (363)—is important: he argues that for Godwyn and for himself, biblical interpretation is or should be transparently and consistently used to support the cause of the oppressed, the outsider, the marginalized. Godwyn reminded Douglass that the Bible could be used to scramble traditional lines of identity, positionality, status, and association. Drawing directly from Godwyn, and indirectly if not directly from the Christian Scriptures—possibly Galatians and Philemon; perhaps also the book of Acts—in support of racial justice, Douglass plainly made the point that Christian baptism nullified slavery and racial oppression. It was a levelling force. He makes an astounding argument that ensued as part of the exegetical exercises within a particular “reading formation”:11 When a heathen . . . became a Christian . . . he could no longer be held as a slave. . . . Within the meaning of the accepted word of God it was the heathen, not the Christian, who was to be bought and sold. (365)

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Such radicalism found among religious dissenters and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the North Atlantic worlds, especially Britain, had great influence upon Douglass. Indeed, he should be understood as having been one of the leading voices in such company, at least in the informal terms of membership in the discursive circle. It is sad that such a coalition was not sustained.12 Another example: In the same speech given in the Congregational Church in 1883, Douglass dismissed the rantings of an insecure writer, a “Professor Gilliam,” who reportedly argued with paranoid intensity that eventually Black peoples would rise up, seek vengeance, and assume a position of “sovereignty” over white peoples. At this point in his speech, Douglass, in a poignant segue, referenced William Miller, widely known even at that time as the prophet of the imminent end of the world. When the world did not come to its end as Miller had expected, and after he made adjustments in his prediction and tried to reassure people that the end was indeed imminent, cynics and skeptics weighed in—”What if it does not come?” According to Douglass, Miller’s response was, “Then we shall wait till it does come.” Miller’s exhortation to “wait” riveted Douglass. The latter rightly took the term to be a biblical—specifically, a New Testament or primitive Christian eschatological injunction. But Douglass contradicted the longstanding Western world understanding and usage of the injunction and translated it into Bible-inflected political rhetorics that pointed directly to the plight of Black peoples in his own time: The colored people of the United States imitate the wisdom [regarding the expectation of the near end of the world] of . . . [William] Miller and wait. But we should work while we wait. For after all, our destiny is largely in our own hands. If we find, we shall have to seek. If we succeed in the race of life, it must be by our own energies, and our own exertions . . . we must go forward, or be left behind in the race of life. (366)

Here, we have another example of the interpretation of Scriptures as the political, the political in terms of the scriptural. Douglass uses Miller’s concept of waiting for the end of the world in reference to the end of slavery and the subjugation of black peoples and the realization of racial justice and socioeconomic and sociopolitical progress—in the world as known and experienced by Douglass. Might Douglass have also thought most interestingly, after the Civil War—about a social conflagration as the shape of the end time in the absence of the realization of racial justice? This matter is not so clear. But what is clear is that for Douglass, Black folks’ expectation of real justice in the United States was understood in terms larger than normal life; it was

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thought about in terms greatly influenced, if not absolutely determined, by the eschatological and apocalyptic rhetorics of the Bible. It is also important to note that Douglass drew upon the parenetic traditions that sometimes accompanied biblical eschatological—apocalyptic visions and rhetorics. Wait, yes, Douglass exhorted. But not in passive terms—“We should work while we wait.” The immediate source or rhetorical background of this exhortation may have been any number of evangelical preachers, pamphlets, or books. But the ultimate and direct source or background here seems to have been Paul’s arguments in 1 Thessalonians (4: 13-5:11) regarding waiting and working. The elaboration upon the working-waiting motif in the finding-and-seeking theme seems to have its ultimate origins in the Gospels (Matthew 7). The further elaboration in the race of life theme echoes Paul once again (cf. 1 Corinthians 9). The point of any of these references for Douglass seems to have been to challenge a particular stance in, or response to, the world among Black peoples in late nineteenth-century America. He articulates this challenge by demonstrating a particular type of reading or use of the Bible as center text for the formation of the nation. Douglass engaged the struggle for racial justice as part of the struggle to realize justice for the nation. There is but one destiny . . . left for us, and that is to make our-selves and be made by others a part of the American people in every sense of the word. Assimilation and not isolation is our true policy and our natural destiny. Unification for us is life; separation is death. . . . Our own interests will be subserved by generous care for the interests of the Nation at large. (370)

Apparently keeping the theme of expectation of the end of the world in mind, Douglass drew at the end of his speech upon Robert Burns’s famous end-ofan-era political song “For a’ that” (1795)13 in order to signal most strongly that the struggle for justice for black peoples is related to justice for the oppressed all over the world: It’s comin’ yet for a’ that, That man to man the world o’er Shall brothers be for a’ that. (370–71)

It seemed important for Douglass to make the point that the United Statesinflected Christian tradition and its Scriptures were political, that reading practices in connection with Scriptures were and should be fundamentally political, that Scriptures always belong to a nation or a people, and that the reading of Scriptures should always be used to advance a particular liberationist/integrationist/monogenetic agenda of nationalization. This means that

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for Douglass, a reading of scriptures must be honestly acknowledged to have a public or civic function, and it must have as its primary consideration the position of Black folks within the nation. The reading of the Bible is supposed to be race-sensitive in the way that Douglass read. Although he did not argue the point in explicit terms, Douglass implied that a reading of Scriptures is virulently and violently racist in antiblack terms when it is not a publicnationalization reading that is based upon, or determined by, the position of dark peoples. That is the meaning of his insistence that there be “no modern Joshua” to make us “stand still” in relationship to the clamor about continuing Black presence and articulations. Silence in this sense is deadly.14 No, I am no Frederick Douglass. But as this essay suggests, I am haunted by him‒‒haunted, in particular, by his challenge regarding the silence. I am, I fear, too much a part of an order—sociopolitical, academic-intellectual—that is eerily silent and too easily misled by what Douglass tagged as “modern Joshuas,” or at least the idea of such as a panacea. Being in solidarity with Douglass’s effort and argument requires, it seems to me, not only a different reading of the Exodus and wilderness situation and other stories of the Bible; it means not merely providing the “Black perspective” on, or the “Black” figure in, the white text, but now reading all things dark-ly, reading the complexity, the luminescence, of the darkness of existence, thereby making of Black selves—or other raced selves—an alternate “text.”15 With Douglass’s practices, we might be confronted with the beginnings of a radical (re)signifying (on) scriptures that at the same time reflects a (re) signifying of the nation, and beyond it, a reconfigured world community. At the very least, it means understanding that the discourse of religious and theological studies, including biblical studies, cannot be silent—with its obfuscating festishizing practices—about the stains and pollutions of racialism and racism and other such ideologies and projects, the purpose and effects of which are to humiliate and subjugate peoples. Douglass’s challenge to us was to engage—seriously, deeply, and with patience, persistence, and honesty. Translated into our early-twenty-first century situation, and more specifically, the very discursive arrangements and project to which this chapter belongs, Douglass’s challenge may appropriately be understood to go to the very heart of the matter about how we sustain the discussion about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Are the issues named by Douglass meant to frame and define the academic-intellectual discussion and project or are they to be taken up as additive approaches to traditional paradigms and projects? More pointedly, should “race,” as Douglass understood the matter—that is, as a conscious-raising problematic and analytical wedge—inform and (re) orient the discourse of academic biblical studies (or related fields)? Such change would mean that biblical studies would turn not around the exegesis of ancient world texts but the fathoming of modern or contemporary world

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sentiments, politics, power dynamics, and practices (only) in relationship to ancient texts. Through these issues, Douglass continues to haunt me. He should haunt all of us. NOTES 1. “The United States Cannot Remain Half-Slave and Half-Free: Speech on the Occasion of the Twenty-First Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, April, 1883,” in the public domain. I cite Douglass’s speech throughout this essay from The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, IV: Reconstruction and After, ed. Philip S. Forrer (New York: International Publishers, 1955), using parentheses in the body of the essay to indicate page numbers in Forrer. 2. See Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds., The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 3. The reader should note what is written about the religious sentiments of another Black intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois, in Edward J. Blum, Du Bois: American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Phil Zuckerman, ed., DuBois on Religion (New York: Altamira, 2000). 4. See Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (rev. updated ed.; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), for the history of developments in the United States; and William R. Hutchinson and Hartmut Lehmann, ed., Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism (Harvard Theological Studies 38; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), for discussions regarding the west in general. 5. See Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2006), 53, 57, 87, 88. 6. Ibid., 51, 63, especially regarding discussion of the Bible as “model” for reading civic texts. 7. See Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early NineteenthCentury Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and William Jeremiah Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), for discussion regarding larger historical backdrops and engagements of the story. 8. Walzer, Exodus, 133, 149 9. Eddie Glaude, Exodus!, especially part two regarding Exodus Politics; Moses, Golden Age; and Cherry, God’s New Israel. 10. For more information and perspective see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1975); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740– 1830 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets

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and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston and New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 2005); and David A. Bell, The Cult of Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [2001] 2003). 11. For the concept of “reading formation,” see Tony Bennett, “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations,” MMLA 16, no. 1 (1983): 1–17; and “Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts,” MMLA 18, no. l (1985): 1–16. For discussions regarding ideologies of race and literacy, see Dana Nelson Salvino, “The Word in Black and White: Ideologies of Race and Literacy in Antebellum America,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 140–56; Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 326–31; and Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. 3–13. 12. See Hochschild, Bury the Chains, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), for discussions regarding histories of radical progressive coalition-building efforts in the early modern period. Some would argue that such efforts were revived in modern civil rights movements. Alas, today they all seem much like far distant echoes. 13. See Robert Crawford, ed., Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), for background information on this poem. 14. But Houston Baker’s concept of “silence” and of the need for a “criticism of silence” in the study of black folks should be considered in relationship to Douglass’s challenge. See his Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), esp. chapter 3, pp. 106–8 (“Lowground and Inaudible Valleys: Reflections on Afro-American Spirit Work”). 15. See Ishmael Reed’s fascinating work Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996 [1972]), for more provocation and perspective.

Chapter 9

Inter​prete​rs E​nslav​ing/E​nslav​ed/Ru​nagat​e (2010)

In spite of what may be the testimonies of my remaining parent and other elders, and notwithstanding the certifications the state may present, my beginnings are not here in this city in the sixth decade of the twentieth century. In respects more profound and disturbing and poignantly ramifying for professional interpreters, my beginnings should be understood to be in that more expansive period and fraught situations of the North Atlantic worlds between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, moments and situations in which “the West” and “the rest” were coming into fateful first contact. With such contact, many social and political formations, sentiments and orientations of “the West” were (re-)forged and (re-)defined. “Contact” is of course studied euphemy, rhetorical repression meant to veil the violence and hegemony of the West’s large-scale triangular Atlantic slave trading in dark peoples. This is the time and situation of my beginning and the framework for the consciousness that I bring to this podium. And almost all of you have beginnings like my own. The dynamics of this period now still largely determine, even haunt, our sometimes different but also often common positionalities and orientations, practices and discourses, ideologies and politics and social formations. Included in the haunting are the profound shifts in the understandings of the self, including ideas about freedom and slavery of the self that mark the period. Although differently named and tweaked from decade to decade since 1880, those practices and discourses that define this professional Society have always been and are even now still fully imbricated in the general politics and emergent discourses of the larger period to which I refer. And the cultivated obliviousness to or silence about—if not also the ideological reflection and validation of—the larger prevailing sociopolitical currents and dynamics 168

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marks the beginning and ongoing history of this Society (among other learned and professional societies, to be sure). With its fetishization of the rituals and games involving books and The Book, its politics of feigning apolitical ideology, it’s still all too simple historicist agenda (masking in too many instances unacknowledged theologicalapologetic interests), its commitment to “sticking to the text,” its orientation in reality has always contributed to and reflected a participation in “sticking it” to the gendered and racialized Others. The fragility of the fiction of the apolitical big tent holding us together is all too evident in the still mindnumbingly general and vapid language we use to describe our varied practices and ideologies and orientations. Of course, there have been challenges to the Society and its orientations in some periods of our history.1 You know what they have been. And you will not be surprised if I suggest that the challenges have been too few and too tepid, and always belated. The fact that we cannot document the membership and participation of a single African American in this Society before the fifth decade of the twentieth century, the fact that the most recent history of the Society (in observance of the centennial)2 does not even mention Black folks, the fact that we cannot point to the official regularly scheduled gathering of two or three African Americans in discourse before the eighth decade of the last century, is shocking. Only with the initiatives of Thomas Hoyt, Jr. and John W. Waters, which led to the Stony the Road We Trod discussion and book project in the late 1980s, which in turn led to the establishment of the first ethnically marked program unit, which paved the way for all such units today—only with such initiatives do Black peoples and other peoples of color appear in numbers to make a point at all about diversity in the Society. This is the period of my initiation and participation in the Society. This suggests much about the timing of someone of my tribe standing before you today. Perhaps, it could not have been otherwise. I do not presume that such folk were between the 1880s and the 1980s always and everywhere barred from membership and participation in the meetings of the Society. I do not imagine the chairs of the Synoptic Gospels or the Prophetic Texts units standing at the doors yelling “Whites only!” There is no doubt about the sick views of some; but I think something deeper was and, perhaps, remains even today, at issue: given the state of emergency in which they have lived (emergencies that would give Walter Benjamin pause), given the onset of the second slavery in the post–Civil War era when the industrial liberal North threw Black folk under the wagon and the South embraced racial violence, the worst practices of Jim Crowism and economic peonage and slavery,3 Black membership in the decades past would have required the Society, in the vernacular of the folk, to “be talkin’ ‘bout somethin.’” Notwithstanding all the historical and some continuing stumbling blocks in the way, I suggest that the paucity of

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Black membership is due ultimately not to the bad faith and manners of members of the Society in the past but to something more profound—the (unrecognized, unacknowledged) racialized discursive practices and politics that have defined it. It is imperative that we recognize, even if belatedly, those few Black pioneers of the decades before the initiatives of Hoyt and Waters—the likes of Leon Edward Wright, Charles B. Copher, G. Murray Branch, and Joseph A. Johnson.4 We must inscribe them and a few others into our full organizational consciousness and memory. These few are no longer with us; they have yet to be fully claimed and recognized. They struggled mightily to figure out how to speak to the challenges and pressures of the different worlds they intersected as Black male intellectuals on the peripheries of the field. They were not always understood by members of their own tribes. They were severely limited in terms of professional appointments. Because so many parts of society and the academy accepted racial segregation as a given, simply the way things were and were supposed to be, they all worked in black institutions, mostly in Atlanta and Washington. And the Society did not recognize them and did little to support them or resist the polluted status quo. They must surely have exhausted themselves. They surely had stories to tell, lessons for our edification. And, of course, that our sisters of color, who faced even more layered intersecting stumbling blocks to their participation emerged in recognized numbers only in the 1980s and are here among us is tribute to their strength and commitment and further evidence of the Society’s fraught and frayed history. Now after having left “home” in that flatter sense of the term or, in Zora Neale Hurston’s terms, having loosened the grip of that hyper-racialized garment I was made to wear, with growing awareness of what I gain from the pioneers referenced earlier, and through engagement of that fraught period of contact as an intense excavation of consciousness, I stand before you this evening with yet another challenge, imploring the Society—and by extension, all critical interpreters—to start and to sustain “talkin’ ‘bout somethin.’” Here is the challenge plainly put: there can be no critical interpretation worthy of the name, without coming to terms with the first contact—between the West and the rest, the West and the Others—and its perduring toxic and blinding effects and consequences. The challenge remains for this Society and all collectivities of critical interpreters in general to engage in persistent and protracted struggle, not symbolic or obfuscating games around methods and approaches, to come to terms with the construal of the modern ideologization of language, characterized by the meta-racism5 that marks the relationship between Europeans and Euro-Americans and peoples of color, especially Black peoples. What might it mean to address in explicit terms the nature and consequences of first contact for the unstable and fragile big tent that is our

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Society? What might it suggest for the ongoing widely, differently prioritized and oriented work we do in our widely different settings and contexts with our nonetheless still widely shared absolutist and elitist claims and presumptions about such work? It would make it imperative that we talk about discourse and power, slavery and freedom, life and death. I have given myself permission to conjure one of those booming haunting voices from an earlier moment and situation from the period of first contact, a voice belonging to one among those peoples heavily “signified”;6 one of the “voices from within the veil”:7 In his first auto- biographical work, his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself,8 Douglass looks back on an incident from his youthful years when he was a slave. The incident was seemingly a recurring one, but he makes the reader experience it as a singular, pointed one for narratological effect. It is an incident that Douglass, the recently escaped and young but emerging lion-voiced abolitionist, remembers and recounts for the (assumed) mostly white abolitionist-minded readers. What he touches upon and opens up in an astonishing display of romanticist and critical-reflexive communication are several issues that likely escaped the review of or were not (or could not be) fully understood by the Garrisonians, the abolitionist patronizers of the young ex-slave. These were issues that still offer pointed challenge to all moderns, especially those interested and invested in thinking about something—about the enslaved, enslaved thinking, critical and free thinking, and interpretation. The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves . . . would make the dense woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound; and—as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly . . . words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.9

In this recounting, Douglass names many issues for consideration—subjectivity and consciousness, discourse and power, power and knowledge, knowledge and positionality, knowledge and the center, knowledge and centers. He names or at least assumes at least three different categories of

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persons or groups as different types of knowers or interpreters produced by that world of first contact—first, the slave singers, those who through their songs provide evidence that they have some knowledge and some agency of communication but are nonetheless not allowed to communicate their knowledge and sentiment beyond their own circle; second, those outside the circle (of the slaves), the world associated with the Great House Farm and all that it represents, those who if they hear the slave songs at all hear them only as jargon, as “mumbo jumbo”;10 and third, Douglass himself, the one who although technically at first “within the circle” (who as such did not/could not know), later, as reflected in his writerly self, outside the circle of slavery, begins to understand not only what the slaves felt and communicated but also something more, something about communicating, knowing. Using African slaves to think with, Douglass thinks in terms of “site” sanctioning “insight”;11 that is, in terms of types of consciousness and interpreters who are differently positioned: the enslaving, the enslaved, and the runagate. These categories, I submit—and I think Douglass thought—are not always totally mutually exclusive; they can be and in history have been complexly intertwined, yet there is justification for their isolation for the sake of analysis. There is no escape from the consequences set in motion by that contact that was turned into violent conquest for some and long-term subordination for the many others. Douglass’s wrenching passage about the Black slaves he knew and the types of interpreters and consciousness that could be identified with them challenges all interpreters to seek a way out, a way to run. His analysis begins–complexly, emotionally—with those whose very identity as human agents was questioned and denied; he begins with physical black enslavement as a way to the problematization of the “black (w)hole”;12 to a profound understanding of the larger complex of slavery and freedom that defines and marks Black peoples to be sure, but nearly all of us in more general terms. To the three categories of interpreters, I briefly turn. First, the enslaving. Those participating in and profiting from the structure of dominance generated by the Great House Farm were understood by Douglass to be oblivious to the plight of others. They are imagined to be those who like Robert Warren’s buzzard in his poem “Pondy Woods” in reacting to the very idea of a free gesture or communication of an idea on the part of the likes of Big Jim Todd “drooped one wing and filmed the eyes.” Having already made the canonical declaration—“Nigger, your breed ain’t metaphysical”—this Western imperialist or white world gesture was consistent with white perching or positionality so to avoid seeing and hearing from the others.13 They were also characterized, according to Fanon, as those who had fallen prey to a Manichaean psychology and epistemics: in the colonial world, everything was understood to be black and white, the latter signifying light

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and purity and life, the former dirt and pollution.14 Of course, we now know more about what subtends such psychology and epistemics. Since Melville and other raging mad sensitive souls, we know now that it represents a horrific splitting of the self—into the blankness of whiteness and the foreboding threatening overdetermined markedness of blackness—and the hardened essentialization of the parts. The splitting is traumatic; it is not recognized or acknowledged; it is part of the phenomenon of the “hidden brain”:15 It results in, among other things, the meta-racist regime that pollutes all of us, infects our discourses, our work and play, including our philological games. Such pollution was at work in Jefferson’s convoluted denial of Phillis Wheatley’s brilliant artistry; in Hegel’s disavowal of the successful struggle of those Black folk in Saint- Domingue-turned-Haiti against their enslavers and the meaning of such struggle as the backdrop for his own theorizing about the dialectics of struggle between master and slave and the further disavowal of the meaning of this struggle for universalism and the turn to modernity; in John Locke’s “purification of language” theory, part of the “metadiscursive formation’’ aimed to deny the right to public speech to any one—women, serfs and slaves, sub-aristocrat whites—who could not speak “properly.” It was at work when Tony Perkins, head of the evangelical and corporatist Family Research Council, declared on CNN in the heat of the last presidential election with great authority and without a whiff of qualification—much like Warren’s buzzard—that the jeremiads of the urban black pastor named Jeremiah Wright against corporatist and racializing/racist “America’’ were simply “unscriptural”: Can we doubt that Perkins’s utterance comes out of the still regnant Manichaean world? Is it hard to see that in Perkins’s mind—buried far in that hidden brain where meta-racism thrives—that there is an assumption that he and his tribesmen own the Bible and that they are invested with all rights and privileges appertaining thereto, meaning control of the discourses about the Bible? Who cannot see that behind his outburst were exegetical arguments, no doubt legitimized by the scholarship of our membership, that conjure the ancient Near Eastern world as a white world in seamless historical development with the modern white world?16 These and other such examples of disavowals and tortured silences and twisted arguments and declarations reflect the pollution and veiling of the humanity and consciousness that is the modern Western Manichaean psychology and epistemics, infecting all peoples.17 It is arguable that it is no longer possible for those who are subject to such a construction or regime to argue freely what they see, think, or feel. Having to make black always signify the same thing—always the negative—represents a tremendous psychosocial and intellectual commitment and burden.18 This mentality of denial and disavowal, the most trenchant reflection of the Manichaean psychology, has been powerfully imaged in the famous

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frontispiece to Jesuit scholar Joseph-Francois Lafitau’s 1724 multivolume work Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains comparees aux moeurs des premiers temps.19 Following Michel de Certeau’s as always provocative interpretive glosses,20 we see (fig. 9.1) the (unremarkable) racialized and gendered but otherwise unmarked writer/inscriber/historian of the world and interpreter of events and truth. She is complexly situated—in relationship to the anthropomorphized Father time and Death. She writes within and for the larger framework that is Europe ascendant. But she must write in order to clarify in light of the contact with the Others and the changes in the world how things, properties, and peoples now–in the imperial colonial era—must mean. She writes about the truth as Europeans must see it, tell it, know it. Notice along the bottom of the image the objects, trinkets, fetishes, representing the Others. The history, the truth that is to be told about these “savages” and “primitives,” must now be told in the terms of the method of bricolage—assembling, choosing this and that part, this or that thing, from this or that world of savagery, in order to place all the Others within the canonical framework that reflects the European Manichaean psychology and epistemics. The “savage” is assumed not to be able to communicate, at least, not in “purified” language, so deserves no hearing, demands no respectful gaze. But Europeans can and should inscribe the Other into reality and interpret and interpellate them.​ Who enslaves whom? Douglass implied that those far outside the circle— those in some respect participating in the ways of the Great House Farm,

Figure 9.1  Frontispiece to the 1724 Edition of Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs de Sauvages Ameriquains Comparées aux Moeurs de Premiers Temps. Engraving signed by L. B. Scotin. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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those who, like the woman in Lafitau’s frontispiece representing EuroAmerica or the West writing up the Rest, can hardly see or hear, much less understand, the Rest represented by those made slaves in the United States. Like the poignantly named Nehemiah who “writes up” Dessa in Sherley Williams’s Dessa Rose,21 the writer makes up a truth, like “science,” a writing that represents a kind of violence done to bodies deemed exotic. I agree with de Certeau in concluding that the woman who is Euro-America who writes up the savages actually does not even look at the objects and symbols assumed to represent them. Her gaze redefines what it means to “see straight.” Second, the enslaved. Their situation was not romanticized by Douglass, at least not without some resistance or qualification. In his view, they were denied any but overdetermined identification with and participation in the world that was represented by the Great House Farm. They were denied the main privileges of communication and social exchange. They were considered chattel, and so it was assumed that they were unable to think, to communicate, except in the way of the “swinish multitude.” They were presumed not to be able to read and write—at least, not in canonical/cosmopolitan European languages or modes.22 Douglass knew that the Black enslaved could make meaning or make things mean, but not beyond their small and rigidly contained circle. Outside their circle, they experienced little or no intersubjectivity, which provokes what might be thought of as the “anxiety of ethnicity.” This phenomenon was understood to be one of the most important meanings and consequences of enslavement. Slaves’ communication was reduced to an “anti-language,” unrecognized and unacknowledged by others.23 This is what Douglass called “unmeaning jargon”: the slaves were rendered silent and invisible. Ralph Ellison’s character in Invisible Man put the phenomenon in riveting terms: I am invisible . . . simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass . . . they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.24

The evidence of the silencing and rendering invisible the presence of the Black-enfleshed and their contributions is everywhere to be seen. Consider Rebecca Protten, an eighteenth-century pioneer Moravian missionary and evangelist and founder of one of the first African American Protestant congregations in the North Atlantic world. The establishment politics of “church”/“religious” history has contributed to her being largely forgotten. Note the woman known as “sister Francis” or as the “Blackymore maide”: Her well-known charismatic leadership in the establishment of the

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seventeenth-century radical Protestant formation that became the establishment Church of Christ in Broadmead, later Broadmead Baptist Church, Bristol, England, was erased by Edward Terrill’s establishmentarian revisionist history. Her leadership was reduced to overdetermined categories—of appellation and sentimentality. She was by exegetical sleight of hand erased out of her rightful place in history, as founding figure, and then flattened into a mere Black pious maid.25 And Douglass’s own situation as writer is worth mentioning. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison provided the preface to Douglass’s 1845 Narrative. Whatever may be said about the substantive comments made in it, it is clear that this preface functioned primarily to “translate” Douglass, that is, to provide the meta-commentary for all that is to follow. This is an example of enslavement as a kind of “framework.”26 A discerning reader can determine whether Garrison ever really understood Douglass’s text. Douglass later severed ties with Garrison and the Garrisonians. He came to understand how slavery could continue to work—way up North—as discursive framing. Perhaps, the most famous description, if not the final analysis, of the phenomenon of the enslaved as the framed is found in W E. B. Du Bois’s works. In his famous Souls of Black Folk, the Manichaean world, the world structured around what he termed the “veil,” is defined by racial division and alienation and ignorance: “there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of the other.”27 As Douglass looks back to the Great House Farm, he does not romanticize the situation of the slaves. He indicates that he has come to understand that the chief dilemma that slaves faced was not the physical domination, as demeaning as it was, but the not being seen, not being heard, not being understood, not being communicated with in broad terms befitting the dignity of being human, not being able to communicate the complexity of sentiments and feelings, and being cut off from everything—except, ironically, the Great House Farm. Enslavement meant being able to sing, perhaps, but only within the Manichaean-prescribed circle in which Black expressivity was overdetermined as, among other things, “unmeaning jargon.” This was for Douglass intolerable. He would escape it. Third, runagate. The term is an alternate form of renegate, from Middle Latin renegatus, meaning “fugitive” or “runaway.” It has come to carry the meaning of a more transgressive act than mere flight. It is marronage, running away with an attitude and a plan, a taking flight—in body, but even more importantly, also in terms of consciousness.28 We know that Douglass literally runs away from enslavement. It is as a runagate that he writes his first autobiography. And in this part of the story about the slaves on their way to

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the Great House Farm, Douglass distinguishes himself from the others who are slaves. He seems to experience being in and out of solidarity with and shared consciousness about them. He knows them, but he is also alien to them. That he once occupied a similar psychic position with them but now assumes a different position is excruciatingly painful for him. He registers acute anxiety experienced over the need to step outside the circle, outside the framed experience, the framed consciousness that is slavery. It is a scary place. It is psychosocial and discursive marronage. He is a runagate even before he runs away. There is a long history of this phenomenon of the runagate—long before and long after Douglass—among the people who have become and whom we now call African Americans. The runagate not only involved heroic individuals such as Douglass but everyday collective folk who showed themselves to be a people on the run, a marooned people, a people intent on migrating from psychic deserts and fields of enslavement to other psychic places, with high purpose. Taking flight, running away, in the several different respects of meaning and experience, was the watchword. It brought some of my relatives to this city and took some others into other parts of the country. That other philosopher called Locke (as in Alain) in his 1925 edited volume The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance vividly captured the impetus and drama of one of the waves of migration in the twentieth century: The wash and rush of this human tide . . . is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll. With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance a deliberate flight not only from the countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern.29

The critical sign of Douglass having already become runagate before reaching the North is his acquisition and critical use of literacy. Learning to read had to do with more than learning the letters, having been given the “inch,” as he called it. No, his reading involved taking the “ell,” involving a much more complex phenomenon with profound consequences, including those and more that were feared by the masters. Douglass’s command of the text is like Maurice Blanchot’s notion of reading as reading past the text to something more or other, a reading of the self, a historicized collective self.30 This self that Douglass began to read seems to be the result of a splitting of a different sort from, but with great implications and ramifications for, the engagement of the Manichaean psychology. Du Bois continues to provide perspective. His references in Souls of Black Folk to the term “veil” as a metaphor to name the nature of the construction

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of the Manichaean world and his understanding of the consequences and impact of such include that most famous remark—“.a peculiar sensation double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others.”3831 This remark is generally assumed to apply simply and universally to all Black peoples in the United States. This interpretation is questionable as applied to Souls: in the Du Bois was focused on explaining (to a mixed readership)‒‒those Black folks who were physically and increasingly psychically removed from the world of the Great House Farm and were now facing the negotiation of larger miscegenated worlds and consciousness. Du Bois understood that for such persons‒‒like himself and like Douglass “outside the circle”—what was experienced most acutely is a splitting, an acute self-alienation, dissociation. This was what he termed existence behind the “Veil of Color.”32 Douglass’s miscegenated and alienated consciousness led him to wage battle. It was the fight with Covey, the infamous “niggerbreaker,” that sharply reflected Douglass’s struggle with alienation and anxiety. Douglass understood the fight with Covey to be more than physical contact. In Covey, Douglass comes face to face, so to speak, with the more tangible manifestations of meta-racism, the slave system, and its imbrication of Christian ideology. But it also occasioned opportunity for Douglass to represent his confrontation with the worlds of the slave, more specifically, African traditions, in the form of Sandy the root doctor. Like Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, Douglass fights an existential battle: he fights against aspects of himself that have been forced to split on account of Manichaean meta-racism; he fights the white side of himself represented by Covey and his absent father, which derides and demeans and denies him and his blackness; and he fights the black side of himself, represented by Sandy, with his limited agency and communication skills and timidity, if not also perfidy. He shows himself to be conscious of the tightly coiled constructedness of both worlds. In the end, his fight results in his becoming a subjectivity that was miscegenated, not merely a blending in literal/physical terms, but an independent self that is unstable, fluid, protean, embattled, split from the violent framing. It was this splitting and the anxiety over it that Du Bois considered a paradox, an opportunity and a gift to the black subjects and through them to the world. The forced splitting provides opportunity for cultivation of heightened critical consciousness: “Once in a while,” he indicated, noting that the phenomenon was not guaranteed but had to be cultivated and exploited, “through all of us”‒‒that is, those of us forced behind the veil, that “thick sheet of invisible horribly tangible plate glass” limning “a dark cave” within which black folks are “entombed souls hindered in their natural movement, expression, and development”33‒‒ “there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way that America can not.”34 In learning to read—not merely texts but textures of

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the world, including what Covey represented in the world and in the same larger scene, what Sandy represented in the world—Douglass had escaped. He had escaped from the cave, from the tight circle. What might these arguments and perspectives mean for this Society? How could its discourses and practices not be fully implicated in and reflective of the Manichaean ideology and epistemics? In what respect is its epistemics different from that of Tony Perkins or Thomas Jefferson? How can the ever more sophisticated methods and approaches of the operations of the Society’s diverse members focused on a single text tradition or, at most, two complexly related text traditions, avoid functioning as apologetics—for the nation or empire and its satellite orders? How can the Society avoid making and keeping the Scriptures and all characters in them white like Ahab’s whale, like Perkins’s white Euro-American Protestant/Catholic ancient Near Eastern world? Douglass hints at a way out. His reflection on his own life story continues to be instructive. He argues that the critical interpreter must seek to escape, must run, must be oriented “outside the circle.” His own experience as a Scripture-reader is a direct challenge to us. Before he escaped, Douglass started a secret seminary/religious studies program—a “Sabbath school”—for groups of slaves from various plantations. Douglass indicated—in somewhat veiled terms, of course—that his motive had to do with more than teaching letters: “we were trying to learn how to read the will of God”; that is, to read life and death, slavery and freedom. He helped establish a safe zone within which the students could learn, think for, and talk among themselves, apart from the slavers. In direct opposition to the expectations and interests of the masters and as a practice reflecting “mimetic excess,”35 this Scripture-reading practice reflected self-reflexivity, a heightened consciousness of imitation of the other—but with a difference. He knew that the reading of the Scriptures was hardly ever mere reading about the ancient Near East, about the life and times of Jesus or the prophets, that the reading of Scriptures in the modern world was a reading of the world as constructed by the splitting that made “black” signify within a very tight circle of reference. So having psychosocially positioned himself “outside the circle” of the world of slave culture and outside the Great House Farm, Douglass positioned himself to “read”—and help others read—the world as it had been and might be ordered. He was a runagate. Can the members of this Society claim such consciousness? Douglass was not so much reading Scriptures as he was signifying on scripturalization, on the regime that creates and enforces uses of scriptures for the sake of domination. Like Kafka’s ape ape-ing high-minded humans,36 Douglass showed his thinking about thinking. He showed his understanding of the political constructedness of scripture-reading and that such reading ought to result in

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talking and thinking about life and death, slavery, and freedom. Surely, here is a challenge to a different critical orientation, an orientation to scripture study as part of the human sciences with investment in critical histories that aim to make sense of what subtends the practices, the forms of expressivity, the relations of discourse and power. It makes sense, according to Du Bois, with all the pain and trauma involved, for the Black self to run: there is no advantage, no life, in not running. Such sentiment and conviction regarding the relationship between alienation and freedom was powerfully expressed by Richard Wright: “I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except that to which I’m obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I’m free. I have only the future.”37 But the impetus to run away is not very strong for those strongly positioned within or benefitting from the Manichaean order. Such “hidden brain” fundamentalism around which the Euro-American world is built is so deeply buried, so tightly coiled, so persistent, that nothing less than shock can dislodge it. Although a renegade member of a different academic professional society, anthropologist Michael Taussig makes of himself a poignant and painful example and lesson for consideration of members of this Society. He accepts himself as a white man from the world of the Great House Farm who looks and listens to the other as the other constructs and projects an image of the “white man.” Note his reaction to such an image created by those associated with the Mabari shrine in Nigeria (fig. 9.2):

Figure 9.2  Image of a White Man Outside the Mabari Shrine in Nigeria; no date. From Julia Blackburn, The White Men (1979); photograph by Herbert Cole; used by permission.

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He frightens me, this African white man. He unsettles. He makes me wonder without end. Was the world historical power of whiteness achieved through its being a sacred as well as profane power? It makes me wonder about the constitution of whiteness as global colonial work and also as a minutely psychic one involving psychic powers invisible to my senses but all too obvious, as reflected to me, now, by this strange artifact . . . it is . . . the West now face to face with its-self . . . the white man . . . facing himself. Such face-to-faceness no doubt brings its quotient of self-congratulation. “They think we are gods: But being a god is okay as long as it isn’t excessive. After all, who knows—in imagining us as gods, might they not take our power?”38​

Douglass’s insurgent seminary sessions and Taussig’s training in an African school of arts and social criticism suggest for the Society the imperative of seeing scripture-reading as part of mimetic systems. The critic should see his or her own critical practices as part of such systems and remain open to influences toward greater self-reflexivity and the destabilization and vacancy of identity. How could the Society not be so oriented in the twenty-first century? How can we be students of scriptures in this century at this moment without making our agenda a radically humanistic science or art, excavating human politics, discourse, performances, power relations, the mimetic systems of knowing we may call scripturalization? How can we remain a Society only of Biblical Literature and not of comparative scriptures? How can we in this big international tent in this century of globalization not include as our focus the problematics of “scriptures” of all the other major social-cultural systems of the world as well the older dynamic systems of scripturalizing of the socalled smaller societies? How exciting and compelling and renegade would be a Society of interpreters that excavates all representations of scriptures in terms of discourse and power! Such orientation requires letting go-of unmarked or blank whiteness and of forced essential blackness. It means running away from all the white text and the black essentialized figure that has for several centuries been used to bind us. Clearly, the claim need not be made that only African America shows the way out. But African America certainly offers the gift of challenge, the model of the imperative of running for life to a zone of discursive and ideological marronage. On account of forced placement in a zone of nonsubjectivity, this tribe, after all, has given birth to artists/poets/shamans/diviners who model the runagate and challenge us to imitate them. They show us the way of the double-sighted, the way of those who know that knowing requires occupying a zone where there is “constantly shifting authorial consciousness” and the “piercing” of “cultural authority,”39a site on which radical translation and transformation are always to be worked on, a site where according to Ralph

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Ellison “black is and black a’int,” because “black can make you and unmake you.”40 It means letting go of closed systems of cultural authority and of claims to be overseers of texts. Those who have been placed behind the veil challenge all of us to run, in fact to run continuously from the cave into the zone of marronage. In his poem “Runagate, Runagate;’ Robert Hayden has woven together perhaps the classic expressions and images of Black cultural sentiments regarding the runagate, who “runs . . . from darkness into darkness.”41 The folk who are dark challenge us to runaway from the feigned solid canonical self, onto “the ghost-story train,” into a “disrupting blackness,”42 down into what Howard Thurman called a “luminous darkness,”43 where the process of the hard work of self-criticism can take place. They also warn us that ultimately there is no other way out. That must have been what the songpoets meant when they crafted and sang: [It’s] so high, you can’t get over [it], [It’s] so low, you can’t get under [it], So round, you can’t get around [it], You must go right through the door.

We may not, need not, all “talk that talk’’ or “talk like dat,” but we all, for the sake of being a compelling force as a learned society, focused on the ultimate problematics of discourse and power, must start and sustain “talkin’ about somethin’”—about slavery and freedom, about life and death. NOTES 1. I am thinking here of Robert W. Funk (SBL president, 1975) and his colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s; and Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza (SBL president, 1987) and colleagues in the 1980s. Their addresses can be found in Presidential Voices: The Society of Biblical Literature in the Twentieth Century (ed. Harold W. Attridge and James C. Vander Kam; SBLBSNA 22; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006). 2. Ernest W. Saunders, Searching the Scriptures: A History of the Society of Biblical Literature, 1880-1980 (SBLBSNA 8; Chico CA: Scholars Press, 1982). 3. See the riveting and unsettling book by Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Establishment of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008). It provides irrefutable evidence of the perduring effects of slavery among black peoples into this century. 4. Leon Edward Wright (1912–1996), Alterations in the Words of Jesus, as Quoted in the Literature of the Second Century (Harvard Historical Monographs

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25; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), a revision of his Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1945; Charles B. Copher (1913-2003), “Isaiah’s Philosophy of History” (Ph.D. thesis, Boston University, 1947); Black Biblical Studies: An Anthology of Charles B. Copher. Biblical and Theological Issues on the Black Presence in the Bible (Chicago: Black Light Fellowship, 1993); R. C. Bailey and J. Grant, eds., Recovery of Black Presence: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Essays in Honor of Dr. Charles B. Copher (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995); G[eorge] Murray Branch (1914–2006), “Malachi: Prophet of Transition” (M.A. thesis, Drew University, 1946); Joseph A. Johnson (1914–1979), “Christianity and Atonement in the Fourth Gospel” (Ph.D. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1958). 5. See Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). 6. See Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 4. 7. The subtitle of W E. B. Du Bois’s collection of essays entitled Darkwater: Voices from the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920). The subtitle represents a theme that is taken up in his most famous work The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903). The essays in Darkwater are said to represent Du Bois’s most mature, certainly some of his more sharp-edged, writings. See Manning Marable’s introduction to the Dover Thrift Edition (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996). 8. In The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (ed. with introduction by William L. Andrews; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). All subsequent references to Douglass’s text, cited as Narrative, are from this edition. 9. Douglass, Narrative, 27–38. 10. This is the title of Ishmael Reed’s most famous and challenging and sometimes unfathomable novel (New York: Scribner, 1972). For his purposes, Reed traced “mumbo jumbo” to Mandingo ma-ma-gyo-mbo, “magician who makes the troubled spirits go away” (p. 7). This trac­ing suggests that which has meaning within a larger structure of meaning. Obviously, in the hyper­racialized West defining itself over against the black world, the works and discourses of such a magician would be translated as nonsense, so much jumbled mumbling. 11. See Kimberly Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of AfricanAmerican Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 293. 12. For a fascinating exploration of this term and the phenomenon to which it points, see literary and cultural critic Houston A. Baker, Jr., in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 155, and passim. 13. See the poem in Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, ed. John Burt (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1998), 39–41. 14. See this argument developed by Frantz Fanon in his Wretched of the Earth (trans. Constance Farrington; New York: Grove, 1968; French original, 1961), 41. Also see the discussion in Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Dif­ference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 59–87.

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15. See the compelling development of this concept by Shankar Vedantam in The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010). 16. See Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785; ed. with introduction and notes by Frank Shuffelton; New York: Penguin Books, 1999); note Susan BuckMorss (Hegel, Haiti and Universal History ([Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009]) and Sibylle Fischer (Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution [Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2004]) advance compelling arguments concerning Hegel’s denial of the universal implication in the Haitians’ struggle to be free and to establish the first modern society with aspirations to universal nonracialized freedoms. For general historical cultural background in re: politics of language, see, focusing mainly on Britain, Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). For a discussion of John Locke and the dramatic ensuing consequences in many domains and contexts in the twenty-first cen­tury in the United States, see Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Lan­ guage Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 21; Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). In re: Tony Perkins as example of modern-day marriage of religious and political right, see http://archives​.cnn​.com​/TRANSCRIPTS​/0803​/14​/acd​.01​.html. 17. In addition to Fanon’s work, see Camara Jules P. Harrell, Manichean Psychology: Racism and the Minds of People of African Descent (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1999), for discussion of the way Black peoples have been infected. 18. On this point, see Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 246; and, now of course, Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage Books: New York, 1992). 19. Joseph-Francois Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains comparees aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris: Saugrin l’aine et Charles Etienne Hochereau, 1724). 20. See de Certeau, “Writing vs. Time: History and Anthropology in the Works of Lafitau,” in Rethinking History: Time, Myth, and Writing, ed. Marie-Rose Logan and John Frederick Logan; Yale French Studies 59 (Yale University Press, 1980). 21. Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: W. Morrow, 1986). See also in re: politics of writing, M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall; Berkeley: University of California, 2002), part 4, ch. 10. 22. The language of Edmund Burke, found in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris (London: J. Dodsley, 1790). It provoked much reaction in England and beyond. See also Smith, Politics of Language, ch. 3. On the matter of canonical or conventional discourses, see Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). On more conventional history of conventional literacy among Blacks, see Janet Duitsman Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992).

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23. The language of Edmund Burke, found in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris (London: J. Dodsley, 1790). It provoked much reaction in Eng­land and beyond. See also Smith, Politics of Language, ch. 3. On this matter of canonical or conventional discourses, see Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). On more conventional history of conventional literacy among blacks, see Janet Duitsman Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992). In re: anxiety, see David Van Leer, “Reading Slavery: The Anxiety of Ethnicity in Douglass’s Narrative;’ in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays (ed. Eric J. Sundquist; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 129; and Orlando Patterson’s works on slavery and freedom: Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, DC: Civitas, 1998), among others. As for slaves’ communications, see Ann M. Kibbey and Michele Stepto, “The AntiLanguage of Slavery: Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (ed. William L. Andrews; Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 166–91. 24. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (2nd ed., New York: Vintage, 1995), 3. 25. See Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Also, Edward Terrill, The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–1687 (Bristol Record Society, 1974). For historical-interpretive context, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), ch. 3. 26. On Garrison’s persistent liberal-abolitionist paternalism in relationship to Douglass, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 148049. 27. From “IX. Of the Sons of Master and Man,” in Souls of Black Folk, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie McKay; New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 700. 28. See Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or Death (trans. A Faulkner Watts; New York: Edward Blyden, 1981); Alvin 0. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2006); Hugo Prosper Learning, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas (Studies in African American History and Culture; New York: Garland, 1995); Mavis Christin Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988); and Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (3rd ed.; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). See also Houston A. Baker, Jr’s recontextualization arguments in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 71–82.

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29. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1999), 6. 30. See Michael Holland, ed., The Blanchot Reader (London: Blackwell, 1995), especially on the concept of “the work.” 31. Souls, in Norton Anthology, 615. 32. Of course, the debate about what this means or when and how this was experienced and what should be the response to it rages on. Although it was not Du Bois’s proposed analysis of or proposed solution to the problem, many critics of black existence have argued that enslavement has meant above all alienation to the point of the loss of a (“sense of”) past and that only the future remained as basis for organization and orientation. For informative discussion, see Frank M. Kirkland, “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black,” Philosophical Forum 24 (1992–93): 136–65; and Orlando Patterson, “Toward a Future That Has No Past: Reflections on the Fate of Blacks in the Americas,” Public Interest 27 (Spring 1972): 25–62. 33. See Du Bois’s mature, somewhat autobiographical work Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 130–31; see esp. ch. 5, “The Concept of Race:’ For larger historical and political-discursive context, see Thomas C. Holt, “Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903-1940,” American Quarterly 42 (1990): 308–9. 34. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290–97. In Norton Anthology, 753. 35. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 233, 246, 249, 252–55. 36. Ibid., xiv, xvii, 254–55. 37. Richard Wright, Pagan Spain (New York: Harper, 1957; repr., 2008). 21. 38. Taussig, Mimesis, 237–38. Image originally from Julia Blackburn, The White Men: The First Responses of Aboriginal Peoples to the White Man (London: Orbis, 1979; New York: New York Times Books, 1979). 39. Benston, Performing Blackness, 292, 294. 40. Ellison, Invisible Man, 9–10. 41. Robert Hayden, “Runagate, Runagate,” in Norton Anthology, 1506–8. 42. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 91. 43. Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope (1965; repr., Richmond IN: Friends United Press, 1999).

Chapter 10

Performing Scriptures Text(ure)s of African Diaspora Formation (2020)

Still oriented to the obsessive and fetishistic focus on the book/the text/the script as the authoritative carrier and mode of registration of truth, insight, and knowledge, and on textual exegesis and the pursuit of content-lexical meanings as the legitimate orientation to the text, the West for the most part continues to ignore or miss the compelling challenges and provocative insights about the human, not merely the one people or tribe often found in the wide range of types of expressiveness and popular commentary that define the people on the discursive margins. Among such peoples are the circum-Black Atlantic and the African diaspora, more broadly. The types of “work,” of ludics, of expressivity, associated with Black folks have without doubt been overdetermined. They have not been taken seriously or been enough examined with the sensitivity and reverence they deserve, especially in terms of their significations and such in relationship to the texts of significance in the West. I should like to challenge serious consideration of the ways in which the Black diaspora has engaged such texts—scriptures—as performance, what I prefer to call the phenomenon of “signifying(on) scriptures,” or “scripturalizing.” These terms here refers to a set of mimetic cultural practices, laden with dynamics of power, to be considered within a broad historical and comparative perspective, not in terms of narrow or flat assumptions about ethnic-specific or racially overdetermined hyper-religiosity. In this chapter, I address some of the larger ongoing implications and ramifications of this fraught history as part of an attempt to understand these peoples and their orientations and expressivities and sensibilities as windows onto the striving or making (as well as governance and control) of the human. This I do by engaging some of the challenges that African American history and culture direct at humanistic scholarship and by using “scriptures” “to think with,” that is, as analytical wedge, as complex social-cultural 187

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comparative phenomenon through which African American expressive traditions, in particular, and the politics and forms of expressivity of societies and cultures, in general, are refracted and can be problematized. As a scholar of “scriptures,” I define myself as a historian of culture and as such interested in—and wanting to challenge readers to become interested in—the phenomenology, the cultural anthropology, the social psycho-logics, the politics, the forms of expressivities having to do with “scriptures.” The latter I define in expansive terms, that is, not as texts, but as dynamics of psycho-social and power relations. I remain fascinated by the expansive range of representations of the phenomenon that is “the work” that we make “scriptures” do to and for us in societies and cultures. And so I want to understand more about what and how “scriptures” mean—that is, what is the meaning of the meaning of “scriptures,” the meaning of the invention of and play with scriptures.1 There are myriad ways to approach the phenomenon. My own way has been through focused attention upon the conjuncture of African Americans and the Bible. The categories of the conjuncture and the conjuncture itself are complex: African Americans are in many respects in terms of the analytics of the phenomenon compelling as examples of peoples around the world and their practices and orientations, ideologies and infra-politics associated with the invention of and uses of central/center-ing texts (=scriptures) of the larger dominant world. Given how the West has dominated so much of the world, the “Bible” is in many if not too many respects illustrative and over-determinative of the phenomenon of the holy book/sacred text/ scriptures as central/center-ing text; and the conjuncture of this particular “people”—Black folks—and this particular “text”—the Bible—represents the widely assumed notion that the former are highly illustrative of an almost reflexively over-determined orientation to the scriptural as a reflection of hyper-spirituality, and the Bible a unique example of the phenomenon of religious textualization as an instantiation of scripturalization. I think it better to think of the phenomenon in terms of power relations, that is, as a type of violence of discursive formation with the related texturalization or types of social-cultural practices—scripturalizing—as part of the complex mimetic responses into which dominated peoples are thrust, but nevertheless “make do” with and make use of for their empowerment.2 Focus on the scripturalizing (mimetic) practices of the Black Atlantic should raise again and again not so much the question what is the meaning of this or that text, but how to name and explain this phenomenon and its consequences, the phenomenon, and its contours. How did these particular people come to such cultural practices? What psycho-social-cultural work is done in relationship to it? With such questions about scriptures and peoples, I am showing my interest to be in the archaeology and politics of interpretation.

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The phenomenon we call “scriptures” and the people we call African Americans, for example, are for me metonymic of the problematics—the layeredness and politics—of interpretation and (coming into) consciousness in the modern world. What does it—this history of conjuncture, in all of its complexity—mean? What does it point to, what does it teach us—about African Americans and other peoples, about formation, about power relations this side of Gutenberg? About interpretation and power—psycho-social, socio-cultural power? About interpretation and/as consciousness? Along with other critics, I have often (in previous work, including in other chapters in this book) turned to W.E.B. Du Bois to begin critical thinking about the development of modern Black consciousness. Du Bois’s turn to what and how the “Negro spirituals” mean is not the last word on the matter; but it has opened a wide analytical window onto the phenomenon of scripturalizing and modern Black consciousness and formation. All Black folks made to undergo the modern worlds of white folks, Du Bois argued in Souls of Black Folk,3 had been forced behind the “veil.” This metaphor of the veil was Du Bois’s attempt to define Black folks in the United States as those forced into wrestling with divided consciousness. Thus, the poignant meaning of the plural term “souls”—again, not as reference to the many souls as in many persons, but as reference to the two “souls,” in the one representative body, or in each body, divided, with a warring within the self. This division was for Du Bois the deep internal psychologically felt reflection of the stressful existence of Black folks as the formerly enslaved and chronically and persistently humiliated other, the subaltern, still living next to, and reduced to looking at themselves through the gaze of, the enslaver/colonizer. Writer and critic Toni Morrison was surely not only very much aware of but in conversation with Du Bois around his views about the “veil.” Here I have in mind in particular her debate with him about his intimation of what the “sorrow songs” signify, what they beckon, what they hold out as possibilities in helping to “rend the veil,” to unite a divided consciousness. From her different social historical positioning, Morrison argued the limitations of both music that was the slave songs and the literature that was the slave narrative. Regarding music, she argued in an interview that it “kept us alive, but it’s not enough anymore.”4 No surprise that the Nobel laureate in literature favored literature: she made it clear that she thought that fiction—in particular, the novel—could speak most directly and powerfully to and for the people having migrated to the cities: I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction . . . for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people . . . The middle class at the beginning of the industrial revolution needed a portrait of itself because the old portrait didn’t work for this new class. Their roles were different; their lives in

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the city were new. The novel served this function then, and it still does. It tells about city values, the urban values. Now my people, we “peasants,” have come to the city . . . we live with its values. There is a confrontation between old values of the tribes and new urban values. It’s confusing. There has to be a mode to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization.5

What should here be noted is that Morrison here seems to see music, including the music—the spirituals—Du Bois discussed, as a continuing part of the veiling, itself needing to be ripped. The veiling or masking here is that which keeps Black folks from probing their interiority—on their own terms. The way forward seems to be precisely what Morrison addresses in most of her novels, most profoundly in the novel Beloved.6 Beloved has been and continues to be interpreted in myriad ways, with many different types of interpreters representing many different angles, agenda, perspectives, responding to what appears to be the author’s invitation to read and probe and discuss the book. There is raging debate still about: the character Beloved—whence she comes, who or what she represents, the meaning or import of this or that statement or action attributed to her/ it, whither it/she goes. But all interpreters generally agree that Beloved is a story about a haunting. The haunting of those who are survivor-heirs of the “sixty million and more” made to undergo the Middle Passage (and to whom the book is dedicated). It is a story about the failure on the part of all of us to remember those who died in such an experience. It is about the refusal of those who died to go away and remain forgotten; it is about the haunting of the memory of those who died. It is about why and how the memory of those who died is prevented, held back, made difficult or impossible to embrace. Why the memory persists. Why it hurts, traumatizes. It is about consciousness, the impact the haunting has upon the black soul, upon the black consciousness. It is about the impact of the loss of memory, the prevention, and refusal of memory upon the Black soul. It is also ultimately about how the Black soul may be reconstituted, healed, united. So it is, then, about consciousness, interpretation, and articulation—about the terms on which, the framework within which, the Black self, the one who is survivor-heir of the middle passage may now look back, remember, see/interpret, negotiate, and speak to the world about what it thinks, how it feels, how it travels and experiences. It is about “ripping the veil”—taking off the mask?—that prevents the Black self from remembering and healing itself. It is a pointing in the direction in which the psycho-social-cultural stitching, weaving work can be carried out. With Beloved Morrison makes narratological, thus, more complex and emotional, the identification of both the problem and the direction of the healing for the characters. Whatever Beloved the book is, it is not a “straight

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stick” that hits a “clean lick.” Whatever Beloved means, it means not in a straightforward manner. The story that is Beloved cannot possibly be represented or understood as a line. And the story that the characters of the story tell is the scrambling of a line. Instead of a line, circles come to mind—the characters tell versions or aspects of the same story or they tell multiple stories, stories that are varied and overlapping. For all of the characters, but most especially for the main character Sethe, language, certainly, the language and narratives, the “symbolic order,” of the master, cannot transmit or translate her experience. In order to prevent her from having to undergo the humiliation of slavery, Sethe killed her baby girl. This experience was deemed by Sethe and by all observers to be horrible. But it was also representative. And it was precisely as horrible representative act—resonant with classic apotropaic (from Gk. apotropein: that which averts or wards off evil) tradition— that it was traumatic, “unspeakable.” It is the master language, the “symbolic order”—what I have theorized and preferred to call “scripturalization”—that Morrison stresses must be ripped in order for Blacks folks to come to be called beloved. Not just the slave narrative but dominant Western language/discourse itself, with its need and tendency, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, to “occult the aphasia,”7 to veil the veiling, as Morrison might put it—this is what must be ripped. This ripping is signaled in the book not only by the multiple repetitive and varied tellings of the horrible experiences and hauntings by different characters but also by Sethe’s effort finally to come to speech about what happened. It is Morrison’s description of Sethe’s movements as she comes into speech that is important to notice here. She was . . . spinning. Round and round the room . . . turning like a slow steady wheel . . . Circling [Paul D] the way she was circling the subject. (151, 153)

This spinning seems to reveal Morrison’s understanding of knowledge, selfawareness, self-consciousness, critical interpretation in terms of indirection and fragmentation, perhaps, functioning in terms of a type of therapy or psychoanalysis. It is both critique of the master narrative as the fixed authoritative position in society and a pointing toward reconstitution and healing. The circling/spinning suggests critique of and resistance to linear discursivity and politics. It also reflects an effort to re-constitute the self. This difference in movement and orientation suggests that the ripping of the veil is accomplished not so much by a refusal to engage dominant or conventional language and texts and textuality as a refusal to accord them the power to carry meaning in the same way, on the same terms, that is, in uncritical naturalized terms, as though they were part of what Bourdieu termed the realm of doxa, the domain of the taken for granted, the un-discussable.8

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The circling/spinning critiques and explodes this arrangement and structuring. It is really functionally much like the “silence” that Houston Baker discussed in his essay on “Lowground and Inaudible Valleys: Reflections on Afro-American Spirit Work.” He argues that the interpretive orientation he associates with Black folk culture is to be understood as silence—that is, as holding back from normal/traditional uses of language, turning away from the regular forms in order to express critique and healing.9 Baker’s argument suggests a problem with Morrison’s critique of music and other types of performance. All types of performances can be “entranced,” all can help rip the veil as much as they can (support the) veil. What matters, as Du Bois seemed to have discovered, is the trance in the facilitation of veil-ripping. Morrison applies this argument to African Americans, for whom there is so much loss. In this situation, what matters is the recovery of images for the flow of memory. Her complaint seems ultimately to be less about genre distinctions based on social location than about that which prompts or provokes or opens up, even if it does not sustain, memory: This has meant beginning with images—images especially of ancestors or something in association with them: [They] are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life. Which is why the images that float around them—the remains, so to speak, at the archaeological site—surface first. . . . . .the act of imagination is bound up with memory. . . You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Flooding” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers [=readers/interpreters] are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to out original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding”. . . like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”10

The metaphors here and throughout this presentation are mixed; they rather deliciously and poignantly run amuck. Speaking so—“in other words”—is necessary in order to address complexity and pain and trauma. “Ripping the veil” means not allowing the self to be “straightened out” which means refusing to think according to and live within the realm of doxa, the realm of the canonical. It means first attempting—through whatever vectors, objects, or practices—to access the sites of memory and then from such sites allowing the memories as waters to flow, to flow in relationship to—over, under,

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through—the received scripts/texts so that they might flow outside the artificially established banks of dominant discursivity (the veil), provocative shorthand for such we might of which we call “scriptures.” (The latter might appear as, but also far beyond texts in the narrow sense of the term.) Only when these memories on their own terms, carrying their own significance, not behind the veil of script/ure/s as texts or as canon—only when these are woven together or are (re)textualized (in the original meaning of that term) in critical/signifying relationship to “scriptures”—to the naturalized order and arrangements of the world—can social therapy begin. This situation speaks to what performance may be made to represent and effect. According to the challenge Amiri Baraka made to Black artists, “performing” should be about movement—“through” texts, through the dominant order, so as to approach some other thing, some other truth.11 Another way of putting the matter, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, is that of “seeing through”—that is, analyzing the world—“like a frame, a window, a screen, or a lens, rather than something we look at.”12 It means taking up the already “race-d,” Black flesh, in order to see everything differently. So here, Black flesh is made scriptural in order through it to see what has been ordered. Performing scriptures—scripturalizing—represents a most complex “reading,” a re-representation or texturalization of scriptures, the naturalized. Per-forming is working, playing through the form, and thereby bringing something into reality. Such work has the potential to evoke and disturb and sustain cultural memories and thereby (re)interpret the world, and our selves to ourselves. NOTES 1. This facilitation and advancement of such work is mission of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS). Go to www​.sig​nify​ings​criptures​.org for information. 2. See Michael Taussig’s fascinating book, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular history of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), for extended argument. 3. Souls of Black Folk (Bantam Books: New York, 1989). All subsequent references in this essay come from this Bantam Classic Edition and are indicated in parentheses. 4. See interview: Thomas Leclair, “‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (Amistad Literary Series; New York: Amistad, 1993), 371. 5. Ibid., 370–1. 6. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin Books, 2000 [1987]). 7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans Richard Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 8. Ibid., 168.

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9. See the essay in Baker’s Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 106, 109. 10. “Site of Memory,” 119, 120. 11. See discussion in Benston, Performing Blackness, 13. 12. W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), xii–62.

Part III

SIGNIFYING (ON) SCRIPTURES; OR, READING TEXTURES, GESTURES, POWER EFFORTS AT RE-ORIENTATION AND RE-FORMATION WITHIN THE VEIL OF FORMATION

Chapter 11

The Work We Make Scriptures Do for Us An Argument for Signifying (on) Scriptures as Intellectual Project (2010)

I propose to argue in this chapter for the agenda and practices of a research institute that offers a compelling future for biblical studies. In order to make such an argument about a direction for the future, I think it important for me to provide my own unavoidably tendentious current perspective on the personal and intellectual experiences and challenges of the past that have led me to this point. I have begun to understand my career of twenty-five years as teacher/ scholar of religion with its focus on the Bible (not the other way around) in terms of an ongoing quest on the part of a member of an overdetermined demographic group—one of the communities of the late “modern” “black” Atlantic “diaspora”—to try to understand the history of uses of and to position myself to “speak back to” an overexegeted/overdetermined socialcultural artifact and “classic” “white” “scriptures.” Precisely because the two categories are complex and fraught and loaded and contested in characterization and signification, their imbrication in my career mark and characterize periods of my academic-intellectual work and preoccupation, orientation, and political-critical consciousness. These periods inform my interest in addressing the matter of the future of biblical studies. The first period from the beginning of my career in the early 1980s to the mid-1990s—had to do with my attempt at representation and reinscription of the fairly traditional orientation, sensibilities, skills, and practices of Western Enlightenment-inflected academic biblical scholarship. Teaching at a well-regarded graduate theological school in a small town of elite colleges in Southern California, I cultivated the skills of the historian (of late ancient Near Eastern religion and culture) and the philologist (of ancient Greek and Latin texts especially ancient Jewish and Christian text called “scriptures”). 197

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And I accepted as the primary agenda, established by that slice of mainstream academic culture in which biblical studies participated, to occupy myself in a disciplined way with one set of texts among the “classics.” So I dutifully pursued the historical “facts” or “truth(s)” in and behind the classic texts that were the Christian Bible. Within this system in this period, I even found my niche and established a reputation by working as a biblical scholar/historian of religion invested in the critical exegesis of texts having to do with the origins, historical development, and theorizing of early Christian asceticism and forms of world renunciation. I even assumed positions of leadership among colleagues interested in such study. I convened several conferences and colloquia and conceptualized and organized collaborative publication projects. For my orientation and work associated with this period, I received the usual academic “rewards”: promotion and tenure; recognition by the academic guilds (in appointments to important posts); and several fellowships and foundation grants. The interest in askesis is itself worth pondering. I think I thought at the time that focus on renunciatory practices as ideologies and regimes of resistance might somehow help me get back to a place of my initial but difficult to articulate interests. I had keen interest in finding out what was behind different views of, and orientations to, the world, in the logics and politics behind different interpretations and uses of traditions. From the very beginning of graduate studies, I was clearly channeling these questions and issues through the experiences I knew from the world I knew, but given the antiquarianist, theory-allergic, and anti-self-reflexive orientation of the program I was undergoing, I had little or no opportunity certainly, no encouragement, to pursue the questions and issues in relationship to that world. I was on my own to figure things out, to be in touch with myself and hear my own voice, to figure out my own interests and how to negotiate them and relate them to the field of studies I had entered. The second period from roughly the mid-1990s to roughly the year 2002 had to do with the beginning of my departure (with attendant fears and anxieties) from the traditions and orientation of my “classical” training and an attempt to model an alternate intellectual orientation and set of interpretive practices that would lead toward a more unitary self. The intellectual departure coincided roughly with my move in 1991 to New York City to assume the position of full professor at Union Seminary (and adjunct affiliate at Columbia University). Although I had all along at least from the graduate school years experienced doubts and ancestors’ hauntings about what I was doing as a professional, I was with the move to the mouth of Harlem and with the challenges and expectations and needs of that location, including those of students of many different backgrounds, forced to begin a (re)turn. With the change in location and my own social and intellectual and political

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maturation, I came to realize that I could hardly continue to be the unqualified classic texts standard-bearer in my teaching and research. I simply could no longer find myself and its history, could not “hear” clearly enough the ancestors within the intellectual guild system and its practices that I had trained for and with my “card” had been charged and expected to represent. And I was deafened and frustrated even more by attempting to carry out such a charge as part of the mission and agenda of the traditional Western protestant theological paradigm—notwithstanding Union’s incessant cries about its “liberal-progressive” modeling of it. Both the theological house in which I lived (figuratively and literally) and the intellectual guild discourse in which I worked were traditional and conservative; their expectations of me were complex, wanting the new “other” that I in personal-physical terms represented, on the one hand, but not really in terms of translating that other in terms of independent professional-intellectual orientation or full-throated articulations and arguments. Both systems, academic biblical studies and a representation of the Protestant theological school, came to strike me as more and more irrelevant to, if not problematic and somewhat unhealthy for, who and what I thought I was. No matter how I seemed to comport myself, I became more silent and withdrawn and thought myself quite peripheral to both domains as they appeared more and more to me to represent mostly unconfessed if not unknowing protectors of (discourses about) “white-ness.” Here I mean that both systems or domains had as their default orientation the structure of whiteness and its correlate racialism and racism that of course defines and pollutes the West and all of its traditional dominant institutions. The ever-clearer recognition of the situation left me somewhat discouraged. I made myself aware of some of the assessments and types of responses black intellectuals and social critics and activists had given to the situation. I determined that that response on the part of some to reconstruct and advance myths and other discourses of afrocentrism, ethiopianism, contributionism, and vindicationism as part of a long tradition in the search to empower a displaced and humiliated people, was understandable but not effective or compelling. And the particularly poignant and long history of effort on the part of some to find a few “black” figures in the “white” scriptures seemed to me to be a desperate but ultimately unwise and self-defeating game.1 In my teaching of and research into the past that was the “ancient world” that was the matrix for the Bible I could not see or hear myself. The experience had come to a point of being intolerable and unacceptable. So slowly, or so it seems now, and thoughtfully, or so it seemed then I began to change my teaching focus and intellectual research agenda. It changed from the reconstruction of the (still mainly unproblematized) ancient Greco-Roman world context and the pursuit of the correct content-meaning of the ancient texts

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which was really, frighteningly, obfuscating discourse about whiteness or a construal of a part of European studies to the meaning of seeking meaning in relationship to ancient iconic texts called “scriptures.” I committed myself to the raising of what I came to consider the most basic question that should be raised prior to the question regarding the content-meaning of the iconic texts: I began to ask not so much what is the meaning (liberal or conservative or whatever) of this or that text but what is the work we make (texts turned into) scriptures do for us. This was not a question that the Western theological school system (including its liberal-progressive protestant wing), an historical religious-ideological reflection and extension of dominant territorial cultures of the book, wanted someone like me to pursue. Such agenda involves fathoming of some hard questions and issues, questions and issues not about a past on which anything in defense of the dominant arrangements can be inscribed without clearly defined attribution and interest, but about what we all continue to do with the texts we call scriptures and with what effects. I arrogated to myself the right to take a step back and begin elsewhere. I decided not (as so many white and black expected and assumed, as even one administrator who had known me for years had assumed) to focus on the “black” interpretation of this or that text but instead to make African Americans’ historical and ongoing experiences and expressions and practices be the experiences and expressions and practices I use “to think with” about the phenomenon of scriptures. I became convinced that the default socioreligious-cultural and academic thinking would continue (even if the explicit claim is not always made) to presume the scriptures to be “white,” that is, the representations and projections of the dominant history and culture. So I then began to conceptualize and develop a multi-disciplinary and collaborative research project on African Americans and the Bible that somewhat modeled the different academic-intellectual orientation for which I had sighed. Over a period of two years, beginning in 1997, I set up what was the first ever of a series of structured but enormously creative and rewarding extensive colloquia among historians, literary critics, sociologists, anthropologists, visual art historians, musicologists, and religion scholars around the topic African Americans and the Bible. These experiences led to my convening with grant support from foundations a major international conference on the topic in New York City in 1999.2 The third period, from 2003 to the present, represents my willingness to depart even further from the antiquarianist-theological play with “classics” and take on more academic-intellectual and programmatic risk: I accepted the ongoing challenge to attempt a complex nuance or intellectual calibration, a balance of focus upon my own world and its history, its traditions and forms of expressions, with comparative work, with the traditions and expressions of many different peoples. This challenge reflects my assumption that the

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experiences of African Americans may be different in some respects from others but not altogether exceptional or unique, and that such experiences are to be studied not as exotica but as analytical windows onto broadly shared if not universal practices, expressions, and experiences. So what I began doing in this period represents not abandonment of, but intellectual-programmatic building upon and, expansion of the focus on African Americans and the Bible. I began to make use of continuing research on African Americans and the Bible as wedge for theorizing about and building a critical studies research program around “scriptures” as historical-comparative phenomenon in society and culture. With my acceptance of an appointment at the Claremont Graduate University in 2003 and the convening in February 2004 of another international conference (“Theorizing Scriptures”), the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) was established as a small center to facilitate the sort of multilayered, transdisciplinary research on “scriptures” that I had for many years sought to encourage and model.3 This rather unique research institute (ISS) has as its agenda the forcing of certain simple and basic but disturbing questions and issues about the complex phenomenon of “scriptures”—what they are or what the English term signifies as phenomenon/a; how they are variously represented; how they are invented; the work we make them do for us; and the ramifications in power dynamics and relations they create and foster and delimit. Because I was convinced that as with medical research we can learn much (more and differently) from shifting the focus of research of a particular syndrome and this particular phenomenon from dominants or presumed “traditional” or “normal” subjects, I have made the commitment to place privileged but not exclusive focus upon historically dominated peoples. It is this focus around which I have come to find myself, including myself as teacher-scholar. I find it compelling because it is an opportunity for me to communicate with passion my ideas and arguments and because it is the motor for my continuing journey toward the modeling of integrity, in the original and most profound sense of this term, of the different investments, challenges, orientations, interests, politics and passions of a career, and personal life journey. Given this historical sketch of my personal and intellectual transformation, I think it important to reflect more deeply on what are some of the critical issues and challenges that lie behind it and some of the implications and ramifications that grow out of it. What in ISS is proposed is a challenge regarding the need, rationale, impulse for change in the study of scriptures and in fact, insofar as it still for the most still turns around the study of texts—the study of religion, in general. It is a challenge regarding the orientation of such study, including its starting point or underlying presuppositions.

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I am concerned in this chapter about a future but that future very much and necessarily in terms of a particular orientation, actually reorientation, to the past. The “past” represents the fulcrum around which or matrix within which the modern European-American field of biblical studies (and of course the study of religion/theology in general) was begun. Of course, this past is also that which shapes us and the larger circles and structures tribes; worlds to which we belong. Of course, the major point here is that this “past” is a culture-specific invention and protectorate. The “antiquity” and the ancient “texts” in play reflect the prejudices and interests of dominance. These prejudices and interests have to do with the dynamics that come out of the first contacts between the West and the rest, the world of the Other. Among the many dynamics and consequences of the first contact is the construction of the modern fields of comparative studies of peoples and religions. And one need not dig too deeply before one can find the construction of the modern field of biblical studies and its originary and ongoing participation in the Western EuropeanAmerican ideological maintenance of exploitative arguments, power dynamics, and arrangements, including the modern era invention and classification/ hierarchalization of “races” and “religions.” The legacy of modern biblical studies’ participation in, major support for and sometimes otherwise deadly silence in the debates about the “chain of being” that provided ideological support for modern trafficking in black slavery is well established. Various disciplines, historical/philological, ethnographic/ethnological, philosophical, and psychological, were developed and employed for the sake of “race-ing” the Other as a tool for containment and dominance. Historian and theorist of religion Charles Long has been most eloquent in pointing out how the West signified the Other through proto-academic-disciplinary discourses in collusion with other interests with powerful and perduring consequences: through conquest, trade, and colonialism, [the West] made contact with every part of the globe. . . . religion and cultures and peoples throughout the world were created anew through academic disciplinary orientations—they were signified. . . . names [were] given to realities and peoples . . . ; this naming is at the same time an objectification through categories and concepts of those realities which appear as novel and “other” to the cultures of conquest. There is of course the element of power in this process of naming and objectification. . . . the power is obscured and the political, economic, and military situation that forms the context of the confrontation is masked by the intellectual desire for knowledge of the other. The actual situation of cultural contact is never brought to the fore within the context of intellectual formulations.4

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Anthropologist Michael Taussig reminds us that the consequences of first contact are certainly powerful and poignant but like Kafka’s ape “tickling at the heels” of those at the top of the great chain of being, they are complex, multi-directional, and multi-leveled and can be for dominants and dominated reverberating and disturbingly and hauntingly self-revealing: [in the transition] from First Contact time . . . to Reverse Contact now-time . . . the Western study of the Third and Fourth World Other gives way to the unsettling confrontation of the West with itself as portrayed in the eyes and handiwork of its Others. Such an encounter disorients the earlier occidental sympathies which kept the magical economy of mimesis and alterity in some sort of imperial balance.5

What I have in mind here, and what I think Long and Taussig suggest, is the importance of beginning critical historical analysis in our time with the (expansive) point of first contact between the West and the rest in order to understand not only what the dominant West has wrought but how the dominated may “speak back to” the situation or resist and even make for themselves a world. It may also be helpful to try to understand what is at stake here by thinking of the words typically placed on the side view mirror of automobiles—“Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The (humanmade) “objects” in our modern world social-cultural mirror generally colored peoples are always, as Homi Bhabha reminds us, forced to lag behind.6 Such “objects” are frighteningly closer than we think. Our thinking with/about them may get us closer to what and who we all are closer to an understanding of how and why we do what we do. Even as I privilege in criticism those people who are generally positioned behind and are reflected in the analytical mirror, I reject the notion that the focus of the analysis is only about them! The look in the mirror, back at those who are behind is, or should be, disturbing to the point of helping us see things differently—including the reality that cultural historical interpretive practices, including the discourse and practice we call biblical studies, are not and never really were ever about the ancient world, the ancient “classic,” the canonical texts per se but about something else that remains unnamed and unclaimed. So beginning critical interpretation with the framework or structure of power arrangements that come out of first contact between the West and the Other is imperative in order not simply to learn even more about dominants, including their interests and strategies, even though this is a likely and appropriate and needed result. Of course, we are always conditioned and oriented to learn about dominants. That is partly what it means to be dominant! We

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may also learn something about the dominated—on their own terms, and this is for so many rather obvious reasons a very much needed result. Most important in my view is the likely result that by genuinely (re-) focusing on non-dominants, we shall likely learn some new things about, and gain some different perspectives on, some widely shared if not universal phenomena—phenomena that have to do with the structures and frameworks, the inventions and artifice-iality of society and culture—that fundamentally condition and determine us but have for the sake of maintaining the status quo remained veiled to us. What is needed in order to unveil what one of Zora Neale Hurston’s folk characters referred to as things with a “hidden meanin’”7 is a “reflexive awareness”—a recognition of and appreciation for the mimetics and ludic practices that facilitate the engagement of societies and cultures as they are made up, especially the connection with the uses of center-symbols.8 ISS has as its agenda what I think of as compelling work having to do with one of those center-symbols—scriptures. Most pointedly, it aims to facilitate research, teaching, conversations, and community programming about the “work we [human beings] make scriptures do for us.” Its scope is global and trans-cultural; its methods and approaches are comparative and multidisciplinary; and its orientation is activist and political as it seeks to help throw light on and address some significant psycho-social-cultural-political interests and challenges, especially as they pertain to religion and the experiences of the historically and persistent ex-centric and poor. In connection with the ISS, “scriptures” is an elastic, tensive concept, a fraught abbreviation that points not to a particular object or text but to a complex social-cultural phenomenon and set of dynamics—that of finding “hidden meanings” and establishing (and dis-establishing) centers and maintaining (and disrupting) centering politics and effects. At the same time, the term calls attention to, and invites earnest and intellectually and politically honest wrestling with, the problematics and politics of scriptures in the narrower more literal sense having to do with writing and reading and textuality and with the material object that is the text. With its explicit commitment to take seriously the range of experiences and signifying practices of historically ex-centric, disenfranchised and poor peoples as special focus, and given the religiously inflected nature of conflicts and crises around the world, the ISS situates itself as a center focused on compelling public health interests and issues. Fathoming the signifying practices of historically marginalized peoples as a way of facilitating the recognition and reclamation of (a people’s own as well as others’) voice and agency of meaning-making practices is a most compelling public health issue. Insofar as the agenda of the ISS is focused on the “work” human beings make “scriptures” do for them, the major research and programmatic

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activities of the ISS revolve around critical more self-reflexive operations of social-cultural histories, ethnographies, and ethnologies. This involves comparative research into how peoples—again, especially but not exclusively, poor and ex-centric peoples around the world in their different local contexts and situations and through their different practices and gestures construct and communicate their stories or otherwise engage in meaning-making. This means fathoming how peoples read/interpret, construct, and communicate meanings about themselves and the world. As incredible as it seems, it has been only rather recently that many ethnographers, ethnologists, historians, social policy analysts, organizations, and policy-makers have come to recognize in serious terms that in spite of the fact that they are not seen and heard in relationship to the center stage of power, the poor and marginal peoples do indeed create and communicate meaning and worlds. And their practices and gestures and worlds should be understood on their own terms so that we may learn from them and about them. Such learning should lead to our addressing their stressful situations and identifying our historical involvements in such situations. Taken from the traditions of signifying as part of the politics of vernacularization among African and African diaspora and other peoples, the use of the concept of signifying practices as an analytical wedge in connection with ISS is intended to open windows onto the rich and layered textures of life and the social and political sensibilities and orientations on the part of peoples who historically have generally been positioned off center-stage. Rather than make assumptions about what domains and concerns (e.g., “religion,” “politics”) are or should be of compelling interest to them, and how they should represent and communicate their interests (e.g., texts and textualization), and what outcomes or results they should pursue (e.g., resistance, revolution), the creative self-reflexive ethnographic and ethnological research focus of ISS seeks to identify and excavate through their gestures, forms of representations, practices, and sounds their wide-ranging significations. That some if not most of the significations of peoples may pertain to or be associated with “scriptures,” as such has come to be (conventionally) understood, is to be expected for two reasons: the term is really a place-holder for the practices and gestures and ideas and associations and affiliations that have to do with finding ultimate orientation in the world. This quest can be at times so complex and textured that it is communicated obliquely, indirectly, in other words. So ISS research must be oriented to unveiling the indirectness and hiddenness of signifying practices.9 Signifying practices are not to be collapsed into or equated with texts (understood in the narrowest and belated sense of the term). These practices may encompass and involve engagements of texts, but they are really reflections of the textures (understood in one of the broadest meanings of the term)

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of culture. Engaging such practices represents a turn from the interests and preoccupations and politics of historical criticism (including, in biblical studies, any of its ever dizzying and razzle-dazzle discursive offshoots) into critical history. This sort of history, which aims to get at a people’s practices and worldview, should put focus on what Pierre Nora termed a people’s lieux de memoire (“sites of memory”). The latter represent “a . . . kind of reawakening . . . a history that . . . rests upon what it mobilizes: an impalpable, barely expressible, self-imposed bond; what remains of our ineradicable, carnal attachment to . . . faded symbols.”10 The sites are engaged by peoples for the sake of living creatively and meaningfully and with the hope of continuously recovering and remembering what is thought to have been lost or what is thought to have been dimmed, veiled, masked in terms of knowledge or immediate or direct experience. In an essay entitled “Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison sums up what may be considered the argument/agenda for biblical studies insofar as such studies is understood to revolve around unearthing the complex texture of lives that are woven around memories. Begin, she argues, with images that facilitate the flow of memory. With focus on peoples of the African diaspora in North America, whose memories have been, to put it mildly, greatly damaged, this means beginning with images of ancestors or something in association with them: [They] are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life. Which is why the images that float around them—the remains, so to speak, at the archaeological site—surface first . . . the act of imagination is bound up with memory . . . You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Flooding” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers [= readers/ interpreters] are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding” . . . like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”11

What might it mean for us to begin to think of scriptures as a type of site—not merely a text or collection of such, but a complex phenomenon in relationship to which peoples attempt to access or recover their most fundamental and poignant memories? What might it mean for biblical studies to think of its agenda in terms not of capturing, boxing, wrestling with the site, but engaging people engaging such a site? And what might it mean for such interested and

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critical engagement of people to get close enough to see that what is at issue has to do with “re-memory,” with efforts to open the flow of those memories that define and locate different peoples? What might it mean for us to engage not the text as rule (kanon), and see it as the object to be exegeted for the sake of getting at the “historical” “facts” within and behind the texts but instead engage the text as human sociality and its striving and power dynamics and relations and making do and play? What might it mean for us to redirect our intensity of interpretive work toward locating, engaging, and interpreting the unruly, complex, texted self, the self-formed and defined and determined in relationship to texts? And how then would our approaches and methods change? What approaches and forms of intellectual practice would inform the critical history of signifying scriptures? And how would such changes (re)define and (re)locate and (re)orient the scholar whose work involves pointing out how a culture signifies and what it signifies on scriptures? To whom would we then be responsible? To whom would we address ourselves? How might we identify ourselves? Insofar as the research focus is to be placed on people and the dynamics of their formation, the agenda would be complex and not about small things, such as letters and texts and the territories that claim them. Instead, it would be about the sometimes-painful efforts to become a people, to realize ultimate goals that are sighed for, to gain power. It would be about how people manipulate their own and others’ imaginations and are manipulated by the same, about why and how they project beyond themselves “realities” that they make up and about how they make ongoing creative attempts to “live subjunctively”12 in relationship to that which is made up. Such work and the project involving the fathoming of such work and its politics would then be fascinating, heavy, pertinent, compelling. Should we trouble ourselves with a future involving anything less than that? NOTES 1. See Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of AfricanAmerican History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16, 44–96. Also, see his Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 2. This event led to the publication of African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (ed. Vincent L. Wimbush, with the assistance of R. C. Rodman; New York: Continuum, 2000). 3. This event led to the publication of Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon (ed., Vincent L. Wimbush; Signifying [on] Scriptures Book Series; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

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4. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986). 5. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xv. 6. Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 191–92, 237, 246–56. 7. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990 [1935]), 125. 8. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 254–55. 9. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), especially chs. 6 and 7. 10. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture (ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 300. 11. Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (ed. William Zinsser; Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1995), 119–20. 12. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 255.

Chapter 12

Scripturalization A Theory of the Politics of Language (2015)

Boko Haram. The Islamic Maghreb. ISIS. Justice Scalia’s constitutional originalism. The Florida-based Qu’ran-burning Pastor Terry Jones. The Sankritization movement in India and its threats to freedom of expression in book publishing. The skirmishes over same-sex marriage as right and wrong biblical interpretation. The 2011 celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible in the rhetorical key of “manifold greatness.” The bookcanonical construction and defense of academic fields. The dizzying fetishistic writing and publication of biblical commentaries in protestant lands. The mystification of authority in catholic world. Mormon anxiety over the threat to their system of book mystification. The scriptural overdetermination of colored peoples—especially in regard to incarceration and education. The gendering of scriptural authority and the policing of women’s bodies and sexual activities. And so forth. These are all modern and contemporary practices and politics having to do with the book—dominant refractions of a sort that I should like to try to analyze in a particular key. But there are also concurrently and sometimes in the same spaces the counter/resisting practices—performances in women’s circles, including non-religious book-reading groups and house churches; in the African diaspora the ring-shout, the chant sermon, the Haitian veves; jazz and blues and their riffing on canonical performances; the music that is poignantly called gospel. The development of Yoruba across the Atlantic as a scriptural phenomenon. And so on. These are complex responses to the dominant practices and politics having to do with the book and that pertaining to the book, with discourse, knowledge, power. These are dynamics and issues of our time that beg—even scream for—sensitive, but also ex-centric critical analysis. The term scriptures I use to register the cross-cultural phenomenon of the book and beyond: it registers oddly, poignantly, ironically, metonymically—as 209

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site of the problematic having to do with language/discourse/knowledge and power. We need to think more about, dig deeply into, how and with what consequences we humans differently and in what patterns and strategies orient ourselves to ourselves and to everything around us. Might the term be a good handle for these issues and dynamics? It is a step I have already taken. I should like to convince you to come along with me. In my view, we find ourselves in a world consolidated and overdetermined by among things by the politics and social psychology that obtained when the famous philologist F. Max Mueller supervised and edited and published a project he called Sacred Books of the East. This enormous work, fifty volumes total, produced during the fraught years 1879–1910, the period of the height of colonialist expansion and violence and the making of the world we know, both reflected and determined much about how we would understand and negotiate the world. It both reflected and modeled and consolidated what I now call the ideology of scripturalism and scripturalization as its projection as discursive regime over the modern world. Billed as a collection of the “sacred texts” of the world—scandalously excepting the books of the Jewish-Christian religion as those books not to be signified and interrogated on the same terms—the project firmly established the “aristocracy of the book religion” and made clear the framing agenda of dominance and violence of the project captured in Mueller’s shocking and chilling but bluntly honest description of his work in the classification of religion as classification of language and culture and races in his use of the old expression divide et impera, translated by him as “classify and conquer.”1 The books of the Christian west were not to be classified, not to be the focus of critical inquiry, not to be excavated or interrogated. Like whiteness itself in the modern world, the books were not to be interrogated or even acknowledged on the same terms, that is, as texts to be viewed as sources for critical inquiry, such texts were only to be exegeted (by certified/authorized clerics—academic or otherwise disposed) and so deployed for psycho-socialpolitical purposes, “religion” as one of the major vectors. This sort of politics marks where we live, the times in which we live. My periodization of modern history is a rather different one from what we all have been taught (in the scripturalized academy): using the Sacred Books project as touchstone, as one important marker, I argue that we now sojourn in the time of the advanced consolidation of the ideology of scripturalism and the social-cultural-political regimes of scripturalization. And we have hardly begun the hard work of taking stock of what it means to be situated in such a world, whether we call it by my term scripturalization or, à la McLuhan, the Gutenburg Galaxy. Take note of the recent publication of the 4,000+ page Norton Anthology of World Religions, edited by Jack Miles (along with a corps of established

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scholars), hailed in reviews as a magisterial and obviously authoritative project. It is pretty much for the first part of the twenty-first century further confirmation and consolidation of what Mueller’s colonialist project represented in the late nineteenth century. The Norton Anthology’s claim to broader representativeness in the Miles collection in my view hardly makes it less problematic in conceptual-political terms. For the “globalized” twenty-first century, this more recent project is arguably more problematic in its sameness of conceptualization and politics.2 After so many years of thinking about and weighing in on such matters with alternative arguments and programs and projects, I have come to agree with anxiety-filled critics that my orientation to criticism and my critical project “do not fit.” It is in sharp conflict with the reigning programs and politics and paradigms within and beyond the academy having to do with the book. The sharp point of conflict lay, on the one hand, in the generally supposedly apolitical set of practices and orientation—“manifold greatness” no less! was, for example, the unproblematized theme of the 400th anniversary celebration of the KJB—that in fact still marks several academic fields and professional discourses—politics; jurisprudence, etc.—as unacknowledged, mostly unrecognized apologetics for the book and the social-political, viz., auctoritas that mark them. My focus, turning around an altogether different agenda—asking not what is the meaning of this or that text/book, but what is the meaning of the invention and uses of the text. Several years ago, I approached that point in consciousness that I would like to think approximates where Amiri Baraka was in psychic terms when he promoted the concept of the “scream.”3 I was also seemingly channeling Clinton’s campaign aid James Carville and his mantra regarding the need to focus, “like a laser beam,” on what is important, when I began several years to scream (to myself!) in both affirmation and refusal—“it’s scripturalization, stupid!” It’s not the obfuscating appearance of the books/texts in the form of authorized-canonical-publication (the “anthology”/reference work as canon), not the exegetical engagement (the content-meaning—liberal or conservative fundamentalist) of the text, not the assessment of the text’s soaring rhetoric or literary turns, not the establishment of its more or less accurate historical background, not the arguments about its claims to universal truths, not the proclamations about it as culturalist achievement, and so forth. What the “scream” is about is that different orientation to meaning itself, raising the most basic but disturbing question about it, including what the “it” represents, questions about the phenomenon itself,4 and using the engagement of scriptures to think with, to pursue an intellectual project and initiative, then excavating scripturalization as social-cultural-discursive and political regime or formation; scripturalism as the ideology turning around the politics of the written; and scripturalizing as reference to mimetic cultural practices and

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politics. With these concepts, I advance a challenge for critical interpretation that is transgressive—far beyond any one current field or discipline. It is essentially a challenge to invent and model a different transdisciplinary field of critical studies, scrambling and upending the traditional fields and disciplines that serve to mask sophisticated apologetics (religion- and culturebased) that are played out across domains. Using African/African diaspora experiences and expressivities as portal and as analytical wedge, this project I call signifying (on) scriptures. The matrix and safe space for it—necessarily, for the time being located outside the traditional academy—is the research organization I have founded that is called The Institute for Signifying Scriptures.5 In White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery, I argued, using Olaudah Equiano’s/Gustavas Vassas’s signifying on early modern Britain as example in his Interesting Narrative (1789)6—one of the earliest and in my view one of the most complex anglophone slave narratives—as text to think with. I also suggested that scripturalization can and should serve as poignant shorthand for the meta-discursive regime and politics of language use, including speaking, writing, and reading and the accompanying claims about knowledge and collective intelligence and meaning that structure and determine English/British modernity. The “texts” generally thought of as “religious” or “sacred”—the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Tao, and so forth—can be considered the most compelling and problematic metonymy for this phenomenon or set of dynamics—that is, the politics of language. But the former cannot and must not be thought of as exhausting the conceptualization and historical representations and expansive domains of the latter. Scripturalization is more expansive than—even as it includes—“religion.” Certainly, at least beyond “religion” as conceptualized and delimited and put in its sphere or domain by religionallergic and -anxious “enlightened” figures. Scripturalization is beyond the modern Enlightenment-influenced ideological-cultural division between “sacred” and “secular.” And, ironically, scripturalization must be conceptualized in critical expansive terms so as to be understood as a product if not syndrome of the Enlightenment. (There was much at stake in inventing religion and delimiting it to the private apolitical sphere.) At any rate, notwithstanding significant differences that obtain in the modern world between and among human beings, what can be referred to as scripturalization disrupts the division between religion and the secular and ironically binds us together—into the “universe of the undiscussed” (Bourdieu). Scripturalization, I should like to argue, is the chief characteristic, the defining orientation, of such a universe, a textured semiosphere (Lotman), for moderns.7 The SoS project is a continuation of the discussion begun in WMM, using Equiano/Vassas as window to discover and analyze scripturalization. The

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larger historical period in which scripturalization was most firmly constructed as a “reality” and consolidated as a regime—with much psycho-social, cultural, political, and other forms of violence and toxicity as fallout—was that of the “first contacts” between “civilization” and the “savage,” the “West” and the “Other.” So following the poignant language used in Interesting Narrative, and in an effort to make as plain as possible the process of construction and the reality of its consequences, I further labeled scripturalization “white men’s magic.” This is fascinating: given what is suggested by the general modern language usage of the suffix “-ization”—construction; consolidation—and given all that the fraught terms “magic” and “white” each differently but also in juxtaposition uncomfortably and ironically and counterintuitively connote in the history of politics of the English language. In associating the terms, I read Equiano as someone signifying with a vengeance. Although it does not have its original impetus in his work, my conceptualization of scripturalization is complimentary of and complementary to—and is in many respects an invited elaboration on—French theorist Michel de Certeau’s notion of “scriptural economy” and of scriptural practice among the “everyday practices” that define social life. Advanced in his phenomenal book The Practice of Everyday Life (L’invention du quotidian, vol 1, Arts de Faire),8 his focus on the scriptural remained at the level of broad and general theorizing. Although not without poignant examples here and there, the work clearly assumed modern-era and, most important, racially and ethnically homogenous (viz., pan-white) Europe as singular if not supreme example and context (or, perhaps, more accurately, with France as the most obviously practical focus). At any rate, I certainly read de Certeau’s work as an invitation to probe further and more deeply into others’ practices, problems, and contexts—historical and contemporary. But I arrogate to myself the right to refer explicitly in direct defiance of and conflict with traditional scholarly works that have to do with the subject here at hand, to dispossessed peoples, especially Black peoples, as means to think with. Following the language and arguments set forth in Toni Morrison’s now famous provocative essay, I aim to practice a type of criticism is commensurate with her notion of “playing in the dark,” the agenda and interests of which are neither “too polite [n]or too fearful” to take note of, indeed, embrace “disrupting darkness.”9 It is important first to remind you what window Equiano’s/Vassa’s story about himself opens onto this fraught phenomenon. A wide window is provided in the famous and disturbing incident he reports in his chapter 11. In this chapter, he is depicted on one of his many sailing adventures. This time he records himself in flagrant imitation of Columbus, lording it over those he and his party come upon and call Indians—in Jamaica. The passage is an important site for analyzing what scripturalization is, how it works:

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Recollecting a passage I had read in the life of Columbus, when he was amongst the Indians in Jamaica, where, on some occasion, he frightened them, by telling them of certain events in the heavens, I had recourse to the same expedient, and it succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations. When I had formed my determination, I went in the midst of them . . . I pointed up to the heavens . . . I told them God lived there, and he was angry with them . . . and if they did not leave off, and go away quietly, I would take the book (pointing to the bible), read, and tell God to make them dead. This was something like magic.10

Here it is in all its poignancy—scriptures used as culturalist-discursive/ nationalist weapon. As white men’s magic—used by a black man. To show himself “almost a white man.” Here is scripturalization as part of the regime of meaning-transcendent, as part of meaning-making and meaning management, a system in which the (stable) meaning is actually in the performance of ownership and control. Content-Meaning to be gained from the text is secondary, controlled by the metatextual meaning in actually pointing out and pointing to the book. Nevertheless, the regime that Equiano/Vassa represented occludes the underlying framing meaning—involving the meaning of whiteness and its various opposites. Only an ex-centric, a “stranger,” in this case a black stranger, could signify on scriptures, as a system, in this way. Equiano’s/Vassa’s performance begs the question—how did this politics of language involving the performance of the scriptural come about? That the self-understandings, practices and performances, politics and orientations of complexly minoritized communities throughout the circumAtlantic worlds have much to teach us about the formation and deformation of the human should not startle or surprise. From their different forced positionalities on the margins minoritized peoples open wide windows onto the challenges of human striving, including their experiences of pressures (even if never realized) to conform to conventional-canonical construals of language forms of communication, representation, and embodiment (or mimicry); opportunities to speak back to and confront and overturn conventionality (or interruptions); and the need to experience ongoing meaningful relationships (or orientation) to the centering politics, practices, and myths that define the modern nation. I am with these arguments in agreement with literary critic Srinivas Aravamudan’s important challenge that we put focus on the strangers, the dispossessed, as “tropicopolitans” and on their tropicopolizations, that is, how these subalterns—Equiano/Vassa as example—“read” and “make do (fait faire),” with the dominant world.11 I argued in WMM that Equiano/ Vassa read not so much the content-lexical-meaning of the English scriptures; what he read were the scripturalizing practices/the scripturalism/the scripturalization of the English elite who as inventors and wielders of the

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nationalizing-cultural texts exercised “unbounded influence over the credulity and superstition of the people.” It was just such “influence” or “magic” that was understood by Equiano/Vassa to function much like the “magic” he imagined had obtained among the Igbo “priests” and “magicians” of his homeland. This turn of phrase and twist of language about “influence” in Equiano/ Vassa has disturbed me for some time. The language is problematic—at once too easy and hard to fathom; both apt and incongruent; both familiar and odd: who speaks this way, in what contexts, and to what end? Although I grant that the whole point of Equiano’s/Vassa’s narrative was to demonstrate that he could “talk that talk,” could make the book “speak,” and so forth, in seeking as he does in his chapter 1 to draw a parallel between white men’s ways and the ways of the Igbo, he aims to show that his peoples, Igbos, also had mechanisms and protocols for divining meaning—or scriptures—but he overreaches. He presses his ethnic-tribal-cultural ecumenism and religious comparativism too hard. “Unbounded influence” is the language and/or ideology not of any local tribe or village, Igbo or otherwise. It is the language and ideology of the regimes of “world religions” and of the “scriptural economies”/fundamentalisms refracted by such, including extensive civilizations—empires or modern nations. “Unbounded influence” seems possibly out of step with the textures of life in the scale of social organization that was the real or imagined Igboland. It was the anxiety—his? whites in his network?—about this other tradition in comparison to the white men, that may have prompted the statement. But this problem of misapplication raises important issues and questions that I had not more fully considered before: given what is known about ways of knowing and patterns of authority in tribal and village societies throughout the world, if the Igbo, like other tribal “priests” and “magicians” were very unlikely to have been thought to possess unchecked authority, then what does his thinking here suggest about the relationship between European and African worlds and their construals of knowing and authority, discourse and power, the politics of language? If Equiano’s/Vassa’s point of comparison is unsurprisingly, even compellingly fictionalized history, historical fiction, what reality does it nonetheless reflect? What issues—about human consciousness and relations—are reflected in such comparison? The most profound challenge of Equiano’s narrative is to help the reader see the reality of “white men’s magic,” indeed, to see whiteness, as construction or in terms of performance, the performance in terms of scripturalization; and scripturalization as part of the general dynamics, perhaps, evolutionary dynamics, of knowledge or meaning management. Scripturalization now appears to be the discursive/ideological playing field onto which we all are now more or less forced. It has a wide if not global reach; it is—not the local

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Igbo priests and wise men—of “unbounded influence,” fixed, stable meaning (at least in terms of claims and assumptions made). We have in the published narrative a window onto what such a construction makes of Equiano/Vassa, and through him, not only all Black “strangers,” but all who live, or are made to live, within scriptural civilizations. We must ask—as his narrative provokes us to ask—how did it come to be so? What follows it or is determined by it? What do the disposessed have to do with it? I should like not only to begin to try accounting for scripturalization as the dominant and extensive regime of language use and authorized stable forms of knowing but also to position it in an historical schema of meaning management. Including scripturalization as phenomenon reflective of modern world whiteness as ideological-political orientation and the baseline on which dominant “standard” discourse rests, I isolate three types of reading formations, types of systems of language use, knowledge-claims, stages in the structures of consciousness or meaning and orientations to the world—(1) traditional local cultures’ totalistic forms of knowledges/ways of knowing, organized around ritual and oral traditions, including the masking (literally and otherwise) of meaning; (2) extensive hierarchical societies and their claims to stable, totalistic-universal knowledge/way of knowing, with the cultivation of meaning-transcendent reflected in their invention and advancement of the scriptural; and (3) dispossessed or humiliated peoples’ mimetics, interruptions, and interrogations of the extensive-totalistic-universal and its and orientations and politics—viz., signifying (on) scriptures, including ideological-psychical maronnage, resulting in the radical degrading of meaning itself. The middle or second formation—scripturalization—is my starting point or touchstone for analysis of other two as part of the larger schema. More about it need not be said for the moment. “Reading” here is understood rather expansively—in terms of a system of communication and collective knowing. The first reading-formation—notwithstanding its association with oral and local cultures—is not simply chronologically prior and psychosocially anachronistic to the dominant reading that is scripturalization; it is a baseline formation, whence we all developed; it is also complexly perduring in our time, but dislocated and muted, carried, and translated by the outliers, the subaltern, and denied by all others. It cannot now be “recovered” in any simple manner. It need not be reached for in nostalgic or apologetic terms. It reflects basic fears and anxieties and carries its own set of politics, especially the politics of mostly male-specific anxieties over sexual performance and death. Yet it may provide possibilities for turning back onto, checking and challenging and denaturalizing, the second long dominant formation that is scripturalization. Examples of this first reading or knowing formation may be found in scientific evolutionary schemas and theories, the most recent and comprehensive of which is Robert Bellah’s magisterial book, Religion

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in Human Evolution. Equiano/Vassa describes only faintly this traditional village world of the Igbos in his story. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a more extended, fascinating, and richer textured historical fiction, using the village of Umuofia at the height of the onset of British colonialism in Equiano’s homeland as window.12 The third formation—associated with the disruption that is voice-finding and the arrogation of its use among the humiliated—represents ongoing reiterations and construals of scripturalization, as well as possibilities for upending it, moving beyond it—in maronnage, of a sort—to a state in which meaning fades. These three turns in and types of formation should not be understood to be chronologically successive or to represent mutually exclusive temporalities; they overlap in time and in all but the earliest barely recoverable historical situations, for example, before the onset and fairly widespread popular practices of writing and reading. Insofar as these formations represent forms or structures of consciousness and social psychologies and orientations, they are more than ideas about ideas, concepts about concepts or abstract abstractions. I also understand them to be more fundamentally about social textures and psychosocial dynamics, orientations of the embodied, everyday practices of ordinary lives that are scripted, viz., made to mean. What does focus on the Black subject do or add to this theory? What must not be lost sight of is the fact that the modern world in which the Black self/ Black body has been raced, overdetermined in racial terms, and thereby humiliated, is itself the occasion or major impetus for, effect or product of, scripturalization. The Black body has been hyper-signified,13 that is, scripturalized. This phenomenon, as the violence of construction of meaning—black having always and necessarily to mean lack or deficit—requires persistent defense or management of meaning as way to exercise and maintain control. “Scriptures” is here then shorthand for the refractions of social-cultural domains and practices that represent mechanism or protocol for the control or stabilization of meaning. What is this meaning to be controlled?—it is this: that black and white exist and how white and black must always mean in the modern world. The modern ideology that is generative of scriptures as object and as cultural practices—what I call scripturalism—is meta-religious, pan-cultural, universal. The regime in which scriptures are made to work or operate is a regime of investment in John Locke’s politics of language or “purification”14—what I call here scripturalization. It is violent, controlling, suffocating, enslaving, policing/forcing a particular type of consciousness and orientation. It cannot be, as Bourdieu convincingly argued, ignored, or simply played with and played off, through fancy methods and approaches to texts of different domains—academy, law, politics, economics, and so forth. It has to be met with alternate forms of conscientization.

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What the Black subject—the historical collective, not each individual— represents in this tight situation is difference (as in Equiano’s/Vassa’s difference from Englishmen and his difference from the Indians as his mimetics/ performance of white men shows). And there is in this difference the potential to model and advance a turn in human knowing or consciousness—what I call with some irony if not a strong paradox, the decay of meaning. It is or can or should be so only in complex reaction to the enslavement of meaning that is scripturalization. This refusal of meaning is to be distinguished from the postmodernism impetus toward the rather easy indifference to stable meaning. What we are confronted with among the dispossessed of the world is rather the awareness that the meaning constructed by dominants cannot hold sway, that it must be refused and that unmeaning could be embraced. This consciousness is reached first through the experience of the pulverization of meaning through slavery and the ensuing contempt in which slaves and their seed are held. This experience serves as potential springboard into transmuting and theorizing the world’s contempt into contemptus mundi and translating it into the practices and politics of marronage. There are numerous examples to think of. A disturbing example of the phenomenon is described by Sherley Ann Williams in Dessa Rose, in which the poignantly named Nehemiah the writer makes up a “science” and with it “writes up” Dessa as an act of violence done to her body.15 A more famous example to think about can be seen in Frederick Douglass’s roiling over the slaves singing on the way to the Great House Farm. Criticism has had trouble coming to grips with what Douglass was doing here because it has been as tortured as was Douglass himself: it seems that Douglass understood that as he looks back upon them, the slaves were denied any but over-determined identification with and participation in the world that was represented by the Great House Farm. They were presumed not to be able to communicate and mean in canonical/cosmopolitan European languages or modes.16 But Douglass has anxieties about this issue—and his text shows as much, and thereby instructs us. He seem on some more reflection to recall that the black enslaved could indeed make things mean, but perhaps, only strangely, perversely, paradoxically, not beyond their circle. This provokes in Douglass what has been thought of as “anxiety of ethnicity.”17 Was he one of them? Did he get them? Their “unmeaning jargon” was of course not understood by the world to which the Great House Farm belonged. This “unmeaning” has been claimed to be one of the most important consequences of enslavement.18 Slaves’ communication was reduced to an “anti-language,”19 unrecognized and unacknowledged by others. But I think is precisely at this point issue that Douglass touches on but does not fully grasp—who can, really, given the issues, the forces to contend with here?—the larger critical issue for an understanding of the consciousness of

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the dispossessed. It was precisely in that discursive psychosocial space— between home and the Great House Farm20—where the “unmeaning jargon” and the “rude and incoherent songs” were made and heard, and where meaning of the sort defined by and associated with the Great House Farm was decayed, refused, signified on. I suggest it is that zone whence the dispossessed around the world still are likely to find voice and to contribute to their own, as well as universal conscientization. W. E. B. Du Bois seemed to channel Douglass in SBF in his re-examination and heavily emotional re-reading of the import of the slave songs. As Du Bois looked back on them after some fraught experiences in his own life, the songs were seen as “naturally veiled and half articulate,” “conceal[ing] much of real poetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody.” Through a history of violence and humiliation “we get [in them] but glimpses here and there . . . eloquent omissions and silences.” He seemed to suggest that such anti-discourse was in fact reflective not simply of a flawed and less rational orientation and logic (within the same system of signs), but a commitment not to mean, in which to mean was to suffocate and to die.21 This not-meaning also resonates powerfully with philosopher Susan Buck-Morss’s argument in her book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, in which she argues, drawing on literary critic Joan Dayan’s brilliant work Haiti, History, and the Gods, that African diaspora expressivities—especially in religious ritual—reflect the persistent loss and dispossession experienced; and with such loss of culture and nation and body, they translate now the “shreds of bodies come back” and the resultant “decay of meanings.”22 This stark orientation suggests the potential that can be gained from finding agency in the expressivities of those who speak in other words, outside the symbolic order or meaning machine. With its need and tendency, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, to “occult the aphasia.”23 Finally, we are brought back to the matter of the Black Atlantic, reading and signifying, difference and mimetics. This is the “mimetic excess” about which Michael Taussig argues (following Horkheimer and Adorno), that breaks the normally violent repressed and closed circle of mimetics. It is “reflexive awareness”—an awareness of the play, “as if” it were “real,” as if “artifice” were “natural.” Situated now precisely—compellingly, necessarily?— in the situations of “post-coloniality,” or post-slavery and jimcrowism, in which the historically dispossessed and humiliated take hold of the tools and magical tricks that historically had been exclusively in the hands of the overground, the male elites, including political-economic, academicintellectual, and religio-cultic virtuosi, this excess becomes a type of radical agency—a capacity “to live subjunctively,” that is, the “freedom to live reality as really made-up.”24 “Black is . . . and black ain’t” . . . “Blackness will make you and unmake you,” Ellison taught us. Anything goes, as Fred

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Daniels came to understand in Wright’s underground, because one sees that what went on in the overground worlds was all made up. Equiano showed us that white men were scripturalized constructions, that the “world religions” and their fundamentalisms and supernationalist orientations of the sort that we take for granted are the construction produced by white men’s magic/ scripturalism. This means black and other dispossessed folk and gender too were constructions, indeed, they were the impetus for early modern intensifications of constructivism; they were intended to mean according to their already forced positioning in the larger construction that is scripturalization. Those dispossessed folk—all made to be Black—now with their varied scripturalizing practices may teach us something: Are we not all, should we not all be, now located in that space between “home and the Great House Farm”—that discursive space in which we must navigate between the stable secure house in which King James sits and manages meaning and that volatile expanse of unmeaning jargon and wild freedom representing the edge and end of culture that place beyond (the categories of) religion, tribe, and nation, and their nexus? We are mostly forced to mean according to the directives of the Great House, but how might we now not mean in this fraught space? The space is frightening not only because of the policing and death inherent in it but also because it facilitates radical agency. We have in my view hardly begun to recognize and to act on as much. My challenge—that we commit ourselves as a promiscuous transgressive collective to the hard but compelling work before us—to learn what to read, and what it means to read/signify/inflect on scripturalization of our times, thereby learn to scripturalize the human. NOTES 1. See discussion about background matters in Tomoko Masuzawa in Invention of World Religions; Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. chap 7. 2. The Norton Anthology of World Religions, ed. Jack Miles, et al. (2 vols; New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014). 3. See discussion of this phenomenon in Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 204–7. 4. W. C. Smith, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), was an important and provocative effort, but it falls short in terms of scope and orientation of the discussion and examination needed. 5. See www​ .sig​ nify​ ings​ criptures​ .org for information, including history and programs. The formal launch of the ISS as an independent scholarly organization is

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to take place just weeks from the time of my final revision and submission of this essay—in the fall of 2014. 6. See WMM, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). I am in this chapter following the text of Interesting Narrative, edited by Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2003). Readers should take note that I am in this chapter intentionally aiming to use the double names for authorship used in the originally published narrative. With this gesture I am influenced by Carretta’s discussion in his Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (New York: Penguin, 2005), chap 12—even as he does not do so with the title of his book. I am even more persuaded by the arguments of the late Lindon Barrett, found in his provocative book, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity, ed Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. McBride, and John Carlos Rowe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), chap 2. 7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001). 8. See Michel De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 9. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 10. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (ed. Vincent Carretta; New York: Penguin, [1789], 2003), ch. 11, p. 208. 11. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitians: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 274. 12. Robert M. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2017); and Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Penguin Books, 1994 [1958]). 13. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1986); and also see Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: One World, 2015): “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage” (103). 14. See discussion of this concept in Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15. Sherely Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: W. Morrow, 1986). 16. On this matter of canonical or conventional discourses, see Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). In re: more conventional history of conventional literacy among Blacks, see Janet Duitsman Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992). 17. So David Van Leer, “Reading Slavery: the Anxiety of Ethnicity in Douglass’s Narrative,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 129. 18. See Orlando Patterson’s works on slavery and freedom: Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge:

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Harvard University Press, 1982); Rituals of Blood (Washington, DC: Civitas, 1998), among others. 19. Ann Kibbey and Michele Stepto, “The Anti-Language of Slavery: Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,” in Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991). 20. Benston, Performing Blackness, 294. 21. Du Bois, “Sorrow Songs,” SBF, in Norton Anthology, 732f. 22. See Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 127, note #112. Dayan’s Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 35–37. 23. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 170. 24. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992), 254–55.

Chapter 13

From Being Framed to Selling Shadows

I write in celebration of the trailblazing work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. I hold Elisabeth in highest esteem as teacher-scholar; I honor and appreciate her as mentor; and I treasure her as friend. She has taught me much. She has been for me a model warrior and inveigler on so many fronts. Her confidence in me has often given me encouragement precisely at those moments most needed. We have been through and lost some important battles. It is for so many reasons a personal honor for me to have opportunity to ruminate on her 1987 Society of Biblical Literature Presidential Address, “Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship.”1 The Address is worthy of continuing discussion. My particular interest is less about this or that point with which I may find myself in dis/agreement with the Address. The latter is quite simply a watershed event in so many respects. I was there at its delivery. And I have read it again and again over the years. It inspired so many of us, challenged us on so many fronts, disturbed us—even as the “us” is broken down into several different if also overlapping camps. There was with the Address the difference—in gender; in performativity: in timber of voice, in enunciation/accented-ness, in aural and written style, in passion (as though something was at stake), and—most important, the difference in attention focused, mostly and so refreshingly, on the larger shared world in which we were/are embodied. She focused primarily on our time and our world, not some mythicized/fetishized invented antiquity many among us still laughingly and oddly claim to be interested in only as historians and/or critics of the literary type. These and other differences I as a somewhat junior scholar at the time observed and took note of; they made a huge difference for me; they became part of the change I experienced in basic orientation to the field itself and to scholarship in general. 223

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The change was not due to Elisabeth’s influence alone. The turn was over a period of time—for several reasons, not least was that silly thing called the tenure clock that made me and so many others among my cohorts rather slavish in terms of orientation and misrecognition of the radical freedom one always possesses to exercise real agency. There was also my personal and social-political maturation and my learning from students, noting what it looks and sounds like as they sometimes either inspired by me, sometimes in imitation of me, complexly experienced socialization/integration into the “field,” with its (traditional: racialized and gendered) discourses and practices. Much of it was painful to observe. On my own terms and clock this difference that Elisabeth had represented in her Address lingered and, along with other profound experiences, helped me burst the dam, break the fever, stay the virus, steady the stuttering, so to speak. I came to learn that her strong voice might help me come to terms with the steady raising of my own questions and issues; and that from it, from her, I might learn to expect more of such events, that there might be more said and done within the guild that would speak to our actual embodiedness and its politics, my embodiedness and the politics I could embrace, something that might venture beyond the trivial, the often antiquarianist and theological default agenda. Of course, I have in the ensuing years and even decades now gone my own in regard to these issues. My way—my program and interest—may be different from but ultimately complementary to Elisabeth’s programmatic agenda. Her support I have counted most precious. The lessons I have learned from her stem not so much directly from her address but in terms of inspiration, similar to the way in which a reader might read Toni Morrison or Chinua Achebe and draw arguments, inferences, and conclusions that neither of them had ever considered. So it is with respect to my reading of Elisabeth’s 1987 Address. Schüssler Fiorenza’s Address was frankly a watershed moment for me and those seated in my section because it was something like the cracking open of a door, an opening through which an escape was made possible. Escape? From? In my view, it is escape from the thrall/enslavement of “white men’s magic”—if I may use this provocative shorthand for white male clerical orientation, performance, presumption, with its pursuit—all too often and purposefully—of the trivial, the “small stuff” of letters, as Sojourner Truth (reportedly) famously put it, with its politics of stasis and control of the discourse. (I have called this regime “scripturalization” as defining of the modern, still colonialist regime of control.) The Address of 1987 was, in step with Sojourner Truth’s stance, a statement of refusal and refutation—refusal and refutation of ongoing participation in “small stuff,” in the un-self-reflexive agenda of gendered professional authoritative scriptural interpretation (the latter understood in broad terms).

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To whom and for what does interpretation (in our part of the academic village) speak? For whom does it work? The answer is never spoken or made explicit; but it is always presumed or assumed. The world of interpreters is presumed. The world of readers/consumers is presumed. And the world of the politics of stasis is presumed. And the product or service rendered—meaning—is constructed as consumers have already been shaped, as the already known world is made to want and need. The 1987 Address was refusal to go along with the set up and the silence in questioning it. What social-culturalpolitical function was being served? Who is the ideal interpreter? Who is the constructed reader? The arrangement that goes without interrogation is part of a regime that is organized around an investment in meaning through textualism (or as in legal scholarship and in philological studies, textual originalism), a focus on ancient world/ancient texts, with little or no self-reflexivity in regard to politics, social relations, power and psycho-logics that obtain in the reading contexts and their dynamics and practices. But insofar as Elisabeth’s Address called for self-reflexivity that we’ve not yet even begun to approach with any seriousness, it represents potential disruption, of the sort that despite lack of organizational change, cracks an opening. (Note: be careful with notions about how much change there is in this guild on account of diversity of membership, participation, and so forth: No matter how much one argues about diversity, the defining politics of this Society is today what it has always been going back to meetings that took place in offices in the late nineteenth century at Union Seminary, NYC. This is indisputable—unless or until there is intentional and explicit statement otherwise orienting the Society. Look at ads from firms that float much of the gathering. Look at the flagship journal, its articles and reviews. In spite of all the fancy set-ups and group monikers, we are what we have always been—un-self-reflexive, theory-allergic, semiclerical order gathering that takes as its model for membership and patronage the white protestant male and the attendant but unspoken assumptions about the construction/hierarchizing of the world and its meaning. (This order of things—the world ordered like a text that was written mostly by male, mostly religious clerical-elites within an unchallenged colonial era sensibility—is what has obtained from the beginning of this Society; it is what obtains even now.) Some of you may know that I opt for a new, different organization, with a rather different orientation and politics and practices: it is long overdue for this organization to step away from colonial/empire-era politics of origins and meaning as part of the orientation to elite white male clericalism and its curiosities about other times, worlds, and peoples only to betray serious interest in mining more deeply into and defending the Christian-world construal of reality. A break should begin with the call I associate with

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Schüssler Fiorenza’s 1987 Address—a call for a refusal to read and to be read on the terms assumed by the current organization (its diversity and faux internationalism notwithstanding). Such a call should include the decentering emphasized, to be sure, but this is basic; it must go beyond it toward a politics of resistance to, or an escape from meaning, from the prison that captures all–especially non-white male elites—in a prison house of occlusion and obfuscation. This is the same trap, I should like to stress, that all peoples of color have been especially beset by for the centuries that have marked the modern world of contact with the Other. Indeed, the meaning trap by which the Society of Biblical Literature as learned society defines itself is the same as the Western order of things that makes language do the work of defining the discovered non-white peoples, most especially Black peoples, as Sylvia Wynter has emphasized, through her provocative use of the ancient world and early modern world shorthand expression nec plus ultra, meaning plus, or overmeaning, with a vengeance, super-determined, in reference to “the nonwhite native and its extreme form of Otherness, the nigger”.2 Little wonder, then, that these peoples have historically inveighed against meaning or standard epistemics, significations. Surely that is the likely force behind what is reported to have been Sojourner Truth’s famous terse exclamation—“I don’t read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations.”3 The point here is that for the one with the over-read black body—especially black female body—whose existence raises issue around the problematics of interpretation, of transparency of reading, overdetermination and representation, anxiety of identity, the work of the scriptural (in that more expansive way that de Certeau uses the term in Writing of History 1988 [1975]) must always be approached warily. Sojourner Truth’s now famous statement and her life story as an unfurling of the statement provide much upon which to reflect. Truth’s actual struggles provide a model for those of us open to a new discourse—a mode of communication and knowing through which to construct a different politics of meaning and knowing and a new circle within which to cultivate such politics. Considered illiterate in conventional terms of the West, Truth left no writing by her own hand to be exegeted so as to access her mind and fix the memory of her. Several narratives—four in particular—were written by white female abolitionists of different bents and politics. But Truth was not by them fixed or rendered passive. Not only was her cultivation of consistent skeptical attitude about writings (about her) such that should shame many of us calling ourselves critics or critical. Like Schüssler Fiorenza, she raised questions about the political and other work of the rhetorical work of writing. All scriptures were for the woman who demanded to be called Sojourner Truth problematic for her insofar as they threatened to fix her “substance,” or

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complex self. She was reported to have said in response to one who wanted to write the story of her life that she was never “ready to be writ up” because of the control writing might have over her image. She searched/sojourned for a different epistemics—her own—and with such to take charge of what she called her “substance.” So she turned to a recent invention in photography—cartes de visite—in order to produce in the manner she desired what she termed her “shadow,” what she seemed to have understood as her projected public images (see fig. 13.1). The projected shadow—likely reflecting and reacting to gendered and racialized/racialist/racist images of the times4—she assumed control over in order to protect her “substance,” the self she knew and held back from the gaze. In this larger arena of the media (or mediatization, of communications or the scriptural, including scriptural-izing) understood more broadly, she recognized and exercised her agency to contest and raise questions about and demand certain requirements in terms of how she would be represented and projected.5​ This was quite serious strategic play having to do with the matter of representation. It was a kind of intervention into standard representations (of Black peoples, Black females, for sure); it was a signifying on scriptural

Figure 13.1  A “carte de visite” of a sort: a photograph of Sojourner Truth, photographer unknown, 1864. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division. “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”

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productions, with their typical gross construals or accentedness or exaggerations of Black life. The representations that Truth arranged/produced were multiple; different; “powerful and ambiguous” destabilizers of scriptural depictions. Sojourner Truth’s refusal and refutation of and resistance to meaning as/of the scriptural/the rhetorical were at the same time imaginative expansions of the forms and politics/agency of representation. Such expansion as a result of her own agency and interests necessarily had to include the layeredness of her humanity—that is, where and how she complexly stands among modern world men, women, and nations. Anything less—in terms of rhetorics (or the scriptural as the broader category and phenomenon I prefer to make the focus of analysis)—was to be considered small stuff, not worthy of being read. This type of politics and psycho-logics remains a potentially powerful touchstone for late modern agency, critical orientation, and practice. A major point to be learned and passed on here—a major part of what it means to be oppressed in the modern world has to do not so much with physical oppression, although it surely remains, but on ever more subtle fronts and terms one finds the constant problem of being overdetermined, defined, signified, scripturalized. Resistance, taking ownership of oneself must entail waging battle in kind—that is, figuring out how to escape the trap of meaning laid by modern dominants or domination. The arena in which such trap is laid is in what Truth called the “shadows,” that is, the arena of (the making of) images, of masking, what M. Taussig termed “’’constructionism,’making things up,” and grasping agency “to live subjunctively.”6 I should like to think that for Schüssler Fiorenza of the 1987 Address and Schüssler Fiorenza before us in 2018 interested in “ethics of interpretation” there is agreement that there is nothing more important than fighting, against the obfuscating tactics, and for strategies of escape or maronnage7 so as to assume in a world defined by mediatization and overdetermination/over-meaning and scripturalization of bodies, especially Black bodies, a decentering, to be sure, and with it some great measure of determination for the historically humiliated body and the “shadow” it projects. NOTES 1. Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, “Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship,” In Journal of Biblical Literature 107, no. 1 (1988): 3–17. 2. See her essay, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas and a New World View (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). Also in an effort to take stock of recent developments, see James Whorter’s essay, “How the N-word Became Unsayable,” New York Times, May 2, 2021.

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3. See according to Celeste-Marie Bernier, Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Translatlantic Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 382n 78, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Sojourner Truth on the Press,” in History of Woman Suffrage, vol 2, 1861-1876, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper (New York: Susan B. Anthony, 1881), 926–28. 4. So according to Augusta Rohrbach, “Profits of Protest: The Market Strategies of Sojourner Truth and Louisa May Alcott,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (The New Press, 2006) 5. See Celeste-Marie Bernier, Characters of Blood, Fig. 21. 6. Mimesis and Alterity: A Peculiar History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). 7. See Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987).

Chapter 14

American Constantine

“Ah, Constantine, how much evil you gave birth to, not in your conversion, but in that Donation.” So wrote Dante (Inferno, Canto 19) in the fourteenth century about the fabrication, the “fake news,” that helped consolidate and justify the worldly power of “the Church,” now the churches (with the Reformation as refractions of social, ideological, economic, and political formations), in the history of the Western colonial and even post-colonial world. The idea of the “donation” turned around the “fake” notion that the fourth-century emperor Constantine had granted or handed over to the church some of the worldly or political authority and power then thought “naturally” invested in the emperor. Naturalization of such fabrication—the “Big Lie” of the period—required strategic and careful and sustained manipulation of what cultural critic Michel Foucault called “discourse,” freighted shorthand for signs, symbols, images, texts (scriptures). Foucault also aptly and pointedly argued that “discourse” represented weapons of manipulation toward naturalization, a kind of “violence we do”—to things and each other. Fast forward, to June 1, 2020, in Washington, D.C.: Donald Trump, at the time president of the United States, made himself an American Constantine by performing for us what I should like to name American scripturalization— a violent regime of signs and symbols, scriptures. Crass, classless, creepy— his performance of mimetic scripturalization, of the regime already firmly sedimented in the historically Bible-drenched America, was all of these. In front of St. John’s Church—an easily recognized site-symbol of the American nexus of church and state as registration of power—our clownish but dangerous American Constantine performed religious “scriptures” through the office already granted him by political “scriptures” (the Constitution) (see fig. 14.1). As our American Constantine redivivus, he thereby appeared with his awkward handling and showcasing of the (U.S. protestant-inflected, 230

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already sanctioned, made dominant or authoritative by dominant figures and formations) scriptures to “donate,” to arrogate—to us as part of the drama, but really (back) to himself!—the authority or power of the religious sphere.​ The entire performance—of American-style mimetic scripturalization— was so hapless, so simplistic, so much the atmospherics set up by the carnival-barker, the reality TV persona, that Trump has paradoxically and (as usual) unwittingly provided opportunity for critical thinking about how such fabrications and naturalizations have worked and continue to work as a kind of violence in the modern world. Normally such “white men’s magic”—as I have preferred to call it, with its scrip​tural​izati​ons/n​atura​lizat​ ions/​hiera​rchic​aliza​tions​of race, gender, class, and so forth—requires a bit more behind-the-curtains work, complete with occluding rites, bright-colored robes or other vestments, and obscuring exegesis. But with this most recent mimetic stunt our, American Constantine has shocked many to the core, provoking harrumphs from all quarters and in all sorts of media and genres—in amorphous odes to love as alternative; in all too expected (self-styled liberal) churchly denunciations; in political-tribal denials and/or loud silences. These responses were deemed necessary, registering heightened levels of anxiety because the stunt lowered the threshold for discerning the work of the magic: it helps us to see how ridiculous and how fragile and “fake” all of it is. And it provokes some of us into considering how important it is going forward to put focus not on exegesis, but on deep and wide (critical, transdisciplinary) excavation, of the psycho-socio-patho-logics and politics of the

Figure 14.1  Donald J. Trump Holds a Bible for a Photo Op at St. John’s Episcopal Church, June 2, 2020, after forcefully suppressing protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police officers the previous day; photo by White House photographer Shealah Craighead, in the public domain.

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phenomenon and dynamics of the performance of the scriptural, the regime of scripturalization. Only sustained focus on the problematics of the latter will help us understand how we have been scripturalized, the deep wounding effects of scripturalization, what we are as a scriptural formation; and how we have come naturally to “read”—Black bodies (on the streets and elsewhere); and the gestures and otherwise incoherent soundings (from our performing reader-in-chief), as examples we cannot and must not avoid these days—with rather powerful consequences. I’m with Dante—Constantine, Constantine, how much evil we have enabled you to do!

Chapter 15

White Men’s Fetish The Black Atlantic Reads King James (2015)

The year 2011 was the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible (KJB). The anniversary was marked and celebrated in myriad ways all over the world, and with a kind of giddiness throughout the Anglophone world. As a scholar of the Bible, I was invited to participate in several events—from London in the United Kingdom to Memphis, Tennessee to San Francisco and Claremont, California, not more than five minutes from my office at the time.1 The programs that I knew about and participated in and those beyond my participation and physical attendance seemed to strike the same basic theme and tone, even as they may have differed slightly in their structure and in line up of participation. I wager that even if they remained generally unarticulated or unexplicit, few participants misunderstood what were the underlying expected tone and tenor of and political orientation to the events. No matter what the field or disciplinary identification—in no particular rank order: biblical scholars, theologians, literary critics, and social and cultural historians seemed to have abounded—The KJB was celebrated without qualification or hedging as the most significant and influential of books in the English language. Difference may have obtained only around reasons offered for—and some implications and ramifications of—its status. The matter of the financial sponsorship and ideological-motivating support is important. It is clear that the National Endowment for the Humanities made a commitment to support the celebration in relationship to the protocols of applications for financial support for the initiatives, programs, observances of colleges and universities and related institutions around the country. That we may seem to have here the old mystery regarding the phenomenon of the chicken-egg priority is enough to make my point that the NEH-sponsored scholarly and high-civics-minded panels around the country in regard to the 233

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King James Bible celebration, although seemingly independently generated, were actually of one large source with one large interest. I am aware of another sponsorship source very much worth referencing here. The Society of Biblical Literature, the U.S.-based largest scholarly organization of biblical scholars in the world, seems to have collaborated with the Nida Institute, the research arm of the very well- endowed American Bible Society, in sponsoring KJB-focused programs in 2010 and 2011.2 There is of course no problem with such collaboration—except I, as participant, did not apparently get or internalize the message about the subtext in the observance of the text that is the KJB. My participation in the SBL-Nida Institute programs did not square with the agenda: “it does not fit” were the words—or words and silences to that effect—communicated to me by the SBL official collaborating with the Nida Institute to seek book publication of the remarks of the program participants. It had become clear to me on each occasion of program participation, quite some time before the official muttered such words to me, that my contribution did not fit the program, did not properly read the subtext. My contribution? It focused on the “Black Atlantic,” specifically and poignantly, on the “Black Atlantic” “reading” of “King James.” Now I should like to make clear that I do not think the lack of fit had to do simply with the focus on Black folks; I suspect that such a focus was not unwelcome—in the convoluted politics of self-ascribed academic and civic high-mindedness. There is plenty of evidence that the few programs that recruited black folks into the celebration were genuinely welcoming. And I do not for one moment think I was the only participant, of whatever ethnic background, thinking thoughts that did not quite fit the program, but I can only address memories of my thoughts and feelings. I think the anxiety was already felt and made evident—among various audience members throughout the year of observance and celebration—that my participation did not sufficiently register recognition of the “manifold greatness”3 of the KJB. My remarks tended to begin with a critical unpacking of all the major standing categories and handles in my chosen theme, as well as those that had become a given part of the world-wide celebration. It was also especially important for me to make clear how I understood and used “King James”—not as historical figure, exalted or its opposites, but as synecdoche for the discursive (-psycho-social-political) regime I have come to refer to as “scripturalization.” This was not what the celebration as envisioned by any committee or group in any locale called for.4 I have also come to agree that my participation in the discussions did not fit. There was too much of a conflict of interest. The sharp point of conflict lay, on the one hand, in the generally uber-celebrationist baseline attitude and judgment—“manifold greatness” no less!—as unacknowledged

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white-mirroring, as unrecognized white-culturalist-self-congratulation; and, on the other, my focus, turning around an altogether different theme, “like a laser beam,” and in that key that I would like to think approximates what Amiri Baraka had in mind when he promoted the “scream,”5 and in channeling political advisor James Carville’s proclamation about focus (in his case, on the economy) in political campaigns, I cried (to myself!) as both affirmation and refusal —“it’s scripturalization, stupid!” It’s not the text, not the text’s soaring rhetoric, not the more or less accurate or more or less fascinating or quirky culturalist translation it represents, not the claims about universal truths it makes, not the proclamations about it as culturalist achievement. What the “scream” for me was and is still about is a different orientation to interpretation itself, using “scriptures” to think with; it is about constructing and advancing an intellectual project and initiative—using scripturalization as touchstone and baseline—that offers a challenge of a future for critical interpretation far beyond what is generally known as biblical studies. This project I call signifying (on) scriptures. The matrix and safe space for it is The Institute for Signifying Scriptures.6 A few prefatory remarks are in order regarding some of the key terms and concepts I trade on so as to aid understanding of my assumptions and general orientation: first, by evoking in the title the “Black Atlantic” I am following Paul Gilroy in referencing a “modern political and cultural formation [that] transcend[s] both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.”7 I add here that such formation cannot be understood apart from the violence of Atlantic world slavery that caused the dispersion. My focus here is more carefully delimited, including mostly the anglophone world of such a formation, which is itself only a part of the larger African diaspora. Second, I have in mind the historical and ongoing demonstration of particular kinds of agency and active world-interpretive work and dynamics in connection with such formation, not a text as cultural canon or artifact or in any case focus of celebration. My focus is on the texture of formation, on formation as a texture; my interest is critical-historical. Third, with the term “reads” I am referring to psycho-social-cultural and political practices, analysis and critique, the work of signification, of “signifyin(g)” (on) self and the world. Gates, SM.8 Fourth, and finally, “white men” and “King James.” Both these categories are synecdoches, freighted abbreviations for dominant discursive formations and systems, with all the cultural politics and power dynamics appertaining thereto. Some may recall that Terry Jones, Koran-burning Florida pastor and director of the poignantly if not ironically named Dove World Outreach Center of Gainesville, dominated news headlines around the world a few years ago. Finding himself on center media stage, Jones indicated repeatedly that he was opposed only to “the radical element” of Islam. Jones’s behaviors

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in connection with the Koran-burning I suggest open a window onto some problems and issues that beg to be addressed in a year devoted to the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. The violent rhetoric and gestures associated with Jones should make us all wince and shiver; this has been the reaction on the part of many who have been reminded of Jones. But as scholars, critics, and thoughtful citizens, we should also take careful note and raise many questions and issues—painful, hard questions and issues that go far beyond the usual uncritical rhetorics of anniversary celebrations. For example, we should want to inquire about the extent to which Jones’s rhetoric and gestures are a mirror projection of Jewish-Christian Western or Western sentiment or “radical element.” Does it take, I should like to ask and in so doing gesture to students of comparative scriptures, a “radical element” to know—and hate—a “radical element”? And in spite of all the drama and trauma Jones and his tiny circle of sectarians tapped into and exacerbated throughout the world—utterly confounding and frustrating the pleadings and work of military officers, diplomats, national and world leaders—how is it possible for them nonetheless to be identified not as exemplars, not as mirror projections, not as standard bearers, but, strangely, only aberrations, of historical Western Jewish-Christian traditions? With the demonstration of a type of street histrionics if not street violence, forcing local and U.S. political and military officials to grow tense, why is it that Jones’s circle, his nation, his religion, his holy book, is not considered “of the Devil”? If, as lawyer and critical legal studies scholar Patricia Williams argues in her column that appeared in the progressive journal The Nation (April 25, 2011), entitled “Axis of Fundamentalism: Gainesville to Mazar-i-Sharif,” that Jones puts the Koran on trial as if it were a “golem, a real defendant embodying all of Islam,” why is it so difficult—except, perhaps, most interestingly and chillingly, among mullahs in Afghanistan and other places—to analyze his tradition as, according to Williams, the “reified homunculus of institutional American force”? This question along with the complex of problems it raises, I suggest, is one of the most significant facing critical thinking for our time. How could it not be so—again following Patricia Williams—given the capacity for both Dove World Outreach in Florida and the mullahs of Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan to “link radically narrow worldviews in a fashion so sudden, so powerful and so complete that it’s almost like atoms smashing”? How can we not refocus and reorient our critical tools and skills, protocols, and questions in the face of a situation in which “citizens in the Middle East use Twitter and Facebook to democratize theocracies [and] religious extremists in the United States and South Asia use precisely the same devices to instantiate 900-year old hatreds and reimpose a premodern order”? What does it mean to think about the King James Bible in this discursive climate?

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Jones and many other Western moderns and some of the Afghani mullahs and many other Muslims may actually reflect the same orientation—to the holy book. I mean here not simple samenesses or points of commonality in connection with those oft-used but seldom problematized designees “people of the book,” or “children of Abraham.” These do not reflect the complexity of comparison that we require. What I have in mind here is commonality in terms of a set of assumptions about and corresponding cultural practices and politics around texts/books and of “the holy book” or “scriptures” as center-forming object or site. The holy book or scriptures is for those within such circles, shall we say, enchanted—divinity complexly located/sited/in/ registered as text, as psycho-socio-culturally coded materiel. Such a claim about materiel, normally un-self-reflexive, is, of course, quite fantastical. And historically, it has often led to power-tripping of the most serious kind—that is, to ideological power dynamics in the form of radically exclusivist and authoritarian (“authorized”) claims, presumptions, stakes, and positions and behaviors. In such circumstances—in what I would term scriptural civilizations—those presumed to be Other​s—“pa​gans”​/“inf​idels​”/“ku​ ffar”​/“dalits”—ma​y at first have been held in contempt and recognized by dominant formations, such as a Christian Holy Roman Empire or an Islamic caliphate or Brahmins, on the quite arrogant presumption that (unread/notreading) Others have no standing or rights, no strategies for world mastery as reflected in their lack of facility with recognized complex traditions in the form of scripts or scriptures, textualization/lexicalization of some sort.9 But after some lapses into curiosity and other strategies of dominance, these Others were sometimes approached and engaged even if only to be ultimately devalued as part of a self-serving scheme of hierarchialization. The reality is that Jones’s fundamentalist violent rhetorics and gestures as part of the cultural practices associated with his holy book are recognized to be what they really are—that is, a construction made powerful that is doxa-logical, what Bourdieu refers to as the system that contains things undiscussed and taken for granted in society and culture.10 Notwithstanding the already and still potential revolutionary leveling effect of the instruments and portals of contemporary cyberspace, what Jones represents is mostly unrecognized due to the nationalist/imperial force in which Jones is located and which he rather complexly symbolizes and projects. Part of what it means to be dominant and ensure continuation of dominance is the capacity to mask and obfuscate the reality—or at least the obviousness—of the dominant arrangements, structures, relations, dynamics, and terms. Tightly coiled and naturalized arrangements make dominance difficult to recognize, much less resist. In order to see some powerful historical and ongoing implications and ramifying effects of the normally unquestioned doxa that are associated with

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Pastor Jones, including the King James Bible (as part of the larger system of scripturalization and as conceptual place holder, metonymic of Western culture and its discourse and power), I propose that what is needed is peripheral vision, ex-centric perspective and its critical insight. My ongoing research interest in a broader comparative-cultural-critical history of scriptures is focused on the sites of social and cultural formation (lieux de memoire). On these sites are found practices we call scripturalizing; they are productive of scriptures—texted and meta-textual. I am interested in a critical history of the invention and the uses of scriptures. I am convinced that a compelling even if not the only appropriate framework and starting point for such a history is the beginning of the modern era, a period in which the foundations of our social tagging and identities were laid and forged. This is after all the era that has “signified” me and my tribe as the “savage,” “black,” “Negro,” “colored,” “African,” and so forth, and in poignant complement to such signification also invented a collection of texts, as “scriptures,” “the Bible,” “the Word of God,” King James Bible, and so forth.11 Although some of the names of these two categories may actually go back much farther in time than the onset of modernity, there is no avoiding the reality that the determinant names, categories, formations, cultural practices, politics and social psychologies that mark nearly all of us have their origins in the early modern era of the first contact. Historian of religion Charles Long has set forth the issues that we must confront from the first contact more forcefully than anyone: . . . through conquest, trade, and colonialism, [the West] made contact with every part of the globe. . . . religion and cultures and peoples throughout the world were created anew through academic disciplinary orientations—they were signified. . . . . . names [were] given to realities and peoples. . . ; this naming is at the same time an objectification through categories and concepts of those realities which appear as novel and “other” to the cultures of conquest. There is of course the element of power in this process of naming and objectification . . . the power is obscured and the political, economic, and military situation that forms the context of the confrontation is masked by the intellectual desire for knowledge of the other. The actual situation of cultural contact is never brought to the fore within the context of intellectual formulations. . .12

Anthropologist Michael Taussig makes much the same point, but also stresses the possibilities that the initial forced contact subsequently opens up for critical signifying agency on the part of those first signified on. In the context of volatility and instability such agency is not, he warns, an inevitable result. Yet he warns that the tide turns, with dramatic potentiality:

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. . .from First Contact time . . . to Reverse Contact now-time . . . the Western study of the Third and Fourth World Other gives way to the unsettling confrontation of the West with itself as portrayed in the eyes and handiwork of its Others. Such an encounter disorients the earlier occidental sympathies which kept the magical economy of mimesis and alterity in some sort of imperial balance.13

In addressing the confrontation of the dominant West with the “raced” Other, one can hardly avoid a consideration of the concept of the fetish. The term we get from the Portuguese fetico, obviously from the charged field of first contact. The discussion about the fetish in the critical literature of many different fields and disciplines is voluminous and wide-ranging and layered and fascinating, if not always clarifying.14 One social science critic has argued that debates have revolved around states of critical consciousness, “the imputation to others of a false understanding of the divisions between human and nonhuman, subject and object, an error that threatens human agency.”15 It is easy in wading into this discursive thicket to be pulled in many different directions. I have found helpful an argument made by literary critic Srinivas Aravamudan. As he addressed the issue of the function of the fetish in the context of the initial contact between the dominant West and the Other, Aravamudan is clear about where and how intellectual energies should be focused: “Rather than worry about its epistemology we ought to acknowledge the role of fetish as pragmatic application . . . Modernity . . . is a perspective that distinguished fact from fetish and truth from error”16 Summarizing and following the theory and challenge of French theorist and social scientist Bruno Latour, Aravamudan suggested that scholars instead orient themselves “in favor of a perspective from amodernity . . . [that] tracks the subject’s capacity to make do (fait faire) with the fetish, a process that dispenses with questions concerning belief and instead concentrates on those oriented around practice.”17 Practices, uses, functions, effects—not the truth-claims about or within any collection of texts, not the lexical meanings of any text-part, not even the celebration of the literary splendor of one collective of texts—are my interests. I should like to explore the matter of the psycho-social-cultural and political meaning of the meaning of the collective that is the King James Bible, using the Black Atlantic—ex-centric formation if ever there was one—as analytical wedge. What I require is an interpretive framework that will facilitate the deep historical and interpretive excavation that will help me see more clearly what conditioned the practices and orientations and forms of consciousness that are part of the history of the Black Atlantic’s engagements of King James. I have chosen the late eighteenth black Atlantic figure Olaudah Equiano and his self-described “interesting narrative” as the larger framing story, the

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historical-discursive site that serves as entry point for the needed peripheral, ex-centric vision for excavation of the Black Atlantic—of which I am part. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself18 has since its initial publication in London in 1789 been read and interpreted on both sides of the Atlantic for many different purposes and publics—in literary and cultural criticism; in eighteenth century English social-cultural history; in the history of abolitionism; and in black studies and African diaspora and slavery studies.19 As one of the earliest and most successful and widely known Black Atlantic writers in the English-speaking world, Equiano was made to be for the English-speaking black Atlantic world a powerful freighted symbol and heroic figure. His life story is seen to register with sensitivity and complexity of the types of struggles and hardships and possibilities facing black peoples in the dominant North Atlantic worlds. Beginning with what his learning to read and write (in the language of the dominants, in his case, in English) means, it has been especially important in interpretation to safeguard Equiano’s story as the first truly epic story of and by a modern black Atlantic figure. It has always mattered that Equiano’s/Vassa’s story be viewed as significant and that Equiano/ Vassa be viewed as heroic. Among Black peoples, on both sides of the North Atlantic, as well as in (anglophone west) Africa, there has long been a need for Equiano’s/Vassa’s story to be a story about Black survival and heroism. There is no doubt that his story came to be seen as desperately needed—for a lot of reasons—by his Black Atlantic successors. I count myself among them. It is partly because I was aware of how strongly Equiano’s story registers in political and ideological terms across fields and disciplines and groups in the history of interpretation that I made the decision to make use of his story in my research. But I find him to be important not so much in terms of having all the right answers to my questions or the strategy for the correct political-economic-ideological course for Black survival and thriving. I find him significant because in his story is one of the early if not the earliest efforts to identify and face with creative and artful sensitivity and passion the major questions, challenges, and problems involved in being a “stranger,” a Black and enslaved person, in the North Atlantic worlds. This is done through the telling of life story that is also a powerful interpretation of the social-cultural situation that he as Black stranger and “white men” as dominant parties (and others) negotiate (or not). Equiano’s/Vassa’s narrative is particularly “interesting” for the historian of religion for (at least) two important reasons: First, the story rather dramatically opens a window onto the origins and the practice of the thinking that has come to be known as the history and comparative study of religion in the modern world: Equiano/Vassa poignantly and somewhat sarcastically, I think, depicts himself as the

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missionary-ethnographer, sometimes the insider, at other times the outsider, chronicling, reporting, and criticizing different cultural and religious traditions, their sentiments, practices and special sacred objects, all as a part of his artful telling of his life story. He showed himself to be a student of religion and culture, complexly positioned to convey his critical but also rather creative tendentious English-inflected protestant observations and perspectives. It is precisely the manner in which Equiano/Vassa throughout his story differently positions himself as here and now the insider devotee and then and there the outside critic looking in that makes his story always so interesting for the scholar of religion. Some religious practices and sentiments are seen as dramatic examples, dripping with sweet irony, of fetishization, the un-selfconscious practices and sentiments of primitives (“my countrymen,” “Eboes,” “Indians”); at other times religious practices are associated with the rational and mature faith of a mature and sophisticated people (the English foremost; Europeans on a slightly lower level). It is precisely Equiano’s/Vassa’s reflections on his positionality, especially regarding things religious, that has to be investigated with care and that may prove to be one of the most important keys to understanding him, his consciousness, and the issues he addresses. Second, because of the manner in which Equiano/Vassa figures himself as focal point of contemporary moral and political-economic crises brought on by violent conquest, disruption, and enslavement, he makes himself a compelling figure in any attempt to understand modern existence and selfconsciousness, including, obviously, Black Atlantic existence and coming into voice and consciousness, about which for the times in which he lived we know precious little. He figures himself in his story—as mature narrator—as qualified insider (“almost an Englishman”) having been outsider (“stranger”=slave) looking in, the one to whom initially the English books did not “speak,” yet one who is at the point of the telling of the story, in possession of—and is self-possessed in complex relationship to—the supreme (English) Book, the Bible. This (rhetorical and visible in the form of the famous frontispieces that were produced) Equiano (as bourgeois protestant lay religious “almost an Englishman” gentleman) signifies pointedly. Although Equiano was in many respects somewhat unusual in some of his experiences, his “making do” with the Bible (understood by him as nationalist-cultural fetish) was and remains fairly typical of Black folks’ “making do” with the North Atlantic worlds they, whether slave or “free” (the latter always and everywhere in the eighteenth century throughout the Atlantic worlds understood in highly qualified terms on account of widely and contradictory codes and laws); up north or down south in the Americas; Christian or Muslim or traditional tribal, had been made to undergo. With its sometimes comical, sometimes sad, always poignant vernacularization of the white dominant English culture, Equiano’s story provides the outline

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for a layered history of Black North Atlantic representations, gestures, and mimetic practices. In Equiano’s life-story, scriptures as books are signified on as means by which English and North Atlantic worlds in general are signified on, insofar as Equiano understands that the dominant social and political structures in place are built around the Bible, drawing justification and power therefrom; so he proceeds to construct his life story in signifying/mimetic relationship to such arrangements. The Black struggle for survival and freedom and acquisition of power are understood by Equiano/Vassa to turn around awareness of and response to the dominant culture’s (mostly unrecognized, unacknowledged) fetishization of the book, especially the book that is the Bible. Equiano’s narrative can serve as a wide portal to an understanding of some of the issues behind the issue involving Pastor Jones and others caged in scriptural civilizations. His narrative tutors us and provokes and disturbs us in respects far beyond what we have even begun to fathom about some of the assumptions—about knowledge and knowing, communication and power, among so many other things—that subtend the construction of scriptural civilizations, including and beyond the modern West. It is worth taking note of a famous story in the middle of the narrative. The story is often called the “talking book” story but is better designated as the non-talking book story: I was astonished at the wisdom of the white people in all things I saw . . . I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how all things had a beginning; for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent.20

As Gates has reminded us, the origins of such a story may be traced to colonial Spanish America—in a specific context of first contact.21 But it is important to note that in oldest layer of such sources the story is used in order to make the point about the superstition and irrationality and illiteracy of the “black” or “Indian” other. In contrast, in some of the anglo-african or Black slave narrative traditions, the story is for the most part made to suggest something about the plight and struggles of the dominated, their efforts to gain voice and authority on their own terms. This story summarizes much of Equiano’s/Vassa’s understanding of the function of the book in the English or larger white world. The object that was the book was seen to be the key to knowledge and power in the land of the white men. So much was this the general popular understanding that the

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character that Equiano develops in his story is depicted as performing scriptures—in the tradition of white men. Consider this incident in which Equiano finds himself in a situation much like Columbus: Recollecting a passage I had read in the life of Columbus, when he was amongst the Indians in Jamaica, where on some occasion, he frightened them, by telling them of certain events in the heavens, I had recourse to the same expedient, and it succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations. When I had formed my determination, I went in the midst of them, and . . . I pointed up to the heavens. . . I told them God lived there. And that he was angry with them, and they must not quarrel so; that they were all brothers, and if they did not leave off, and go away quietly, I would take the book (pointing to the bible), read, and tell God to make them dead. This was something like magic . . .22

Of course, the book is the Bible, at that time quite likely King James’s Bible (or Version, or some mediating edition of it). Whether or not it was the KJV that was directly referenced is less important than the work that white men make books, in general, the Bible, in particular, do for them. In addition to the fascinating image of Equiano/Vassa holding that is the frontispiece to his own book, this narratological depiction of his imitation of white men’s ongoing operation with the book was a poignant signifying on the book that was English/British-national or white men’s scriptures. It seemed to function as fulcrum/matrix of psycho-social power. That Equiano/Vassa analyzed the situation and phenomenon in this manner is made clear from a passage that has not received much attention from interpreters. It is the passage—occurring much earlier in the narrative, in his chapter 1—in which Equiano/Vassa describes the traditional operators and operations of divination in his homeland. In the larger context of the narrative, the passage actually sets up a kind of ongoing comparative anthropological analysis of Igbo culture and English culture or white men’s world (if likely, not through first-hand experience, but as imagined/remembered/related): Though we had no places of worship, we had priests and magicians, or wise men…they were held in great reverence by the people. They calculated our time, and foretold events, as their name imported, for we called them Ah-affoeway-cah, which signifies calculators, or yearly men, our year being called Ah-affoe . . . They practiced bleeding by cupping, and were very successful in healing wounds and expelling poisons. They had likewise some extraordinary method of discovering jealousy, theft, and poisoning; the success of which no doubt they derived from their unbounded influence over the credulity and superstition of the people . . .23

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After chapter 1, Equiano’s/Vassa’s narrative continues in other terms to compare the two worlds. These worlds are argued and presumed to be more alike than the presumed readers are likely to assume. These two worlds, Equiano argued, are fundamentally alike, in that both turn around some understanding and operation of “magic”—that is, in regard to some operations or objects in the world that shapes and controls the people. But it must be noted that the term “magic” was referenced thereafter in the narrative—more than ten times—to describe the white world.24 This emphasis makes understandable the point of the (non-) talking book story: the “magic” with which the character in the narrative threatens the natives has to do with the book that is the Bible. Such magic is understood to subtend white men’s world. The use of the terms “magician,” “priest,” “method of discovery,” “calculators,” “credulity,” and “superstition” in the description of Igbo society in chapter 1 serves to set up poignant comparison of the Igbo system of knowledge to that of the white men. The point of comparison is essentially the use of a sort of magic—through systems and forms of performance, masquerade—as fount of knowledge and power. It is the book that is understood as white men’s magic. Around the book the system of knowledge in relationship to which the center is fixed, social power is arranged, from which social power emanates. That is what “King James” represents. Equiano/Vassa represents an early example of historical and ongoing contemporary attempts within the Black Atlantic to imitate, signify on, critique, interrupt, reframe, extend, the phenomenon that the King James Version of the Bible represents and advanced. These attempts that extend from Equiano and his near contemporaries to the present in the twenty-first century can be seen in myriad types of representations, performances, and construals. Examples include the slave narrative, certainly, but also the folk sermon, the devotional ritual of folk religion, the novel, some rhetorical speech patterns, social formations of many types, and the publication of home-style versions of the KJV. The latter, as may be seen most dramatically in Equiano’s narrative, is used to register that which is authorized, that which is power, the center. And as the center is registered or performed, it is subject to interruption, reframing, critique, amendment by glosses. This is the stuff of an interpretive history. In sum, in order to name, analyze, and check the practices of Terry Jones (and other like-minded Western scripturalists) what among other things is needed is a clean mirror:25 this is what Equiano’s narrative is—a clean and disturbing mirror, a haunting. There are no white men—except to speak of, as did Equiano, at points in veiled and, at other points in, paradoxical terms. As he shows us, none of us, and all of us, may become (almost like) “white men,” insofar as whiteness remains the signal of power.

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Yet ex-centrics, those in positions of “marginality,” who are forced to “read” “white men” and their fetishes, are disturbing and interruptive precisely because they help us see not only whiteness as it is performed but also a blackness, a more layered being-not-white. That is how the Black Atlantic reading of “King James”—and other scriptural systems, with Terry Jones being not the exception, but our frightful representative—should be carried out. But reading such reading is only the first step in understanding how the ex-centric and displaced Black self learns through much struggle to read itself into being and through such learning in turn help others to see and read differently. NOTES 1. After first accepting another invitation, to a conference convened by a mixeddisciplinary group, convened by a literary critic, to be held in Ohio, I later opted out of it, in an effort to regain control of my time and research focus and agenda. It was one of two large conferences organized and convened in the United States: The King James Bible and Its Cultural Afterlife, The Ohio State University, May 5 through May 7, 2011; and An Anglo-American History of the KJV, The Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, September 29 through October 1, 2011. Go to www​.manifoldgreatness​.org. Accessed March 1, 2014. 2. SBL and the Nida Institute co-sponsored several programs: see http://www​.sbl​ -site​.org​/meetings​/2011KJV​.aspx. Accessed March 1, 2014. 3. These words refer to “the multi-faceted . . . influence of this landmark book.” They were taken directly from the 1611 text’s dedication to King James: “Great and manifold were the blessings when God made James the king of England.” The Manifold Greatness project, marking the 400th anniversary of the 1611 King James Bible, was jointly produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, with assistance from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. SBL and the Nida Institute also sponsored several programs: see http://www​.sbl​-site​.org​/meetings​/2011KJV​.aspx. Accessed March 1, 2014. 4. An experienced speaker can read shifts in seats and turns of gazes: I recall the program occasion in which silence ensued after I responded to a question from the audience about whether the KJB would be read five hundred years from now. My response, something to the point that it would indeed be read five hundred years from now if English-speaking nations or the Anglophone world still dominated. My comments seemed like much of a disruption of the discursive ambience and orientation to the celebrative mood. 5. See discussion of this phenomenon in Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 204–7.

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6. See www​.sig​nify​ings​criptures​.org for information, including history and programs. The formal launch of the ISS as an independent scholarly organization was to take place just weeks from the time of my submission of the initial version of this essay—in the fall of 2014. 7. See The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 19. 8. Influence here is from H. L. Gates, Jr., Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); and C. H. Long, Significations (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1986), among others. 9. See Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practices in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2012 [1982]), for multi-disciplinary perspective. 10. See P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 164. 11. It might be helpful to read John McWhorter’s NYT essay, “How the N-word Became Unsayable,” reference above in chap 13. 12. Long, Significations, 4–5. 13. Taussig, Mimesis, xv. 14. See Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 16881804 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 271–83; and essays by William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; “The Problem of the Fetish, II,” The Origins of the Fetish,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987): 23–45; and “The Problem of the Fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16 (Autumn 1988): 105-23; and “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 152–85. 15. Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Missionary Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 27. 16. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 274. 17. Tropicopolitans, 274, 399, n80. See Bruno Latour, Petite reflexion sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches (Paris: Synthelabo, 1996), 26, 31. 44. 18. I follow throughout this book the single-volume text included in Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, edited and with an Introduction by Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 19. See Aravamudan’s sketchy discussion of history of interpretation, in Tropicopolitans, 233–88. The literature is voluminous. Among the most important arguments about what and whose side Equiano is on are those found in the following works: Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Wilfred D. Samuels, “Disguised Voice in The interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African,” Black American Literature Forum 19 (1985): 64–69; Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Keith Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies

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of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1988); Susan Warren, “Between Slavery and Freedom: The Transgressive Self in Olaudah Equiano’s Autobiography,” PMLA 108, no. 1 (January 1993): 94–105; Joseph Fichtelberg, “Word Between Worlds: The Economy of Equiano’s Narrative,” American Literary History 5, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 459–480; Geraldine Murphy, “Olaudah Equiano, Accidental Tourist,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 551–68. 20. Equiano, Narrative, 68. 21. See Gates, Signifying Monkey, 162–65, in re: Gracilasso de la Vega, 1617, Historia General del Peru, in re: Atahualpa and Fr. Vincente de Valverde. 22. Equiano, Narrative, 208. 23. Ibid., 42. 24. Ibid., 62, 63, 65; 67; 118; 127; 183–84; 185–87; 190–91; 208. 25. See the recent fascinating use of the concept and elaboration of argument around it in Eric Lott’s Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Chapter 16

The Name the Peckerwoods Gave It St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple and the Scriptural Formation of the Black Atlantic Written in collaboration with Rosamond C. Rodman

Not far from Graceland, Elvis Presley’s homestead near Memphis, lies another “sacred” site, albeit less famous, known as St. Paul’s Holy Spiritual Temple (see fig. 16.1). It was founded and created by Washington (“Doc”) Harris in 1960. Doc Harris, who identified as a “self-ordained” Baptist minister, intended the site to have therapeutic effects for its members. St. Paul’s Temple was conceived by Harris to be “[a]n eternal organization . . . A church.”1 On about an acre of land, St. Paul’s Holy Spiritual Temple, obscured behind a large metal gate, trees, and shrubs, contains many large wooden sculptures painted in brilliant hues. Some of the pieces are so large they seem almost to be small buildings themselves. There are quite a few Christian crosses, but also Masonic symbols, and other decorative elements. Perched in the back of the property are a couple of low-slung and slowly sinking buildings. These also contain Harris’s artworks, or “craftworks,” as he preferred to call them. The indoor pieces feature colorful and painstakingly beaded goats, sheep, airplanes, arks, and rams. Large wooden red hands stretch upward. Mannequins wearing Masonic robes peer out from the corners. In the center of one of the buildings is full-sized dining table draped in a bright red tablecloth, complete with formal place settings (also painted red). Upon a silver platter is a carefully painted and bewigged skull. This material representation of the story of Herodias’s daughter, prompted by her mother to request from Herod the head of John the Baptist, clearly indicates an artist engaged with the Western-inflected Bible (Mk 6:17-29; Mt 14:1-12).​

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Figure 16.1  St. Paul’s Village. Photograph by Judith McWillie; used by permission.

Because of this tableau, and the many direct and indirect references and reformulations of scripture to be found at St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple, the expressive work associated with St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple can easily be categorized as “scripturalizing.”2 Scripturalizing should be seen as something other than a process of match​-the-​art-w​ith-t​he-te​xtual​-refe​rence​ -inve​ntory​ing. Scripturalizing is a set of mimetic cultural practices, laden with dynamics of power, to be considered within broad social-historical and psycho-political contexts and frameworks. Clearly, Doc Harris knew and signified on or played with the Western scriptures he could hardly avoid in his life and in his craftworks. More importantly, for the purposes of this chapter, is how St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple itself serves a case study for signifying (on) scriptures, not because of the many scriptural referents to be found there, but because of the “verbal misdirection” of the site’s (arguably better-known) nickname. For this mis-naming/misreading functions as the obscuring and obfuscating signifier, the phrase that, according to historian of religion Charles Long, “has nothing to do with the context of the discourse, but immediately the conversation must be formulated at another level because of that word or phrase.”3

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That word or phrase is in this case—“Voodoo Village,” or, as Doc Harris’s grandson James Washington “Mook” Harris somewhat poetically and with poignant signification, put it, “the name the peckerwoods gave it.”4 The conferral of the nickname “Voodoo Village” covered over and displaced the engagement with scriptures by Doc Harris and members of the Temple, a signification that “constituted a subordinate relationship of power.”5 It is in this way that the Temple provides the opportunity to observe how signifying (on) scriptures opens windows onto the operations of discourse as power, power and discourse. Not long after Doc Harris founded the Temple in 1960, local reporters began nosing around, seeking the story of and behind the Temple, including its possible social and political ramifications for the area. Doc Harris complied with their requests for information and a tour because he “initially wanted his works to be seen.”6 Harris invited reporters out to the Temple and tried to explain what the Temple was for, and how he conceived of the work he did there. But the reporters did not understand. Although Harris told them that he was creating a church, reporters found this difficult to mesh with their existing notions of what a “church” should be. The dizzying number of sculptures, the bright primary colors, and the mixing of Christian and Masonic symbols seems to have contradicted deep-seated assumptions about church. Church was traditionally inside; much of St. Paul’s was outside; traditional church contained clear evocative and authoritative symbols. Harris’s property contained all manner of images, rendered in seemingly odd ways. Traditional churches did not have quite so much brightly painted wood and strangeseeming shapes. “Church” was supposed to be the projection of a highly evolved and mature culture, dignified in artistry and complex in design, with the purpose being to inspire and strike world-transcending awe and wonder in devotees and outsiders alike. St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple did not fit peoples’ conceptions of what a church was. One reporter even described it as filled with “the exaggerated objects in a children’s playground.”7 The oddity and shock of St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple seem to have triggered such reactions, the most common of which was not infantilizing, but standard-issue racism. Instead of writing about St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple, which is what the founder and members named it, journalists called it “Voodoo Village.” The coining of this alliterative but clueless and insensitive nickname in a local newspaper opened the door to snide and disrespectful attitudes and reactions to the temple. Locals invented scary stories about “Voodoo Village.” Teenagers dared each other to drive by and vandalize the site, throwing beer bottles and shooting guns. Over the years, the legend of “Voodoo Village” began to take shape. People warned each other that if one were to venture there alone at night, there was a chance of being captured and sacrificed in strange night-time rituals.

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Members of the Temple quickly and strongly objected to the nickname. Doc Harris’s grandson, Mook, dismissed out of hand the name as “the name the peckerwoods gave it.”8 Marvin White, a pastor of the Temple, tried a more political approach. He wrote to the editor of the Commercial Appeal, the local white-controlled Memphis newspaper: “Doc Harris did not build a compound named ‘Voodoo Village.’ He built St. Paul Spiritual Holy Temple, a Christian church. Voodoo Village is a disrespectful, false characterization spread by this newspaper.”9 White continued, fingering the real issue in the misnaming by pointing out that the allusion to “voodoo” at the Temple did not quite get at the level of hostile curiosity and harassment experienced by the Temple owners and members: Beale Street merchants publicly offer voodoo trinkets and books of spells. Yet there are no clandestine visits to their establishments in the dark of night. There are no blaring automobile horns, no beer bottles thrown and no pistols or shotguns being fired at any of them as it is the case almost nightly at Saint Paul Temple. One would think that if voodoo was the motivation for such uncivilized behavior, dealers of voodoo paraphernalia would have more bullet holes in their doors than we who cleave unto none but Christ.10

In other words, it was not just voodoo as tourist titillation that drew the reaction to the Temple, it was something else that seemed to cause such a hostile—and sustained—reaction. Over and over, the founders and the members explained that the temple was a site devoted to Christian worship. Doc Harris was a high-degree Mason, as is his grandson Mook. But neither had any connection to Vodou, a complex and highly evolved Haitian religio-culturalphilosophical system that is part of the larger complex of African diaspora religious systems and formations. Yet, once the name “Voodoo Village” was coined, it took on a life of its own. Voodoo in vernacular parlance in the United States has come to serve as an umbrella term for “primitive beliefs and practices involving zombies, wax dolls, and exotic spells celebrated clandestinely by Blacks who, inebriated with blood, enter into ecstatic and frenzied states of consciousness in which their bodies are invaded by supernatural malevolent powers.”11 The use of the term “voodoo” conveys unmistakably pejorative connotations, even among Haitians and other black diaspora communities. “Voodoo” has become, in fact, encoded shorthand for anti-black racist discourse, “a venue for the expression of more-or-less undiluted racial anxieties, manifested as lurid fantasies about black peoples.” The etymology of “voodoo” or, more precisely, its spelling, reveals that the term was transplanted from the Haitian colonial context into the North American one to reconfirm the idea of the “inherent and inherent and uncultivated savagery of Blacks, not only in Haiti, but throughout the world.”12

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In the late eighteenth century, a French colonial, the lawyer M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, seems to have coined the word vaudoux to “denote both the deity and the cult devoted to it . . .mainly among the ‘negres Aradas’ from the Fon-speaking region of West Africa.”13 After the successful Haitian revolution in 1791–1804, in which slaves overthrew their French overseers, “vaudoux receded from the literature” as Haitian government officials worked to showcase their modern nation.14 At the mid-point of the nineteenth-century, vaudoux returned, this time more fully characterized as villainous, partly due to pro-slavery interests in the United States in the antebellum years, but also out of national and religious tribal territorializing (with the Catholic Church linking of vaudoux with Satan worship). The British minister to Haiti published his memoirs of his time in Haiti by linking rumors of cannibalism with Vodou. By 1927, an American, William Seabrook, wrote the highly popular novel, The Magic Island, in which practitioners of “black magic” in Haiti created zombies.15 The shift in spelling and geography and sentiment are important. During the period leading up to and following the U.S. Civil War, the spelling of the word vaudoux dropped from usage. Local Louisiana papers begin to refer instead to voudou. “Voudou appears routinely in English-language newspapers in New Orleans until well after the Civil War.”16 Then it changed again: According to Pettinger, in 1888, The Journal of American Folklore featured an article that asserted that voodoo had replaced both voudou and the earlier vaudoux. This shift in spelling is not simply a transliteration of the French word into English. Voodoo cannot be mistaken for an English word; it cannot be broken down into familiar morphemes, and indeed its oo sound and internal rhyme aligns it (for imperial ears, at least) with the language of children and savages (cf. gris-gris, juju, mumbo-jumbo). Vaudoux, the other hand, looks and sounds like a word of French derivation.17

In other words, voodoo replaced vaudoux as the post-slavery U.S. both rationalized and ratcheted up violence against former slaves after the Civil War. The French spelling of vaudoux situated it within a European linguistic and cultural context that was not altogether flat and simple, but the U.S. spelling—voodoo—seemed to signify in violent terms ignorance, infantilization, racialization. Nothing was good or worthy of nuanced consideration. This linguistic violence was only one tactic that was very much part of a new regime of racist practices, laws, cultural, religious, and economic responses that followed the Civil War and Reconstruction in the era known as Jim Crow (1860s–1950s). The Jim Crow period, with its full throttle white aggrievement ideologization, encouraged wide expression of contempt for people of

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African descent. During these years, African-Americans experienced many and sundry forms of violence, from the physical (a sharp rise in lynchings) to the political (enacting of severe and broad-based segregation statutes and laws). Voodoo, spelled as such, can fairly be placed within the history of Jim Crow politics, ideologies, and practices.18 The word voodoo got new life in 1980 when then-Republican candidate for President George Bush (the elder) used the term “voodoo economic policy” to castigate opponent Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics.19 Ronald Reagan won that presidential election, appointing Bush as his vice-president. Since then, Bush’s famous epithet has taken on a life of its own in the culture, with many media references to “voodoo economics” or “voodoo politics” and the like. The academy seems to have applied it just as energetically as the media. A casual search through library catalogues reveals a host of references, from voodoo hermeneutics to voodoo science—ad nauseum. This practice signifies much more than rhetorical play; it is serious stuff having to do with what Toni Morrison has one of the characters in her novel Beloved calls “dirty[ing]” a people—“anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind . . . [and] dirty you.”20 It is applied all too freely to communicate the negative, the questionable, superstitious actions and things, most frequently paired adjectivally with other words to communicate disapproval and disrespect.21 Black peoples and their traditions and orientations are usually, even if not in every instance, understood or assumed to be at issue. More importantly, they are used to “think with” about things that are not good, not beautiful, not strong, not noble, not intelligent, and so forth. Here is scripturalization with a vengeance—and as violence. “Voodoo Village” is a phrase that operates as the kind of dirtying of which Morrison speaks. St. Paul’s Temple has no link to Haitian Vodou—except in that provocative sense, ironic both in terms of understandable and coerced denial and ignorance on the part of local African Americans, on the one hand, and ignorance and not a little cruelty on the part of local whites, on the other, in which both represent profound examples of African diaspora religious formation. “Voodoo Village” as moniker does not meaningfully, rationally, or logically name or describe the phenomenon that is St. Paul’s Holy Temple. Yet it conveys a truth about the racialism that subtends American culture in particular, the West more generally—the truth about that anxiety that is felt among white dominants when subalterns arrogate to themselves the right to name and represent their own social-cultural systems and institutions, with their own ideas, images, rhythms, and all such on the terms of their orders of mimetics and their reverberations and mirrorings. The psychosocial and cultural political dynamics involved are complicated and complicating. Nicknaming St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple “Voodoo Village” is analogous to the anxious and dyspeptic responses to Chris Ofili’s

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painting depicting the Virgin Mary. Discussion and information about these responses to Ofili’s painting comes from two sources, American historian David Roediger and art historian W.J.T. Mitchell.22 As discussed by Roediger and Mitchell, these responses to Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary can serve as a helpful analogy to our observations about the misnaming of St. Paul’s Temple. Both are instructive in terms of the signifying (on) scriptures practice and project, especially as these cases sharply evoke the “purification of language”23 as a process that grants legitimate interpreters and legitimate interpretations to insure the holding of the center. In both cases, we find artists of African descent wrestling with the center—center/canonical texts, images, teachings, sensibilities, aesthetics. Scripturalizing is a useful and apt term to convey the dynamics, the struggles involved in contesting and reinterpreting, signifying on, and making useful the given canon or center. Chris Ofili’s painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, originally part of the 1999 Brooklyn Art Museum (BAM) show called “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” for a number of reasons, caused great controversy. Ofili is an Afro-British painter well known for his inclusion in the “Young British Artists” (YBA). He studied at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art. “His paintings are concerned with issues of black identity and experience and frequently employ racial stereotypes in order to challenge them.”24 Ofili commonly makes use of blaxploitation images and gangsta rap to upend racial and gendered stereotypes. In 1992, he was awarded a traveling grant that enabled him to study art in Zimbabwe. There he got the idea of using dried elephant dung in his paintings.25 In 1998, Ofili won the prestigious Turner Prize for contemporary artists, and all of the paintings he submitted for consideration for that prize contained elephant dung. His painting called The Holy Virgin Mary was not in any way unusual within the context of his corpus. Ofili himself identified the painting as “simply a hip-hop version of highly sexualized old-master paintings” of the Virgin Mary.26 It is a beautiful painting, which, like his others, takes a deeply textured, collage-like approach to his subject. The painting offended then-mayor of New York Rudy Guiliani: “The idea of having so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick.”27 New York’s Catholic Diocese Cardinal O’Connor chimed in—the painting was effectively “an attack on our Blessed Mother.”28 Neither city nor church official had seen the painting when the declaratives were offered, so their remarks are unsurprisingly inaccurate about the painting. Guiliani and O’Connor’s remarks are however fascinatingly accurate about white anxiety, because they provide the response of what might be considered almost hyper-white anxiety. That such responses come from persons whose ethnic backgrounds were in the not too distant past were deemed less-than-white—Giuliani as Italian-American and O’Connor

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as Irish-Catholic—is ironic and poignant.29 Their defensiveness about the sacredness of “our” blessed mother and description of the painting as shitsplattered reflects their amped up guardianship of hard-earned whiteness and its canons. Mayor Guiliani was not the only person to register discomfort with Ofili’s painting. Hillary Clinton, at the time running for the New York Senate, explained that she would not view the show because she had “the feeling that I know many New Yorkers have that there are parts of this exhibit that would be deeply offensive.”30 Retired New York resident Dennis Heiner was among them. Two months after the show opened, Heiner went to BAM. Plopping down heavily on a bench near the Ofili painting, Heiner feigned illness to distract a guard. The guard turned from his post to call for medical attention for Heiner. Heiner scampered forward as the guard did so, ducked behind the panel of plexiglass position in front of the painting, and pulled from his jacket pocket a squeezable plastic bottle filled with white paint. Squeezing white paint onto the canvas, he used his hands to smear the paint over the canvas. He succeeded in covering much of the head, neck, and shoulders of the Virgin Mary. Asked why he had done what he did, Heiner replied, “It’s blasphemous.”31 While much of the press coverage of the incident linked Heiner’s vandalism with Ofili’s use of elephant dung, one wonders what really upset Heiner. Was it really the small brown spiral in the approximate location of a breast? Might it have been the collage-like cut-outs of labia and buttocks sprinkled liberally on the canvas? Or, as David Roedinger asks, why “did no one initially mention that she was Black and that Ofili was Afro-British?”32 These questions cause a reconsideration of Heiner’s actions and his charge of blasphemy both. Was the real problem that the Virgin was rendered in African-like aesthetics or that the artist used elephant dung and magazine images of women’s buttocks/genitalia? The long history of constructing the Virgin Mary as a demure white woman makes one wonder.33 Also, Ofili’s painting features only her without a babe, unlike many if not most of the “old masters’” representations, as if to challenge the connection between virginity and baby. Her African attributes, studded by the images of the culture’s hypersexualization and focus on black women’s buttocks, her singularity and direct gaze—in these ways, Ofili’s painting refuses rather than embraces the white scripturalizing of the Virgin. His arrogation of his right to scripturalize in African and African diaspora modes and to signify on white dominant scripturalizing practices and politics—the Virgin Mary as icon of femininity and of whiteness itself—seems to have been too much for Guiliani, Clinton, and Heiner, and those for whom they understood themselves to speak. Art historian/cultural critic W.J.T. Mitchell has suggested that the especially acute response to the Ofili painting occurs because sacred text/images

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rest upon direct investment: “The logic goes like this: the Madonna’s image is offended by being rendered in excremental materials; if her image is offended, then she herself must be offended as well. If the thing I respect or love is insulted, then I am insulted.”34 Ofili’s painting is an example of scripturalizing as a type of alternate divination. Mitchell is quite right in saying that the Ofili painting is an excellent example of the difference between being offended by an image (in the way one might be in reaction to violence or pornography) and “outrage over an act of . . . violence to an image.” The image of the Virgin Mary is in so much of white dominant culture “sacred” insofar as it is shared, deeply invested in setting up a cultural projection. So if the Virgin Mary is offended, then I—the representative “I” of dominant culture—am insulted for her. Mitchell notes that Heiner had a number of options available to register his objection to Ofili’s Virgin Mary. He could speak out against the painting by holding a placard and marching in front of the museum, or even to slash it with a knife or throw eggs at it. No, Michell says, Heiner “very carefully and deliberately covered Ofili’s composition with white paint.” Yet, noting the relative ease with which Heiner’s thickly smeared water-based white paint was removed from Ofili’s canvas suggests to Mitchell that Heiner’s act should be seen as “not so much an act of vandalism as a defense of the sacred image of the Madonna against its sacrilegious defacement by this painting.”35 Indeed, Mitchell mentions but discourages the potential for reading Heiner’s whitening as having racial overtones.36 Perhaps, it was not so much the choice of paint color that required reading, but surely the racialized enjoinment of the “I” who holds the image sacred did. Mitchell seems to assume the “sacred image” is beyond racialization or other than it. In fact, that is precisely part of the sacralizing/scripturalizing. What is sacred about the image of the Madonna is, in part, her whiteness. By “whiting out” Ofili’s painting, Heiner’s gesture was not one of veiling, but of erasing; not one having to do with modesty, but with controlling and diminishing Ofili’s representation. Ofili is not allowed to speak, to represent, to signify. To Heiner, and to those who consciously and unconsciously identify with a certain image of the Virgin Mary, Ofili “dirtied” “their” Madonna. “She” required their protection; she needed defending. Against what, exactly? The answer clearly involves in no small part the collective efforts to keep whiteness centered and other representations outside, margin, specious, other. The image of “her” image—held collectively by Heiner and other spokespersons—was some how de-sacralized or “dirtied” by Ofili’s efforts. In this way, Mitchell may be right to suggest that Heiner’s choice of paint color should not be overdetermined. But that hardly takes racialization out of the process of sacralization/scripturalization. Indeed, it is the assumption that the sacred somehow exists without, beyond, or outside

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the human processes of racialization that functions as one of the components of the mystification that is sacralizing/scripturalizing. When one steps outside the tight interpretive circle or dares to call it that, as Ofili did, the Center and those who identify (with) it as scriptured/sacred, react. Interestingly, Heiner’s wife, Helena, who encouraged him to act against the “abusive” painting, explaining that her husband was “trying to clean the painting.”37 Risking both the pitfalls of the politics of comparativity—and the potential for getting sidetracked by the fascinating and celebrity-studded details of the Ofili painting—we suggest there is a poignant analogy to be made between Ofili’s painting and St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple. It is simply this—naming St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple “Voodoo Village” functions much like Heiner’s painting over: both are reactions to difference and to departures from centered (white) scriptures or canons. Both reactions function to cover over—render illegitimate—the “reading” of canonical images from a nonwhite, ex-centric perspective, either in the form of literal white paint, or linguistic pejoratives. MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference presents the results of a collaborative research project exploring how communities of color in the United States in their mimetic scriptural practices both mirror and challenge “America” in part through their “misreadings” of the culture, including its canonical scriptures and arrangements and orientations broadly understood. “Scriptures”—in both narrow and elastic terms—served as analytic wedge to better understand minoritarian community and identity formation and politics, as well as the terms and consequences of the construction of “America.” One of the issues—indeed, the first issue raised in the research protocol had to do with naming: “How does the community name and understand itself today?. . .How has its self-naming/-understanding changed over time?”38 Clearly, such question are apt in regard to St. Paul’s Spiritual Temple, not least because the name its creators gave to it has been refused, covered over, and misdirected by referring to the site as “Voodoo Village.” There is, of course, a long history of names being taken away and other names conferred, especially in African-American communities.39 The reactions to both St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple and Chris Ofili’s painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, are strikingly similar and instructive about some social-cultural dynamics and politics that beg more critical consideration. If scripturalizing is understood to refer to the processes by which the authoritative images and texts and arrangements and practices are constructed and deconstructed, what we are confronted with are power issues and dynamics. “Voodoo Village” and white paint, then, can be read as processes of signifying on scriptures. When forms of expressiveness do not faithfully reproduce or project the dominant white script and its politics, the responses

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to it should be considered part of the violence—discursive-rhetorical political-economic, and so forth—that is part of the process of maintaining the regime of the center—“scripturalization.”40 That St. Paul’s Holy Temple can be positioned as (oppositional, resisting) part of the regime of Western-inflected scripturalization means that it is not one of those exotic, odd-ball phenomena associated with what is assumed to be the hyper-religiosity of Black folks. Instead, it is and should be researched and analyzed as a striking example—with all the contradictions and complexities involved—of the mimetics, the creative imaginings, performances, forms of expressiveness, strivings, and interpretations of the world that mark the long and complex fraught history of the Black Atlantic, and such as part of the making and unmaking of the human. NOTES 1. Grey Gundaker and Judith McWillie, No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 20. 2. The term “scripturalizing” is the effort to “fathom how ‘scriptures’ developed, what work we make them do within and across the societies and cultures, and with what historical and perduring political consequences.” Vincent L. Wimbush, “Introduction: “TEXTureS, Gestures, Power: Orientation to Radical Excavation,” in Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 3. This practice involves more than one level of engagement or interpretation—the lexicalexegetical, as modern literate westerners are formed to think, is the most basic. Among other levels or types of engagement, what seems evident in this situation is a reading of lexical readings of the dominant world, with its un-self-reflexiveness in terms of race and social-political and economic station. We have to do with a kind of play on—thus, signifying on--this obsession. 3. Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 1. 4. See Cory Dugan’s essay in James Perry Walker’s Voodoo Village: St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple (Federal Axis Corporation, 2008), 38. 5. Long, Significations, 2. 6. Judith McWillie, correspondence with Rodman, April 22, 2014. 7. Quoted in Grey Gundaker/Judith McWillie, No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 20. 8. Walker, Voodoo Village, 38. 9. Quoted in Gundaker/McWillie, No Space Hidden, 22. 10. Ibid., 23. 11. Leslie G. Desmangles, “Replacing the Term ‘Voodoo’ with ‘Vodou’: A Proposal,” Journal of Haitian Studies 18, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 26.

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12. Adam McGee, “Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture,” Studies in Religion 41, no. 2 (2012): 232. 13. Alasdair Pettinger, “From Vaudoux to Voodoo,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 40, no. 4 (2004): 415. 14. Ibid., 416: “No doubt one reason vaudoux receded from the literature is that the practice itself was suppressed by successive governments following independence in 1804.” 15. Spencer St. John, Hayti or The Black Republic (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1884). See also William Seabrook’s Magic Island (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1929.) The illustrations alone provide evidence of heightened anxiety and prejudice out of control. 16. Pettinger, “From Vaudoux to Voodoo,” 419. 17. Ibid., 420. 18. Pettinger is careful to note that “voodoo never reigned supreme in Englishlanguage accounts,” and that “vodou is gaining acceptance.” Even so, Pettinger argues, “it is important to recognize that voodoo, vaudou and vodou are not words for the same thing” Voodoo is used “much more indiscriminately to hint at the presence of any form of magic or witchcraft, and usually not dependent on any assumed knowledge of Haiti at all.” Indeed, Pettinger re-emphasizes that voodoo “is a more exotic word in English than vaudou is in French, and for that reason has acquired the extraordinary rhetorical power touched on at the end of the previous section.” He here refers to the in-text quote on the previous page. Pettinger, “From Vaudoux to Voodoo,” 422. Adam McGee would seem to be in agreement about the extraordinary power of the word. “I would argue that there is a distinct religion called by the nearly identical name of “voodoo” – which is made no less real [than actual Haitian Vodou] for the fact that it has no actual practitioners and, for all intents and purposes, does not exist except in the imaginations of millions of people who have been exposed to American popular culture.” McGee, Haitian Vodou and Voodoo,” 238. McGee here builds on and refers readers to Laënnec Hurbon’s “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald Cosentino (Los Angeles: University of California Los Angeles, Fowler Museum, 1995), 181–197. 19. When reporters asked Bush about those words in 1982, two years into his vicepresidency, he vehemently denied ever having used that phrase. “Well, what I said back then . . . it’s very hard to find . . . er, actually let me start over. One, I didn’t say it . . . Nobody, every network has looked for it, and none can find it. I challenge anybody to find it.” Without having to look too hard a reporter indeed unearthed a video of George Bush using exactly those words, “voodoo economics,” in 1980 at a speech at Carnegie Mellon University. “1982 Voodoo Economics,” www.NBCUniversal archives​.c​om Web. http://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=o8hnM6xNjeU 20. See her Beloved (New York: Vintage, 1987), 295–96. 21. See recent efforts to change this in Leslie G. Desmangles, “Replacing the Term “Voodoo” with the term “Vodou”: A Proposal,” Journal of Haitian Studies 18, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 26. 22. Specifically, David Roediger’s chapter “Smear Campaign: Giuliani, the Holy Virgin Mary, and the Critical Study of Whiteness,” in his book Colored White:

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Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 27–43; and W.J.T. Mitchell’s book (which was recommended to us by art scholar/ author Ronne Hartfield), What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), especially chapter six, “Offending Images.” 23. See on John Locke’s arguments applicable to this discussion, Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36–40. 24. “Chris Ofili,” MoMA, “The Collection,” https://www​.theartstory​.org​/artist​/ ofili​-chris​/artworks/​#pnt_1 25. Art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote the following: “Ofili has said that, ‘the paintings themselves are very delicate abstractions and I wanted to bring their beauty and decorativeness together with the ugliness’ of the dung, so that people ‘can’t every really feel comfortable with it.’ In other words, the dung is supposed to be disturbing, its purpose becoming at least double-edged, like some of his allusions, which Ofili uses to play with a largely white art audience’s assumptions about black culture. ‘It’s what people really want from black artists,’ he has explained. ‘We’re the voodoo king, the voodoo queen, the witch doctor, the drug dealer. I’m giving then all of that.’ Michael Kimmelman, “Of Dung and Its Many Meanings in the Art World,” The New York Times, October 5, 1999. Web. 26. Quoted in David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 28. 27. “Sensation Sparks New York Storm,” BBC News, September 23, 1999. Web. 28. Roediger, Colored White, 28. The use of the first-person plural here provides another clue. 29. Roedinger comments more fully on this issue, specifically the ways in which “Italian American whiteness was bound up with the images of Madonnas in fascinating ways, some of which could not have been lost on Giuliani. In Italy…depictions of the Madonna and other waits were, and to some extent still are, black,” thus positioning him “to see the need to draw tight racial boundaries surrounding Mary.” Roediger, Transcending Whiteness, 35, 37. Roediger also points out how other such immigrant groups were “regarded as less-than-white upon their arrival in the United States” (34), referring to the work of Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). 30. “Hillary steps into dung art row,” BBC News, September 28, 1999. http://news​ .bbc​.co​.uk​/2​/hi​/entertainment​/459846​.stm 31. Robert McFadden, “Art attack—Pensioner causes sensation at New York gallery by defacing Ofili painting,” The Guardian, Dec. 17, 1999. Web. http://www​.theguardian​.com​/world​/1999​/dec​/18/1 . The photo was taken by a famous photographer, Phillip Jones Griffiths. http://iconicphotos​.wordpress​.com​/tag​/phillip​-jones​-griffiths/. Because of the quality of the photos, some suspected that Griffiths was warned in advance of Heiner’s intention, an accusation that both Heiner and Griffiths deny. 32. Roediger, Transcending Whiteness, 28.

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33. See Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Vintage, 1976), a fascinating work that tracks the development of different Virgin Marys in different historical, geographical, political, and social contexts. 34. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 135. 35. Ibid., 136. 36. “It did occur to some commentators at the time that the real offense might have been the blackness of the Madonna, an affront to those who are accustomed to blonde, blue-eyed images of the Virgin. In this case, Heiner’s whitening of the image takes on a racial overtone. So far as I know, no one had the effrontery to say this publicly.” Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 137 n. 27. 37. Roberto Santiago, Mike Claffey, Bill Hutchinson, “Virgin Mary Canvas Defaced in Brooklyn,” New York Daily News, Dec. 17, 1999. Web. 38. Vincent L. Wimbush, ed. with the assistance of Lalruatkima and Melissa Renee Reid, MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5. 39. Research on names and naming in the Black Atlantic is widely dispersed. Generally, discussions are divided by place names (toponyms) and personal names or eponyms. A few notable discussions may be found in Walter Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); John Thornton, “Central African Names and African-American Naming Patterns,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 50, no. 4: 727–42; and Trevor Burnard, “Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no. 3 (Winter, 2001): 325–46. 40. See extended discussion in V. L. Wimbush, White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Chapter 17

“We Will Make Our Own Future Text” An Alternate Orientation to Interpretation (2007)

I propose in this chapter to make a modest first-step contribution to what is thought about in terms of the ongoing political-ideological uplift work of African Americans. I should like to model such work through a questioning of and challenge to the traditional and still dominant discursive project still centered in colonial-era humanistic studies, including religious and theological fields, to be sure—the textual commentary. I hope here to offer at least the outlines of a different orientation and approach that builds on other earlier work and arguments, including those found elsewhere in this book. Every discursive formation, every instance of the discursive is political. My basic argument is that the commentary as intellectual project is psychopolitically and intellectually very problematic, not because of any specific substantive arguments on the part of commentators—such arguments may run widely within a certain spectrum—but because the commentary necessarily forces a certain delimitation and qualification of questioning and probing. It forces the interpreter to begin not (honestly and self-reflexively, at least) in his or her own time, not in or with his or her own world situation, but in another one—that (one that is imagined or assumed to be) “of the text.” This orientation to the beginning or first step in interpretation is critical. To be sure, since Origen, biblical exegetes or commentators have tended to range widely with their questions and issues. But the point here is that a dangerous game is set up whereby the commentator feigns to be faithful “to the text” while dancing with another set of (unacknowledged and unannounced) issues. This game can—in fact, has—become so twisted and dizzying that it is for the most part and for too many interpreters no longer even recognized for what it is; the game and its effects are acutely and profoundly and with devastating social-political effects obfuscating. There are high stakes in such 262

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practice for peoples on the periphery. At the very least, it keeps them distracted, unable to focus on their mostly pressing world situation. I am not recommending that texts not be engaged. What I am suggesting is that we question taking up the master’s play in relation to the master text. I want to challenge all to think differently about and orient themselves differently around interpretation, about what to interpret, where and how to begin, how to proceed, with what approaches, and with what agenda. My own way of addressing this phenomenon has been—at least in the early stages of my career—through focused attention on the history of the conjuncture of African Americans and the Bible. I continue in this chapter with the questions that have haunted and inspired and challenged me—not so much about the meaning of this or that text but about the phenomenon that is this specific historical conjuncture that entails the invention and uses of texts as scriptures. What psycho-social-cultural work is done in relationship to this phenomenon? With the focus on scriptures and peoples, I show my interest to be in the archaeology and politics of interpretation. The phenomenon we call “scriptures” and the people we call African Americans are for me emblematic of the problematic of interpretation and consciousness. So in this chapter I want to address some of the larger implications and ramifications of such an interpretive history. What does it teach us—about African Americans and other peoples, and about “scriptures”? About interpretation? About interpretation and power—psychosocial, sociocultural power? About interpretation and/as consciousness? About who and what we are, how we are, what we do—including the range of the complex good and ill as consequences and effects—as interpreters in relationship to “scriptures”? What does it mean to have and to engage scriptures? I begin—perhaps somewhat defiantly—not with a text but with social (viz., African American) textures. My readers will know well that on account of his prescience and sharp sensitivity to issues having to do with interpretation and/as consciousness, I find still challenging and very useful, if not in fact necessary, as an expansive, critical, and sensitive perspective on the existence, conscientization, and challenges of persons of African descent on the United States W. E. B. Du Bois’s language and argumentation found in his classic collection of essays, Souls of Black Folks, originally published in 1903.1 Having discussed his arguments elsewhere, I shall not focus on his arguments here, except to remind the reader that about the attention he gives to the concept of veiling, especially in relationship to the slaves’ consciousness as it seemed to be reflected in music. I have also been known to argue that Toni Morrison is another critical mind without whom one should not proceed with thinking about Black folks’ conscientization. Regarding the veil, she deepens and widens Du Bois’s metaphorical rendering. For her, the veil has to do not merely with racial segregation and othering. Given her different times and the different genres of her

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work and play, she argued the limitations that music and literature that was the slave narrative represented for development of consciousness. Regarding music, she argued in an interview that “it kept us alive, but it’s not enough anymore.”2 No surprise that she favors literature: she has made it clear that she thinks that fiction—in particular, the novel—can now speak most directly and powerfully to and for the people having migrated to the cities: I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction . . . for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people . . . The middle class at the beginning of the industrial revolution needed a portrait of itself because the old portrait didn’t work for this new class. Their roles were different; their lives in the city were new. The novel served this function then, and it still does. It tells about city values, the urban values. Now my people, we “peasants,” have come to the city . . . We live with its values. There is a confrontation between old values of the tribes and new urban values. It’s confusing. There has to be a mode to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization.3

Morrison here seems to see music, including the music Du Bois discussed, as a continuing part of the veiling, needing to be ripped. The veiling here is that which keeps black folks from probing their interiority—on their own terms. Such a problematic and the way outward (or inward, really) seem to be precisely what Morrison addresses in most of her novels, most profoundly in Beloved.4 Interpreters generally agree that Beloved is a story about a haunting, the haunting of those who are survivor-heirs of the “sixty million and more” made to undergo the Middle Passage (and to whom the book is dedicated). It is a story about the failure on the part of all of us to remember those who died in such an experience. It is about why and how the memory of those who died is prevented, held back, and made difficult or impossible to embrace. Why the memory persists. Why it hurts, traumatizes. It is about consciousness, the impact the haunting has on the black soul, on the black consciousness. It is about the impact of the loss of memory, the prevention and refusal of memory upon the black soul may be reconstituted, healed, and united. So it is also consciousness, interpretation, and articulation about the terms on which, and framework within which, the Black self, the one who is survivor-heir of the Middle Passage may now look back, remember, interpret, negotiate, and speak to the world about what it thinks, how it feels, and how it travels and experiences. It is about “ripping the veil” that prevents the black self from remembering and healing itself. It is a pointing in the direction in which the psycho-social-cultural stitching, weaving work can be carried out.

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Although it is clear what character in the book does the haunting, not entirely clear in every part of the book is the matter how the haunting is to be understood, that is, how the haunting works, why it persists, what the haunting is all about. It should occasion little surprise that I would notice and want to exploit, as very few other interpreters have, Morrison’s epigraph, which is taken from Paul’s letter to the Romans (9:25), and which also supplies the name of the character for whom the book is named: I will call them my people, Which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

No argument needs to be made about the importance of epigraphs in summing up a writer’s agenda. What I want to stress here is the importance of the epigraph in naming the issue behind the (narrative plotline) issue. It is important that the larger context of Paul’s statement (actually a quotation of Hosea 2:25, with word agreement with the Septuagint of 1:9) be established. The larger discursive-argumentative context is Paul’s effort to address the believers at Rome of mixed background, viz., Jews and Gentiles, regarding what appears to be, in light of the success of the Pauline mission, an ironic, even paradoxical twist of fate and circumstance—the phenomenon of the Gentiles. Since the promise of God’s favor was given first to the Jews, how has it come about that the non-Jews, and the Gentiles, are turning in what seems to be great numbers and so many Jews in comparison seem not to be accepting God’s “call”? Paul’s tries his best to clarify matters; it does not work. His arguments are halting, elliptical, and confusing.5 I think it important to note that the end of the larger section, Romans 9-11, in which the prophetic statement that Morrison used for her epigraph is found, Paul sums up how he thinks the matter having to do with the turning and selection should be understood: “I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery” (11:25). At the beginning of the larger section, Paul engages in a wonderful play on the word “call” (kaleō) before he draws a conclusion regarding the “mystery.” It is this word and Paul’s play with it—that is, his signifying on it as marker of “hidden meanin’,” of paradox—that seem to draw Morrison’s attention. Morrison seems to have applied the Pauline “mystery” that equated “the call” (as election) and being called “beloved” to her book and black existence. She renders the historical and perduring exclusion and marginalization; the historical enslavement, otherness, and subjugation; and the hoped-for elevation and self-possession in society and culture of black peoples mysterious. Paul’s rendering of Hosea’s being called “beloved” is translated by Morrison

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as black folks’ coming to be loved. So it seems that what is most mysterious is the matter of how they were first enslaved and how they can or may come to be healed, elevated. In Morrison’s thinking—through Paul—black peoples are the Gentiles, the ones thought at first to be outside, at first considered marginals, slaves, in terms of some grand design. And just as a mysterious thing happened with the Gentiles of Paul’s day, as even they were brought into the fold, so black folks, according to Morrison, are destined to “called,” to be loved. Morrison presents the challenge of addressing the mystery of Black existence—how it evolved, survival strategies, the power dynamics involved, the self-acceptance. But what is first required (her essays and novels, especially the book Beloved, seem to suggest) is the work of identifying and “ripping the veil.” With Beloved, Morrison makes narratological, thus more complex and emotional, the identification of both the problem and the direction of the healing for the characters. Whatever is Beloved the book, it does not mean in a straightforward manner. The story that is Beloved cannot possibly be represented or understood as a line. And the story that the characters of the story tell is the scrambling of a line. Instead of a line circles come to mind—the characters tell versions or aspects of the same story or they tell multiple stories, stories that are varied and overlapping. For all of the characters, but most especially for the main character, Sethe, language, certainly, the language and narratives, the “symbolic order” of the master, cannot transmit or translate her experience. In order to prevent her from having to undergo the humiliation of slavery, Sethe killed her baby girl. This experience was deemed by Sethe and by all observers to be horrible. But it was also representative. And it was precisely as horrible representative act that it was traumatic, “unspeakable.” It is the master language, the “symbolic order,” that Morrison stresses must be ripped in order for black folks to come to be called beloved. Not just the slave narrative, but dominant Western discourse itself, with its need and tendency to veil the veiling, as Morrison might put it—this must be ripped. This ripping is signaled in the book not only by the multiple repetitive and varied telling of the horrible experiences and haunting by different characters but also by Sethe’s effort finally to come to speech about what happened. It is Morrison’s description of Sethe’s movements as she comes into speech that is important to notice her: “She was spinning. Round and round the room . . . turning like a slow steady wheel . . . Circling [Paul D] the way she was circling the subject.”6 This spinning seems to reveal Morrison’s understanding of knowledge, self-awareness, self-consciousness, critical interpretation in terms of indirection, and fragmentation, perhaps, functioning in terms of therapy or psychoanalysis. It is both critique of master narrative as the reflector and confirmation of fixed position in society and a pointing toward reconstitution and healing. The circling and spinning suggest a critique of and

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resistance to linear discursivity and politics. It also reflects an effort to reconstitute the self. This difference in movement and orientation suggests that the ripping of the veil is accomplished not so much by a refusal to engage language and texts and textuality but a refusal to accord them the power to carry meaning in the same way, on the same terms, that is, in uncritical naturalized terms. Here are the radicalism and power of the interpretive stance taken and shared by Morrison and Du Bois and so many other critics of African American life—that for Black and subaltern critical consciousness, there is no meaning in any Western-translated narrative, script, text, and tradition unless such is first ripped, broken, and then “entranced,” blackened, made usable for weaving meaning.7 The metaphors here and throughout my article are mixed and strange; they rather deliciously and poignantly run amok. Speaking to—“in other words”—is necessary in order to address complexity and pain and trauma. “Ripping the veil” means refusing to think according to and live dreamily within the realm of doxa, the realm of the canonical. It means accessing the sites of memory. Social therapy can begin only when these memories on their own terms—not behind the “veil” of canonical texts—are woven together or “(re) textualized” (in the original meaning of that term) as “scriptures” in critical/signifying relationship to other “scriptures.” And in agreement with writer-critic Ishmael Reed, it may mean, with ramifications most radical, that ultimately we must come to the point of recognizing that agency means “we will make our own future text.”8 NOTES 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989 [1903]). 2. From Thomas Leclair, “The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, Amistad Literary Series (New York: Amistad, 1993), 371. 3. Ibid., 370–71. 4. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 1987). 5. See epigraph. And see Romans 9:22-26 for the larger context: “What if God, wishing to display…wrath and to make known [God’s] power, has endured with much patience the objects of wrath that are made for destruction; and what if [God] has done so in order to make known the riches of [God’s] glory for the objects of mercy, which [God] has prepared beforehand for glory—including us [believers] whom [God] has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles? As indeed [God] says in Hosea, “Those who were not my people I will call my people,’ and her who was not beloved I will call ‘beloved.’ And in the very place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ there they shall be called children of the living God.”

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6. Beloved, 151, 153. 7. “Merely arranged in a traditional Christian problematic…words are ineffectual. Only when they enter into entranced performance…do they give birth to sounds of a new order.” See Houston A. Baker, “Lowground and Inaudible Valleys,” in his Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 106. The entranced performance about which Baker speaks is realized only when there is an addressing of the “lowground and inaudible valleys” of experiences of Black folks. Then the canonical arrangements and structures are exploded, the veil is ripped. 8. See Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, passim [no pages] (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988). The larger context for this provocative statement is worth attention: Jes Grew. . . is a psychic epidemic . . . [It] is seeking it words. For what good is a liturgy without a text? . . . Jes Grew has no end and no beginning . . . Jes Grew is life . . . They will try to depress Jes Grew but it will only spring back and prosper . . . Jes Grew needed its words to tell its carriers what it was up to. Jes Grew was an influence which sought its text, and whenever it thought it knew the location of its words . . . it headed in that direction . . . If it could not find its Text then it would be mistaken for entertainment . . . merely a flair-up. The Blues is a Jes Grew, as James Weldon Johnson surmised. Jazz was a Jes Grew which followed the Jes Grew of Ragtime. Slang is Jes Grew too . . . We will make our own future text.

Chapter 18

Meditation on Disruption (2018)

My comments are less about historical facts and gestures and initiatives having to do with the origins and first phase of the history of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Committee on Underrepresented Minorities in the Profession (CUREMP)—these can be easily enough lined up and recorded and presented—than meditations/musings/confessions on or about what for me CUREMP represented at its conception, on the one hand, what it now, on the other hand, signifies for me and may or should signify hereafter. I do so through focus on a point of Du Bois’s meditation on his own rather long life and career, or really, his reconstruction as scholar—his 1940 meditation on the change from what he calls his years (late nineteenth century, his first appointment at Atlanta University) of commitment to being a “scientist,” fundamentally, a “slave” of the burgeoning qualitative-oriented human sciences guild (sociology), to what he calls “master of propaganda” (covering the early years of the twentieth century, his extra-academic intellectual and social-political work in the Niagara Movement and founding of the NAACP). More about what this might mean in a minute or two. Here are some riveting words from that meditation: At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord’s wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the 269

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University. I began to turn aside from my work . . . Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing . . . My career as a scientist was . . . swallowed up in my role as master of propaganda. . . . My life had . . . its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem. . . The problem of the future world is the charting, by means of intelligent reason, of a path . . . through the . . . intricate jungle of ideas . . . of which the concept of race is today one of the most unyielding and threatening. I seem to see a way of elucidating the inner meaning and significance of that . . . problem by explaining it in terms of the one human life that I know best.1

As Du Bois looks back on his career, he was at a point (at least in narratological terms, the reality was likely more complex) when he was startled and provoked by an instance in Georgia, not far from here he taught and conducted research at Atlanta University, of overt, dramatic physical violence directed at a Black body. When this happened, it “dawned” on Du Bois that in his work as scientist of history and of the social body, as one seeking integration into and validation from (a part of) an academic guild of the human sciences, he was neither compelling nor effective nor evocative, given the anti-black violence that obtained and the ideological framework of anti-black racism that defined that local world in which he found himself, as well as the larger Western world. Even more important, he discovered that that “science” which he modeled/practiced with such earnestness (and partly invented), not only could not address incidents of violence against Black peoples, with its “dumb silence” it participated in and validated the epistemic regime that was ongoing colonialist violence and racialism. But what happened in April 1899 in middle Georgia—the violence made into spectacle against Same Hose—was a “red ray;” it tipped things over. With this event, he allowed himself to be “disrupted” and so to be “turn[ed] aside.” In other words, it provoked him to walk/run away from the academic position he held and the practice of the science that had heretofore defined him. The following month his son died. The classic we now know as Souls of Black Folk was published soon thereafter. A classic propaganda—in the rhetorics and sighs of Black souls—if ever there was such. Well, much more could be mediated on here; you get the point here that is relevant for our interests: As we take time to observe the 25th anniversary of CUREMP, we might also force ourselves to consider what it represents. Disrupting questions aplenty might be raised about our situation. What is this business, our “science,” our profession, all about? Who professes what? To whom? To what end? After twenty-five years, are we sure the breaking into

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the Society is what is called for? What is this Society about? Why should anyone invest in it? Why should peoples of color invest in it? Perhaps, with the embarrassing demographics, it made some sense in the late twentieth century. But what now? What is or may be the “red ray,” the Sam Hose event, in the life of any one of us here who had invested in CUREMP and via CUREMP in SBL? What is the event that shakes us mightily, turns us away—away from thinking about or conducting our “science”? (Or in our case, playing with the text, the text, the text. . .) Is it one event? Or a series of events? 9-11? Trayvon Martin? Ferguson? Philando Castile? Sandra Bland? Violent immigration rhetorics? The harsh racial rhetorics and tactics of the 2016 Campaign/ Election? Or, perhaps, even—actually more slowly over time—it has dawned on you what the Society is and has always really been about. I confess, I have since the 1990s wrestled with these and other questions, issues. My community—in the form of haunting ancestors who in the vernacular are constantly regaling me with the question whether the science I had learned was actually “talkin’ ‘bout somethin’,” which I have always understood means something having to do with matters of life and death. No single event led me to respond as I have in recent years. But the cumulation of haunts, of pokings that awaken, entreat me to come to speech about the “somethin’” I was supposed to be “talkin’ ‘bout.” No effort to disabuse a colleague from Kansas or Durham UK or Johannesburg South Africa that I am, that we are “qualified” is now enough. No new program units performing essentially the same discursive games, only with special modifiers—African American this, Latino/a that, Asian this and that. . . —can be enough. Not for me. Du Bois’s career may not be the perfect one each of us needs to follow in every respect. But there are some powerful challenges and lessons in it. As Du Bois wanted and needed to become a citizen of the academy and the modern research university, with science as the coin of the realm, so CUREMP needed to be experimented with. It was part of a campaign to force concession about a part of the truth about the world. And as Du Bois needed to leave the academy—not simply Atlanta University or Georgia as the convenient flawed institutional or social-cultural site-example—but the academy and its politics of the discursive science as such, so we should be challenged to reconsider commitments drilled deeply into our personal-professional psyches and sense of worth. (Why do we hang on? On account of certification? Visibility? Validation? From whom?) Du Bois continued to be—no, he became more of an intrepid activist intellectual, outside the guild/academy. Most important was his renunciation of—escape from—science. Of course, in the eyes of some others, he did not run far enough away. Zora Neale Hurston is another powerful example of an intellectual maroon from the human sciences. Her now classic 1934 essay,

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“The Characteristics of Negro Expression,” was a signifying act on Du Bois’s SBF. For her generation of young upstarts, SBF reeked of too much interest still in appeasing white folk. She mercilessly riffed on its attempt to represent black-inflected “propaganda.” But she also capped on the practices and politics of anthropology—her field of training—as it had been developed in the early twentieth century, with its fetish for the fetish. Much of her work was a sharp parody of that field and other fields; she performed disruption, interruption of the discourses. Which brings me to this question—what was/is the point of our acceptance of the idea/existence of CUREMP? Was it, a la Ralph Ellison, making the invisible visible? Insuring that we would be included as late twentiethcentury practitioners of the weird type of science that SBL represents? What has been gained? What lost? Was CUREMP a mistake? What is compelling about seeing slightly more persons of color in this circle, given its project and orientation? I suggest, we take note of Du Bois as he traces his sense of need to accept the call to become “master of propaganda” (instead of scientist) to meet the corrosive politics of unacknowledged misrecognized propaganda of the colonialist politics of hierarchy of knowledge. By “propaganda” I think he suggests the imperative of a yet to be named critical studies agenda—selfreflexivity and the wisdom of naming, embracing, and allowing engagement and interestedness to motor and structure criticism. And to make of the object of criticism epistemic regimes and social textures, no more the quest for the merely qualitative (or the analysis of canonical texts and histories). SBF as a total production was conceptualized and structured in this key. My own story is a roiling over the lack of progress within the larger organization—SBL—that created CUREMP in bringing to the table for serious debate what I would name as the problematic of the epistemic status of identity in criticism, whether and to what extent this issue has informed and helped lead to what I am on record, arguing to be the need for the reconceptualization and reorientation of the modern field or project of biblical studies. In spite of the games played with this or that dazzling method or approach, the field is still too much the reflection of and captive to the late nineteenthcentury colonialist project (another way of describing the science about which Du Bois wrote). This project—with its continuing fetishization of text, what I have otherwise and in other places called “white men’s magic”—is not benignly anachronistic but now in our ever more complex twenty-first century global situation defined by discursive propinquity is dangerously and sadly a silent mostly clueless guardian of and apologist for the epistemic regime of modern colonialism and its racialization. Some of you know that I have taken the rest of my career—not retirement—into my own hands, with all the risks involved. Like Du Bois, I find it

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necessary to walk away from full-time involvement in institutional teaching and program/guild work for the sake of turning to reconceptualization and reorientation and the facilitation of new projects, programs, conversations— what Du Bois called “propaganda.” And like Hurston, I too am invested in making sharper the “propaganda” called for in this era by doing what I can to disrupt and signify on the conventional field and its project. My disruption effort—beyond my own personal research and writing—some of you know I call The Institute for Signfying Scriptures (ISS). Few have noted that the very name continues Du Bois’s and Hurston’s play on the pretensions/ claims/politics that mark the orientation of the dominant science into which I was formed—ISS signifies on IAC (Institute for Antiquity and Christianity). This Claremont-based institute is (or was) poignant example of what the so-considered white male avant-garde scholarly turks in the post–WWII-era field until end of twentieth century represented, with its incredibly mimeticfetishizing gestures toward Europe, especially Germany. So then, ISS=IAC (Institut für Antike und Christentum). I would like to think Zora Neale would be proud of the play. In this initiative, that is ISS I am clearly riffing on the claimed but mostly questionable and ironic scientism of the field as it performed in the three or four high places or centers in North America. Even as I peered in and tried qualified participation from Claremont for a short season, I was questioning whether I personally should continue to invest in any of the shows as it was even in the high places reflective of anachronistic, unself-reflexive, unreconstructed, unreconceptualized still colonialist practices, agenda, politics. (Q? Marriage of Jesus? Really?) But I am also challenging all of you to consider whether what CUREMP represents as project that comes out of that agenda without disruption and contestation—real arguments and debates—should have a future. What now needs to happen to turn integration into disruption? NOTE 1. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (ed. H.L. Gates, Jr.; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1940]), 34ff.

Part IV

“I’M BUILDIN’ ME A HOME,” OR, “[I] HAD TO RUN” EXPANSIVE AND SAFE SPACE FOR “COMPOSING” THE HUMAN

Chapter 19

Scriptures Fathoming a Complex Social-Cultural Phenomenon (2004)

Use your imagination to tap into the sights, sounds, rhythms, textures of the following situations, dynamics, and phenomena: • The huehuetlatolli or “Ancient Word” recited with flourish and energy by the “knowers of things” among the Aztecs. • The placement in the exact center of the traditional Zulu village of the usamo or “special place” that houses special objects used to communicate with the ancestors. • The dreams, visions, and rituals (especially the Sun Dance) that enable the Shoshoni to acquire puha (“power”) needed for a right orientation to Tam Apo (Our Father). • The Jewish scribe seated bent over a smooth surface copying with intensity and focus the Torah. • Modern-day reciters of the Quran at the shrine of the sainted Sunan Ampel, in East Java, Indonesia. • Members of Muslim Men’s society parading in the streets of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, carrying posters with a verse from their scriptures reading: “hold fast, all together . . . do not become divided” (3:102). • An Indian boy as part of an eight-year commitment learning phrase by phrase to recite from memory a portion of the Vedic oral tradition. • Buddhist monks in the Thai village of Phraan Muan arising at 4:30am in order to participate in a home-blessing ceremony involving the chanting of the words of the Buddha. • Modern Chinese families at local village temples kneeling and reading sacred texts of mixed origins. 277

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• Divination practices, devotions, ancestral rites observed among modern Japanese as part of the system of mediation for orientation to the “sacred way” and the achievement of the “balance cosmos.” And consider closer to home the following: • A multi-colored mural in Trinity Baptist Church Los Angeles as interpretation of a scriptural rendering of baptism as psycho-social-cultural transformation and healing. • Two of the many objects found and re-contextualized and reinterpreted among members of a community of mostly ex-Roman Catholic monolingual transgendered Latinos in Los Angeles’s McArthur Park district. • The articulation of the prerequisites, practices, politics of exegeting blackness on the part of self-styled Black Gnostics in South Central Los Angeles: And the music—always the music that poignantly carries the psycho-social tunings. It’s a big country: • Country Gospel, “If We Walk in the Light” (1 John 1:7). It’s a small (missionary-inflected) world: • South African Gospel, “The Star and the Wiseman” capping on the story regarding the Wise Men in Matthew 2. It’s a complex world: • Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion”—a riff of Luke’s Magnificat (1:39ff), Mary’s song in praise to God for her being pregnant with Jesus. These situations, practices, phenomena beg critical questions that bring us together this weekend. These questions should help us to enter into conversation and lay a foundation for ongoing collaborative questioning and analysis. My aim here is to press the case for the laying of the foundation, the establishment of a vehicle that will facilitate thinking about and research into the questions having to do with the varied ways that the phenomenon that has come to be called (in English) “scriptures” figures in society and culture— and with what historical and perduring consequences. The primary agenda of such an institute is to serve as an international center that can model an alternate political-critical intellectual paradigm for the study of “scriptures” in different societies and cultures, with particular focus upon peoples of color and among them the persistently disprivileged. The primary focus is to be placed

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not upon the content—meaning of texts, but upon textures—upon the signs, material products, practices, orientations, politics, and power issues associated with the social-cultural phenomenon of the invention and engagement of “scriptures.” So we seek to fathom the histories, the anthropology, sociology, the social psychology, the critical discursive arts, and politics of scriptures. This fathoming represents orientation and agenda different from that generally associated with professional academics and clerics and laypersons who engage in the study of texts they call sacred. This different focus belongs to an intellectually politically insurgent analytical and theoretical framework that has been inspired and made compelling by a shift from preoccupation with the white religio-cultural dominants to the forms of expressiveness of non-white historically subordinated sometimes desperate peoples around the world. The circumstances of such peoples, their social identities, and their ways of being in and expressing themselves in the world can lead to a (re)consideration of some of the most basic normally unproblematized issues, including even the issue of the Western naming and cooptation of the phenomenon of what we might call “scripturalizing.” This different orientation, with its different practices and different agenda—and the new facilitating research vehicle for such—are here referred to as signifying (on) scriptures. “Signifying,” as part of the provocative title of the new research vehicle and its agenda, represents both a different critical mode of engagement and investigation and a modifying characteristic. On the one hand, “signifying” captures the critical mode of engagement and investigation that is different from the various methods and approaches—whether popular or academic, traditional, or postmodernist—that is associated with exegesis or interpretation of texts. It captures a mode of criticism that stops not with quest—liberal, fundamentalist, pietist, academic-guild, and so forth—for the content-meaning of the ancient text and the ancient world. It riffs on the whole enterprise as an all too serious and politically problematic one, as it leaves no object, no practice, or practitioner without the attention that utterly unsettles. On the other hand, “signifying” modifies “scriptures.” It suggests something about what seems to be at stake in the various inventions of the phenomenon. And it suggests something about the ways “scriptures” work or are made to work in society and culture: Their riffing, scoring, capping, upbraiding offices, allowing the wielder to get loud on someone or something are dramatic and provocative. An historical example may help make the point about how the term “signifying” may be applied to the agenda of the new Institute. Seventeenth-century Dutch Lutheran missionary Wilhelm Johann Mueller recorded in the following words his exasperation to the response on the part of the Fetu peoples on the Gold Coast of Africa to his initial efforts to present the Bible to them:

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They do not desire to believe in the almighty Creator of heaven and Earth . . . If one talks to them of God’s miracles and gracious works . . . some of them listen in amazement, but most scoff. If one tells them of the wonders which God performed long ago in the Old Testament, they immediately ask how many years ago it was that such wonders occurred—as if to say, if such a long time has passed, how can one actually know such things?1

Even without their direct representation of events and sentiments, it is dramatically clear not only that this people signified on the “scriptures” presented to them—viz, scored the thing presented to them as the ultimate, discontinuous medium of the sacred—they also indicated clearly their understanding of the newly encountered phenomenon of “scriptures” as a fascinating possible new medium among the media or revelations of the sacred in the world.2 In such responses are to be found the critical orientation for the new Institute. That this might help the Muellers of the world see themselves and their practices differently makes the establishment and agenda of the Institute all the more compelling. The Union Theological Seminary-New York-based African Americans and the Bible Research Project that I established in 1995 and directed there for eight years provided case-study evidence for the theoretical and analytical gains that can be made in research on religion, in general, and sacred texts, in particular, in relationship to signifying cultural practices. In recent years, several scholars have argued that because African Americans and other subaltern peoples have historically, necessarily been persistent critical signifiers both as a part of their own ongoing internal life experiences and in relation to dominant discursive and social formation a turn toward signifying practices in the study of such peoples is very much needed. What the African Americans and the Bible project represented was an attempt to understand the phenomenon of inventing and engaging texts—texts claimed to be unique and mystifying in origins, production, authority, and meaning—in terms of social-cultural signifying practices. Given the orientation of traditional academic biblical studies, with its focus upon the content-meaning of ancient texts and the invention of ancient worlds construed as legitimizing background and matrix for the production of Western theologized truths,3 this project and its orientation was a step not without serious academic-intellectual political implications. To be sure, focus upon the phenomenology of “scriptures” has not been ignored altogether in scholarship. The late historian of religion W.C. Smith was for many years and in many respects the most important because he was one of the most provocative scholars in the phenomenology of “scriptures.” Among his many publications, his book What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (1993),4 became for interested academics the starting focal point

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of the thinking and conversation about the phenomenon. He inspired many students some among us to continue such conversation and work. During the 1970s and 1980s, Smith persisted in prodding and provoking and challenging scholars of the Bible in the West to address the question that was the title of his book. In addition to the investigations into the ancient historical contexts for the texts, beyond the philological and formalist-literary studies of the ancient texts, why, he argued, should not the scholar of the Bible ask what it means for post-biblical peoples to create and engage scriptures? Why should it not be legitimate and reasonable if not urgent to ask what it means for peoples to persist in investing in “scriptures”? Although inspired by Smith’s writing, they were not the final catalyst for the turn I took that leads now to the establishment of the ISS. Smith’s arguments were for me confirmation that my undeclared orientation and thinking up to that point were not totally unique in the world, that I was, as one thinking about the importance of asking questions about what scriptures are, whence scriptures developed, how scriptures functioned, not totally alone in the world. What determined the turn I took—from graduate school years onward— was my persistence in thinking about “scriptures” through the prisms of the experiences and practices and politics that defined the world into which I was born. Without much prompting at all, memories of Sallie Alford Wimbush and Lessie Lynch Rowland, my grandmothers, figures of deep southern soil, who, in spite of their differences, were alike in being like Morrison’s grandmother figure in Beloved, that is, figures who haunt me. The hauntings memories are fluid: I do not retain many whole complex situations in my mind; only the broken/partial haunting situations remain. But as time has traveled, the memories of them have become more clearly focused. And they both have become not so much Bible-quoting figures, but biblical characters, characters who mean. Surely, several histories are confused here—the grandmothers not in terms of the facts about them but as figures I needed to help me figure things out, and those larger psycho-social histories and dynamics that determined us and in which we were all forced to participate. Surely, here is a reason for my quest—not clear-eyed or with a straight line or sharp clarity of purpose; so strange in some respects, so obvious in others—to become a scholar of religion and of the Bible, in particular. To understand these women—whence they come, how and why they survived, what they wrought, what they signified. Even as I was forced in the graduate program I had signed onto to study the “white Bible” and on terms that were decidedly and arrogantly culturally intellectually monochromatic, my thoughts constantly turned to that world, the world of those grandmothers that, for good and ill, had shaped me. This was the world of Sallie Wimbush and Lessie Rowland, that colorful world

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that at first sought, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure and confusion, in many different conflicting attempts, to color-code the Bible, to make it, in the words of ethnographer-anthropologist Zora Neal Hurson, “suit our imagination.”5 But there were along the way some frightening developments: For a number of reasons, especially in more recent times, this world, Sallie Wimbush’s and Lessie Lynch Rowland’s world, in too many places as a reflection of the fervor and high pitched tones of worldwide fundamentalisms, has over the past few years begun re-“bleaching” the Bible, forgetting that in connection with the Bible, certain games are always played; there was also a forgetting about how such games are played. Given the structure of the world, and given where my grandmothers fit within it (Hurston’s sassiness notwithstanding), how could this not have happened? With this phenomenon all around me, everywhere in evidence, even as I was somewhat earnestly engaging academic studies that fetishized an ancient collection of texts and an ancient world behind it as whiteness, I would still need again and again to ask (myself and some select others): Why do Black folks, and other non-centered, nondominant folks, read/use the Bible and other texts they call sacred? Why do they, why do we, engage them in particular ways, on particular terms, and under particular circumstances? How did we come originally to engage them? Why do we continue to engage them? Why does anyone read them? Why do collectives around the world engage such texts? What is at stake in such engagements? What are some of the social-political and psycho-social consequences of such engagements? Naïve—who, after all, was there to advise and offer counsel?—and doubly ironic as it was of me to think that I could pursue my questions in a biblical studies program at what was supposed to be at the time the premier program in North America, such training did position me to push with a certain amount of poignancy certain questions from within the field. Something Smith could not do! Although greatly inspired by Smith’s work, ultimately, I found that I could not make full use of it for the type of agenda I was creating for myself. As comparative and as expansive as it was in some respects, Smith’s work proved to be too narrow in certain other respects. It seemed far too delimited by and focused upon the dominant or major (“world”) religions. And in relationship to or as a direct result of this delimitation and focus, his work seemed little concerned about political issues and power dynamics. In the end, Smith’s answer to the provocative question he raised was that “scriptures” was “relational.” This answer can hardly be wrong; but it is not and cannot be enough. Left vague, the issue of the “relational” with respect to “scriptures” remained intellectually stunted and mystifying, confounding. Smith’s legacy is not in any clarity he brought to the issues, in any answers

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he provided, but in his raising of the question—the simple, pressing, pointed, haunting question—“What is Scripture?” I felt compelled to address the question Smith raised, but I also felt compelled to address it differently from him. I threaded the question not through cultural-dominant world religions and the frozen investigative categories they inspire, but through the cultural experiences and forms of expressiveness of the historically and persistently subaltern, that social political category that (as I learned from students in a seminar on the Bible and the Margins) is still difficult to define for academic discussion, but is easily sometimes palpably and horrifyingly immediately recognized in the larger world that students of religion may try to engage. In response to a gracious invitation in spring 2002 from colleagues engaged here in Claremont in the study of religion, the African Americans and the Bible project was translated to the Claremont Graduate University—a non-sectarian graduate students-only research and teaching institution, with programs in the humanities (cultural studies, history, literature, music, philosophy, the arts, politics and economics, and a burgeoning Africana studies program), among others. In addition, the Claremont Colleges offer a wide range of programs and experts across the humanities and social sciences. Special rich resources among the colleges include the Intercollegiate Departments of Black Studies, Asian studies, and Chicano Studies. And, of course, the Claremont School of Theology offers continuing dialogue with colleagues across the theological sub-fields. That this invitation to take the next important academic-intellectual-programmatic steps with this rather field-scrambling African Americans and the Bible project came not from an old established east coast school but from a school in California inspires— even begs—pondering and explanation. (I leave such pondering and explanation to you for now.) The professorial post I hold in the School of Religion here at Claremont Graduate University, with primary teaching responsibilities for biblical studies, is of strategic importance for the launch of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures. It makes possible creative space for conversation and experimentation in research and thinking and writing and teaching in a field that is for now on the whole indifferent to, differently oriented from, if not is some instances hostile to, the different agenda we may represent. The teaching position and the new Institute are an opportunity to model the different research agenda of ISS and to attract and mentor a new demographic of students. By “new demographic of student,” I mean not only representation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups in the field of biblical studies—as important as this is to me both personally and professionally—but also students with very strong but varied academic-intellectual backgrounds who probably would never consider pursuit of the study of religion much less

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biblical studies except as construed through the agenda in connection with the new Institute. The Institute we launch aims to keep the attention upon textures in general—how societies are formed and deformed in relationship to religious dynamics, and in particular, how texts are positioned to weave social textures, how they are made to form and deform social identities. The agenda includes focus upon the particular colors and patterns of the textures—that is, how particular peoples and groups not generally and complexly represented in the histories and analyses of world-civilizational dynamics shape and reshape their worlds and are shaped and reshaped in relationship to texts, and with what results. With such focus, the proposed research Institute would become the first of its kind to base critical theorizing about religion, in general, the phenomenon of “scriptures,” in particular, explicitly on the historical and ongoing experiences of historically dominated peoples of the world. Western modern theology and the critical interpretation of religion have generally participated in an epistemic system in which meanings are located in a conventional semantic order and are mostly reflected in relationship to authoritative texts. The intellectual and power dynamics associated with such orientation are now clearer than ever before. The tightly controlled almost obsessive focus upon texts and the system of signification upon which texts are constructed severely limit representation. It has the effect of rendering invisible or inauthentic or exotic the complex worlds of vernacular orientations and traditions, both oral and (unconventionally) scripted. We have been reminded by recent scholarship6 that there is among African Americans much more to expressiveness and representation than conventional literacy would indicate. The study of scriptures in relationship to the subordinated among such peoples ought, therefore, to include more than the study of texts as conventional scripts (or, to put the matter differently, the study of interpretation of texts communicated in conventional scripts, with conventional scripts chasing conventional scripts). The issued here is not at all a matter of drawing upon the old opposite, literacy versus orality; rather, it is about the need to come to critical terms with the reality of the wide range of different types of communication, representation, forms of expressiveness of peoples. Because it is clear that conventional literacy and “texts” and the practices associated with such mark the dominant structuring of the world, conventional scripts or texts are necessarily always a major issue to be problematized. Yet the historically enslaved, conquered, desperate peoples of the world—mostly but not exclusively darker peoples, mostly but not exclusively female—represent powerful epistemic, theoretical and analytical alternatives and challenges. Their constructed, more clearly delineated, but sometimes overdetermined and hard to hide, “social identity” can be thought about as having, in the

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terms suggested by literature scholar Satya P. Mohanty, a particular “epistemic status.”7 With mixed always powerful effects. Since that discourse that is Western theology has have long been construed as textual mediation of the transcendent, a radically different orientation can be effected through problematization of the “scriptures” as texts and through an extension if not explosion of the very meaning of “text.” That there has been some attention a given to this issue among some colleagues in theological and religious studies is clear enough, but also clear is that the attention given has not been sustained and there have been no corresponding fundamental or radical changes in academic programs in study of “scriptures.” (I have in mind here something other than the sexy orientation to ancient worlds and ancient texts. The Institute for Signifying Scriptures can and should be understood as signifying on Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, including its European German precursors.) The shift as proposed here in connection with the new Institute may have direct impact upon our understanding of several matters: how different practices associated with interpretation may affect social and cultural formation; how what we term “religion” may be differently conceptualized—in terms of a broad range of socio-cultural signifying practices; how “scriptures,” their invention and engagements, may be seen in terms of primary modern mimetic signifying practices; and how through such signifying practices not only the boundaries and frames and categories of social identity and social relations but also the orientations and infra-politics, especially of non-dominant peoples, who necessarily communicate “in other terms” or “hidden transcripts” may be reconsidered.8 No one discourse is to set the tone or determine the questions of the agenda. Scriptures are too important to be left to scriptural scholars. Yet there is need for someone to beat the drums to call us into a different circle. I have on behalf of ISS accepted this role. But after having called us into the circle, I am/ISS is prepared to have my soundings be one among the many to be heard. The conversation I suggest should begin in response to at least seven—I really tried my best to avoid this number!—categories of questions and issues. These categories of questions and issues can serve as springboards for the conversations. These questions and issues are interrelated and overlapping. 1) Phenomenology and Origins: What is it that we are investigating or theorizing about? How should we think about it? How and under what types of social-historical circumstances did such phenomena originally appear in history? Scriptures are not the same as texts. So what as phenomena are they?

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2) Settings/Situations and Practices: Where are the phenomena ongoing? What are some of the typical settings and situations—past and present— in which the phenomena take place? 3) Practitioners and Practices: Who are the practitioners or performers in connection with the phenomena in the various settings and situations? 4) Material Representations: What are some of the cultural material-physical objects or expressions around which, in relationship to which, the phenomena appears? What are their forms, shapes, textures? 5) Needs and Consequences: Why do people do it? Why so they engage the phenomena? What are some specific psycho-social, social-cultural, political-material needs reflected in connection with the phenomena? 6) Power Issues and Dynamics: Who’s up and who’s down in relationship to the invention and uses of the phenomena? What are some consequences for gender relations? Racial–ethnic relations? For social status differentiation? Sexual orientation? 7) Perduring Themes and Issues: we need not avoid or deny the recurring big themes and issues that inhere in scripturalizing, but we should not allow ourselves to fall back into a position of fathoming these themes and issues apart from the other issues names. SUMMARY I do not claim to have registered here all of the important and relevant questions and issues. I do not claim to have been totally fair to all groups in terms of representation of issues. And I do not even claim to have registered in the most compelling manner the questions and issues included. The corrective and fine-tuning work can and should go on. But we simply must begin the conversation! Our headlines around the world constantly reflect far too much drama, too much pain, conflict, fear, obfuscation, manipulation, duplicity, violence, self-delusion, self-destruction and, yes, also transcendence, illumination, self-discovery, and empowerment—in short, the full range of human strivings for sociality and meaning-seeking—mostly in connection with performance of “scriptures”—for us not to make here a beginning in addressing these questions and issues. In beginning such conversation, we may want to think about a pledge among ourselves, precisely because of what is at stake in the world and out of respect for the accumulated wisdom of signifying traditions. We should pledge to work not simply to deconstruct and de-center (old) “scriptures” only to (re)scripturalize in more subtle and elitest and elusive terms. Nor must we seek now from hyper-critical post-scripturalizing posts and perches and situations to deny to the subaltern one of the powerful mechanisms and

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means by which they have in the past and continue in the present—even in the most problematic and troubling terms and modes of imitation—to engage powerfully and poignantly in the deformation of worlds of pain and trauma and then shape for themselves new worlds. As my friend and scholarly colleague Rabbi Burton Visotzky commented in a conversation with me about the sort of project that brings us here today: “If I want to know a people I want to know what scriptures they read.” I would add that we must also know what “scriptures” are being invented or received, how a people receives “scriptures” and whether and why a people tries to unread or tries to deny reading or having scriptures.” “Signifying (on) scriptures” must signal an agenda not to explain away and do away with “scriptures,” but in the spirit of signifying, to point out the truth and nature and terms of the paradox in human history that first involves the invention and wielding of “scriptures,” then the uses of “scriptures” sometimes in order to continue necessarily to forget what has been done, at other times for the sake of survival if not thriving to undo some of the terms and effects of what has been done. Let us now begin our work, our play, our signifying on scriptures, our collective woofing, scoring, talking smart, loud talking, capping on, riffing—all as a reflection of our reading of one another and of our shared and varied circumstances. NOTES 1. See Adam Jones, ed. and trans. German Sources for West African History, 15991699 (Studien zur Kulturkunde; Steiner, 1983). 2. See John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3. Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World (ed. Mark Golden and Peter Toohey; New York: Routledge, 1996). 4. W.C. Smith, What is Scripture: A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993). 5. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1935). 6. Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 7. Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 8. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Chapter 20

Escape The Launch of the Independent Institute for Signifying Scriptures (2014)

The Islamic Maghreb. ISIS. Justice Scalia’s constitutional originalism. The Qur’an-burning Pastor Terry Jones. The politics of (re-)Sankritization in India. The 2011 celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible in the rhetorical key of “manifold greatness.” The persistent canon wars in the academic fields. The roiling politics of language use and instruction in some public schools. The ongoing manic writing and feverish publication of commentaries in protestant land. The scriptural mystification of channels of authority in catholic world. Mormon anxiety over the threat to mystification of the scriptural. The scriptural overdetermination of colored peoples, especially in regard to police violence and incarceration. The gendering of scriptural authority. But also the performance of scriptures in the ring-shout, in the chant sermon; in jazz and blues, in music that is poignantly called “gospel.” The confounding and graphics and images on the walls of and in the backyards of the conventionally unliterate. The scriptural development of Yoruba across the Atlantic. Jazz and its riffing on canonical gestures. And so on . . . These are a few of the ongoing dynamics and issues of our time that beg— even scream for—sensitive but also courageous critical analysis, formulated anew. I no longer accept playing defense regarding what is included, or how limited should assume to be the applicability of “scriptures”; I now challenge critics to show me where scriptures have not been invented, are not present and made to work in human-making and government, in human formation and deformation, in human expressivity, gesturing, and masking. It is attention to such issues that makes ISS compelling and makes all the more pressing today’s official launch of ISS as an independent organization. So with the strange moniker what/who/are we? We are among other things now an independent voluntary association of a diverse group of people, of different social and intellectual backgrounds, of different academic fields and 288

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of no fields in particular, of different professional and personal experiences, eager to learn and to be challenged, to “stretch on out” (as one of Ishmael Reed’s characters in Mumbo Jumbo exhorted Papa La Bas to do), in terms of facilitating and modeling conversation about and research into things that matter, things that have to do with life and death and the highs and lows that fall between. What is our interest, our cause? To construct, model, and advance a different critical field of inquiry—ultimately, about how we become and sustain being human; about how we do become so sometimes in toxic and violent terms; at other times, in soaring poetic transcendent terms; about how we use language/discourse as power: for and against others and ourselves. “Scriptures” is the freighted shorthand for this work. The name suggests we must focus on the sites and practices for the ultimate politics of language use and politics and leave no domain uninterrogated, left in a fog of mystification to remain naturalized. Scriptures registers oddly, poignantly, ironically, metonymically—as site of and nature of the problematic having to do with language/discourse/knowledge and power. We need to think more about, dig deeply into, how and with what consequences we humans differently and in patterns orient ourselves to ourselves and to everything else around us. We must facilitate and require focused, intense, sustained unfettered and unqualified, expansive and honest and courageous attention to these matters. We need each other, to check each other; we need an association made up of those who see the need and the challenge to excavate. We absolutely need—free of old disciplinary and program and institutional ways and rules—an Institute for Signifying Scriptures. What would success mean? What difference does it make? The criticism can be, should be focused, ultimately not on texts or traditions, but on ourselves—the humans—on our self-possession that can be our self-flourishing or our doom. We need to figure out how to figure ourselves out. This can only be done within a circle of strong diverse minds and bodies, willing to face each other honestly and squarely, all while transgressing boundaries and boundedness. We shall need to create the ambience for the creation and advancement of the discourse we need to accomplish this goal. Getting to this point has been a long experience of journeying, of accomplishment and failure; disappointments and surprises. Many have dropped out along the way and many will not come along and join us for varied reasons: on account of what they perceive to be the deficits or surpluses, the fear, the threats in our efforts: that we are not tribal enough, or too tribal in surprising ways; that we are too ideological or not ideological enough; that we do not focus enough on the religious; that our approach is too critical, not affirming, not apologetic enough, that there is no warm and fuzzy here, no redemption in view, that we are too broad and diverse; that we are not diverse enough.

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And so on. Because we aim to steer clear of apologetics—for any arena, field, discipline, tribe, nation, historical era, tradition—we represent no apparent or natural constituency for the normally assumed support and security. This means we must create it—create a transgressive circle or constituency of audacious, free-thinking agents, willing to scramble and trouble categories, boundaries. Our times and situation and the urgency they press upon us demand we take the step we are taking. Time is short; the end is—has been, for a while— at hand. The school programs will continue as they are—with the meager rewards they reap—to the end. They cannot save us; they cannot save themselves. The learned societies are simply the programs and schools magnified. They are stuck, paralyzed. We may consider ourselves in terms of identity and agenda and politics moderns or late moderns or now post-postmodern; and we find ourselves complexly- and warily-situated in the world not so much invented but certainly consolidated and shaped and determined by among things what the publication of the project that the famous philologist F. Max Mueller supervised and edited and called Sacred Books of the East. This enormous work, fifty volumes total, produced during the fraught years 1879–1910, the period of the height of colonialist expansion and violence and the making of the world we know, both reflected and determined much about how we would understand and negotiate the world. It both reflected and modeled and consolidated scripturalism and scripturalization as chief characteristics and markers of the modern world. Billed as a collection of the “sacred texts” of the world—shockingly excepting the books of the Christian religion as those books not to be signified and interrogated on the same terms—the project firmly established the “aristocracy of the book religion” and made clear the framing agenda of dominance and violence of the project captured in Mueller’s bluntly hones description for his work in the classification of religion—divide et impera.1 The Christian west’s books in the world Mueller represented were not to be classified along with all other books of other traditions; they were only to be exegeted (by certified/authorized clerics as professors). This sort of politics still marks where we live, the times in which we live, and what was expected of some of us in terms of professional-intellectual orientation and practice: exegete (through whatever creative play the canonical texts) and defend the canonical arrangements. My reading of history is a rather different one from what we all have been taught (in the scripturalized academy, as a reflection of the psycho-politics and psycho-logics of the Mueller Sacred Books project). I maintain that we now sojourn in the time of the advanced consolidation of the ideology of scripturalism and the social-cultural-political regimes of scripturalization. We are beyond simple politics of classification. That battle has been won.

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The West won. But there is now a sense that the hold of the regimes is slipping, that too many are not properly formed and sufficiently oriented in in the thralldom, that is, Western scripturalization. This sense of slippage has provoked more defensiveness and violence—the stuff of our headlines. There is out of desperation the call—and the money, in academies and in politics— for more and more highly trained and adept exegetical troops (academics and think-tanks and bloggers, journalists, and so forth). The sense of desperation, of the felt threat of slippage, of an awareness that enough if not too many are aware of the artifice, the made-up character of the arrangements around us all.2 We still live in the times of the Sacred Books project, to be sure. But we also live in the times productive of the Sojourner Truths and the Voodoo Villages of the world. These representations of Black Atlantic expressivities and formations, for example, also represent the many different complexly mimetic and sometimes critical responses around the world to scripturalism and scripturalizaion. They represent in response imitation, contestation, signifying, satire, parody, exaggeration, and so forth. They beg critical analysis. When Sojourner Truth reportedly responded to those who asked about her conventional literary skills that she did not “read” such small stuff as letters,” that she instead read “men and nations,” one gets a sense of the possibilities of modern critical positionality and responses to the formation of the modern that is scripturalization. “Men and nations” can be extended logically to all the domains of modern life—the academy; law; religion, education; and so forth.3 And in that little known phenomenon in Memphis TN called the Voodoo Village by white locals driven by contempt and ignorance, but called by insiders the mimetically fraught name, St. Paul’s Spiritual Temple, with its images and found objets d’art that reinterpret biblical stories and discourse, we have also an example of both the challenge and opportunity in the ultimate politics of language and knowledge in the world after Mueller, what I choose to name signifying (on) scriptures.4 The likes of the phenomenon of Voodoo Village must be part of our ongoing critical focus. As conversation partners, we need to survive and thrive; we need to get on with the conversation and with the work that the conversation poignantly names. NOTES 1. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), chap 7.

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2. See Michael Taussig’s fascinating view of the anxieties felt around mimetic practices and difference in his Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). 3. On Sojourner Truth’s life and her continuing challenges to all of us, see Nell I. Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 230. 4. See the pioneering work on this phenomenon in Grey Gundaker and Judith M. McWillie, No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2005).

Chapter 21

“I Wish [We] Knew How it Would Feel to be Free” The Subjunctive Mood (2016)

ISIL as movement constructed and directed by Abu Bakr Naji’s treatise entitled “Management of Savagery,” about the logic and agenda structuring of violent deconstruction and reconstruction. The anxiety in India over the publication and dissemination in India of Wendy Doniger’s academic critical book about Hindus. The Worldwide Anglican Communion’s condemnation—with African and other non-Euro-American bishops ironically pushing the envelope (The return of King James’s “Donation”?)—of the American (U.S. Episcopal Church) Communion’s supposedly unscriptural support of gay marriage. Ah! We say: these phenomena are too far away. Not a part of our world. And at any rate, they are about religious fanatics and mostly from exotic worlds. What then about the Wheaton College professor—Black and female and protestant evangelical Christian and U.S. citizen—who in donning a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women and in holding forth about the widely accepted notion about the kinship of Islam and Christianity—primary examples of religions of the book—what about this woman who in this noisy age of white nationalist Trumpism found herself hounded and fired by academic-clericaladministrators? What of Mormons who, in one of their recent translations of God’s pronouncements, made clear that it was just recently revealed to them that children of same-sex households are not to be welcomed into the fold? What about the Kentucky county registrar Pentecostalist Kim Davis and those Catholic institutions and sisters who refuse to countenance Obama Care’s almost weaning compromises and accommodating gestures around gay marriages and coverage of contraceptives for female employees, all in the name of divine (albeit differently construed) authority? But perhaps these examples, being simply about those religious types among us, do not touch 293

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us much. They are in another respect rather far away from us. They are our fringe and by definition not us. Ah, so: moving away from the religious, into another domain—what then shall we say about the phenomenon of a constitutional republic, our own polity, for example, founded on text(s) now deemed by many, if not most, to be “sacred” and inviolable (notwithstanding the long history of amendments)? Or how should think about U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s (TX) now famous heated exchange in 2013 with Senator Dianne Feinstein (CA), provoked by her leadership of an effort to move gun control legislation in the wake of the shooting massacre in the elementary school in Newtown, CT? What should we make of the terms on which such a debate turned, the extent to which Feinstein was forced or allowed herself to be put on the textualist-discursive defensive: Cruz: “All of us should begin [with] our official document, with the Constitution . . . and the Second Amendment . . . and the Bill of Rights . . . when the framers” Feinstein: “I have been up close and personal to the Constitution. I have great respect for it.”1

The politics of such originalist-texualism is not now merely ensconced in law school or in high court debates; it is part of the discourse that had already exploded onto the field of raw politics as reflected in the emergence of the Tea Party in the two previous election cycles. Recall the chilling words of Sharron Angle, Tea Partyer and senatorial candidate in Nevada, who was caught on camera evoking with great confidence the founding texts and textual founders, as though they were her special possession or that of her circle: . . . our Founding Fathers . . . put the Second Amendment in there for a good reason . . . and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.2

But these, some of us might say, are latter-day hard-right angry white Republicans created in/by the age of Obama. They are not us—enlightened progressives; they are of the world of Fox News; we tune into MSNBC; we do not traffic in or speak the language of such folk. And there has also emerged also in the age of Obama the Black Lives Matter (BLM) phenomenon. Could there be found a more powerful example of modern political and social-cultural resignification or signifyin(g)/signifyin’? Charles H. Long powerfully argued that signifying was and remains a response on the part of peoples who have historically been signified, overdetermined. And the young writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has recently exploded on the scene with his captivating and passionate writing about how

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contemporary (mostly male) embodied Black life is experienced, has suggested that the BLM movement articulates the need to read against the underlying reigning cultural textual/language/discourse/structure of representations that has historically been and remains anti-black.3 But we are not all Black people, some of us may think (in perfect step with post-reconstructionist logic); we have nothing against them; we have done them no wrong; we are not racist; that stuff was a long time ago . . . ; we want peace and rights for all; it’s their battle to fight; and after all, all lives matter . . . . Recent student protests across campuses all over the world, some directly inspired by and aligned with BLM, some others anticipating it or channeling it, raise the issues of language use and of representation and symbolics. From Amherst and Williams, to Yale and Mississippi, to Missouri and Oxford, the United Kingdom, the complaints against and questions about the long-established symbols and structure of language/representation—whether turning around John Calhoun or Woodrow Wilson or Cecil Rhodes—have been uttered by students, as though channeling Amiri Baraka’s “scream.”4 But have they been heard? The battle—over “weaponized words” (K. Manne and J. Stanley, “Weaponized Words . . .,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/1/15) and images and representations—continues, with strategies that range from “testimonial quieting” to charges of political correctness and misreadings of, and interests in “erasing,” history. When there is the clamor, as there was at University of Cape Town, South Africa, for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, one of the ideologists for the apartheid system in that country, and at Yale University, with the demand that John Calhoun, a name associated with the architecture of the confederacy with its own form of apartheid/slavery and the ideology and inflections of white supremacism— when these situations are questioned, critiqued, condemned, when these figures are denied continued institutional iconic status, are we confronted with the effort to evade, to erase history, or with an instance of deeper engagement and performance of critical history?5 Now, might such examples, because they come closer to where most of us live and work resonate, make a difference to our sensibilities, orientation? Or are these youths, even as they are located within the academy, still too much like the loud and scary Other? These dynamics, now at our office door, sitting atop our desk for decision-making—are these yet about us, about which we should take note? Before I let go of the ears of the academic wolf, one more example: the perduring (some might say persistent chronic never resolved sometimes paralyzing) issue in the academy, having to do with what constitutes knowledge itself or what it means to educate a person. One way—the way of Columbia and St. Johns and others—identifies and advances and inculcates the “core” or “canon.” Another way—that of Amherst and Brown and a few others—lets

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students graze or feed freely. There are of course several types of efforts that are hybrids of these two ways. Have we to do (simply) with canon(s) in one instance, (radical) freedom in the other? Or are these differences merely in strategy—canon of methods or canon of knowledge—with the interest in inculcating standard cultural literacy the reigning agenda still?6 Whatever the approach and calibration and orientation, the academy itself is on the table, is itself a powerful and poignant, if not the most important example of what needs to be named and pressed here for analysis: here are windows—provided by the like of the CHE, no less—onto the agenda of the politics, the nature of the games played, the roilings and anxieties and fears and threats that touch people like us, the people who are by profession (and institutional charge) the language/discourse/representation guardians and masters, those who are charged with certifying who can speak with authority. Might we now open ourselves to a consideration of the root issues and dynamics begging to be named, addressed, excavated? Or are these too dynamics and issues now too close? And with agenda and interests that are seen to be too negative? There are also concurrently and sometimes in the same spaces and in other spaces and domains yet other kinds of human/social dynamics, gestures, practices, performances, with other kinds of politics and interests—in women’s circles, including religious and non-religious book-reading groups; in academic-feminist criticism of scriptures; in the African diaspora the ring-shout, chant sermon, the Haitian veves; jazz and blues and their riffing on canonical performances (Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” among my favorite things); the music that is poignantly called gospel; the development of Yoruba as a transatlantic scriptural phenomenon; the cultural politics and contestations in the reception and criticism and standardization of “classical” music (what has been called “orchestrating the nation”);7 and even in the recent view of and signs from the displaced—immigrants and marooned and enslaved— around the world. And so on go other kinds of dynamics representing earlier and ongoing and more advanced engagements, performances, inflections representing agency in complex relationship with dominant structures and arrangements. These all are examples, phenomena, dynamics, and issues of our time that beg—even scream for—sensitive but also ex-centric critical analysis. They cry out for critical attention on the part of a collective, a circle of friends in collaboration that would aim to understand what these dynamics point to, add up to, signify; what they open windows onto. They demand some sort of commitment to the consistent tracking and analysis, the import, the implications and ramifications appertaining thereto. What are we looking at? What do, how do, these phenomena and dynamics mean? What do they suggest about who we are?

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Consider in sum the nature of the examples I have pointed to—-they all have to do in complex terms and arrangements with: langu​age/d​iscou​rse/ repres​entat​ions/​symbo​lics,​ and with contestation, with the struggle to come to speech, to be heard, to have and to maintain a sense of interpretive authority and power. In other words, they pertain to the human. They open onto a wide range of domains and contexts. They are not all or specifically or exclusively about “religion,” even as they press the importance of problematizing what we have made “religion” do and represent. They are contemporary or recent modern examples (that nonetheless provoke or demand historicizing analysis). None is simply or in isolation about mythic “origins” or some canonical text or ancien régime. These are all modern-world phenomena and dynamics and problems. They are not so much exotic examples that one must dig deep and search hard for: in fact, I simply took note of our daily headlines around the world (with some understandable leanings toward our location in the United States). And as the headlines ranged across the world, they suggest the imperative of a comparative focus. They do not reflect the agenda and policing of one single discipline or field; they suggest the scrambling of current disciplinary assumptions and prerogatives, and make it impossible to grasp what is at stake from a single field perspective. And precisely as they are part—again and again—of our daily headlines around the world, but with little or no clarity, no real depth of analysis about what they as phenomena, events, signal or mean, they would, I suggest again, seem to warrant critical analysis—and an orientation begging to be named, constructed, modeled, and advanced. The examples I have provided seem to suggest the need for persistent critical questioning and deeper analysis than traditional scholarship disciplinarily arranged—with their defensive scaffolding and walls—in the academy. They would seem to require transgressive analysis—analysis that goes beyond traditional disciplinary politics and practices, in order to get at what is at work and at stake, that is, to get at the “big questions,” namely, freedom and unfreedom, life and death. How could we come to terms with the examples lifted up earlier—with their promiscuous engagements and practices and politics and their mimetics—apart from a new critical orientation and practice? Following Adorno and Horkheimer, Michael Taussig challenges us to think about mimesis as having potential to help us to approach a breakthrough in conscientization: History would seem to now allow for an appreciation of mimesis as an end in itself that takes one into the magical power of the signifier to act as if it were indeed the real, to live in a different way with the understanding that artifice is natural, no less than that nature is historicized. Mimetic excess as a form of human capacity potentiated by post-coloniality provides a welcome opportunity

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to live subjunctively as neither subject nor object of history but as both, at one and the same time . . . [It] permits the freedom to live reality as really made-up.8

Apart from a critical practice that addresses the complex modern world of the mimetics of language play/usage and how such constructs and deconstructs worlds? The group of friends dedicated to such—what I prefer to call “signifying (on) scriptures” as the handle for the critical project or critical discourse about discourse and representation—we now call the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS). The term scriptures, for all its awkwardness, precisely because of its awkwardness, affords capaciousness of thinking having to do with thinking, with language and structure and system, and on account of its history of being hijacked by one complex domain (“religion”) to reference the politics of language, I use it as fraught and fruitful term to register and problematize this arrogation and practice, the expansive cross-cultural phenomenon of registering language play through the written and beyond: it registers oddly, poignantly, ironically, metonymically—as language itself, discourse itself, representation itself, the site of the problematic having to do with language/ discourse/knowledge and power. We find ourselves this day as we gather here situated in a world constructed and consolidated and overdetermined by among things the politics and social psychology that obtained within the modern era the writing/publication of the project that the famous philologist/Sanskritist F. Max Mueller supervised and edited and called Sacred Books of the East. We are for good and ill children of Mueller’s elaborate project. As you all know, this enormous work, fifty volumes total, produced during the fraught years 1879–1910—the period of the height of colonialist expansion and violence and the making of the world we know—both reflected and determined much about how we have come to understand and negotiate the world. It both reflected and modeled and consolidated the ideology (what I now call our nearly universally shared cultural religion) of scripturalism and scripturalization as its projection as discursive regime over the modern world. (The tiny differences—“world religions,” denominations, around which we have historically and still throw ourselves into conflicts social-cultural, if not physical wars—are structured and insured by scripturalism.) Billed as a collection of the “sacred texts” of the world— scandalously excepting the books of the Jewish-Christian religion as those books not to be signified and interrogated on the same terms—Mueller’s project firmly consolidated and legitimized the “aristocracy of the book religion.” He made clear the big framing social-cultural, nationalistic and civilizational agenda of his project, captured in his own description of his work—as he somewhat boldly and somewhat warily presumed to make the classification of religion the classification of language and culture and “races”—a matter

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of modern empire/civilizational restoration and ascendancy. This was made plain in the shorthand for the politics his use of the old empire world expression divide et impera, shockingly but bluntly and honestly translated by him as “classify and conquer,” was made to communicate.9 Notwithstanding complex devolution and necessary adjustments in forms of mediatization, for example, this sort of cultural practice and its politics (of naming, classifying, marking) still locates and defines us—as those of the time of the consolidation of the ideology of scripturalism and the socialcultural-political regimes of scripturalization. And I argue that we have hardly begun the hard work of taking stock of what it means to be situated in such a world, whether we call it by my term scripturalization or a la Marshall MacLuhan’s “Gutenberg Galaxy.” The opportunities and challenges and pitfalls of being in such a time and in such a world are pointed and several: Take note of the recent publication of the two-volume, 4,000+ page Norton Anthology of World Religions, edited by Jack Miles (along with a corps of established scholars). The project has been hailed in reviews as a magisterial and authoritative project. The self-ascribed encyclopedic project is pretty much for the first part of the twenty-first century further confirmation and continuation and further consolidation of what Mueller’s late nineteenth-century colonialist project represented: Its claim to broader representativeness in my view hardly makes it less problematic in conceptual-political terms. This broadening of representation is of the sort that should chillingly remind us of the periods of the late “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” in which the Savage Others (indios and negros) were “discovered” and “framed”—enscripturalized—into the new order. For the “globalized” twenty-first century, Miles’s anthology—of scriptures—is arguably far more problematic in its lack of problematization of the type of issues I address here. Both projects (Mueller and Miles) are reflective and refractive of—metonymic of—scripturalization that obtains across most of the human-occupying globe. But neither raises the most basic question about what the collection—not what this or that text—means.10 Further effort in unpacking terms played with here and in clarifying what is at stake is in order: although the ISS takes as its baseline for naming the pertinent issues and problems regarding human-making to be addressed by shorthand reference to the common but rather freighted English term “scriptures”—historically and still reflexively associated with and limited to the artificially separate and narrow domain that post-Enlightenment modernity calls “religion” (and its structure of authority)—it takes the step of exploding the valences of the term back into more varied and expansive domains, theorizing the term in broader phenomenological, comparative historical, psycho-social-cultural, and anthropological terms, viz., as “things written” (scriptura). Then, of course, the term begs a broader comparative

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construal—as that which is authoritatively languaged or communicated, viz., the scriptural, capacities for discourse and self-reflexive consciousness that most clearly distinguishes humans. Thus, the play with “scriptures”/the scriptural is in relationship to language/discourse, knowledge and consciousness, the political.11 The historical and enduring effects of constructions of the human—certainly, in complex societies oriented around different (conventional and translocal) systems of literacy—are here termed scriptural-ization. This term, especially with the fraught suffix pointing to system or structure, is meant to convey among other things the nature and terms of the construction—that it is a “metadiscursive”12 regime of language (use), of communications, with pertinent ramifications and implications. Such constructions are usually associated with extensive and dominant powers—ancient and modern empires (nation-states). They are aided and abetted by—in fact, defined and delimited by—the scriptural, in what the signifying on scriptures project emphasizes must be the broad and expansive understanding of all that pertains to such (that is, far beyond the literal, or things written). Various forms of expressions—rituals, gestures, practices, ludics, and performances—at different times and in different situations, with different interests, purposes, and functions, collude with and resist the construction, the regime, that is scripturalization. Such expressions I refer to as scripturalizing. This latter term—with the suffix pointing to dynamics, to interaction, mimetics—refers not only to the ongoing refractions of the regime but also the nodes that represent possibilities for making liquid, more complex and unstable—viz, the re-/de-construction of—the established arrangements, relationships, associations, and occupation of spaces that define the regime. Here are possibilities for the unmaking or alternate shaping of the human. So with scriptures/scripturalizing are opportunities and challenge—to explore more deeply and through a different yet not fully and consistently explored analytical wedge how we as human beings—homo ludens,13 Kafka’s ape tickling at the heels of or ape-ing the human’s aping (Taussig)—have been constructed and coiled, and with what consequences; and how we may again and again be differently constructed and uncoiled. Suggested here in the orientation and theoretics, and practices of this project is the potential for an analytical wedge for the advancement of a different kind of history—of a wide and deep world of subjectivization and politics, of the construction and maintenance of the center, of power relations and dynamics and performances, with this difference—no longer, as was the case with Mueller’s project, disingenuously and dangerously excepting our own scriptures, and no longer ignoring our ongoing participation in the invention and consolidation of the things projected. And no longer the focus on the (exegesis/explication of the) text; henceforth, on the excavation of the invention and engagements

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of the scriptural as the political, the political as the scriptural (so Rancière)— this is where we must take up the critical work. I suggest we come to terms with the reality of scripturalization and scripturalism as dynamics that are normally unrecognized (as construction) and misrecognized (as natural) or held in contempt as merely odd, simply and easily ignored or fomented against (the Bill Maher syndrome). For the sake of our advancement as self-reflexive creatures (humans) a way for the nuanced thinking and basic radical critical questioning—about who we are, how we have become what we are—must be found and sustained. With such questioning as part of the agenda, it might not be too much to think of ISS aspiring in this manner to contribute to public (psycho-social) health. This would the entail acceptance of an orientation to a set of interests distinct from the typical non-religious or confessional academic program statement of interest—especially in the humanities—that renders itself speechless and paralyzed about its raison d’être, its interest, its passion, its politics, and commitments. Some of you will not be surprised that I am inclined to put the situation— the challenges we face in society and culture in regard to discourse and power, and the agenda of ISS—in the stark terms involving slavery and freedom (or agency). Scripturalization I have attempted to explain in terms of a type of slavery, including that slavery which Jefferson and a few of his contemporaries identified as “rule without consent.”14 This phenomenon is clearly evidence of the anxious and nervous and fearful inspiration of their own experiences with the black folks whom they made sure would have no voice with which to register their lack of consent or opposition to their enslavement. So enslavement can here be understood more generally and universally as being enthralled to something or someone, including a written constitution that extends beyond a generation or any discursive regime. Constitutionalism beyond a generation is scripturalization. This is what I would call (playing with Taussig and company) simple mimetics—deficit mimetics. As for freedom, the mimetic practices, the scripturalizing, with (M. Taussig’s notion of) “excess,” that is, with self-awareness of the play or unreality involved—can lead to or be experienced as a type of freedom or agency. But such orientation requires a renunciation—of the effort to control the capacity of consent on the part of others through obsessive control, including force and the unacknowledged politics and manipulations of “white men’s magic.”15 It means when at all possible running away from all that has sought for several centuries to bind us—the white text that constructs the Manichean world of white and black essentials. And it means living in psycho-social/cultural-critical marronage, hos me, as if artifice were real. It suggests the possibility and imperative of living subjunctively, as Taussig suggests, or as Zora Neale Hurston’s “folks,” long before Taussig, had taught her, to see that all things in the world—including even the Bible! and what

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it signifies (scripturalization, as I prefer to put it)—were to be used to “suit [the] imagination.”16 Clearly, the claim need not be made that only one group knows the way out. But we should note the gift of the challenge of the insight from and the model of the imperative of running, as though life depended on it, from those so long forced to exist in what Fanon termed the “zone of occult instability where the people dwell” (Wretched of the Earth [1991/1961]), the state of non-subjectivity, of discursive and ideological marronage. They show us the way of the double-sighted, the way of those who know that knowing requires occupying a zone where there is “constantly shifting authorial consciousness” and the “piercing” of “cultural authority,”17 a site on which radical translation and transformation is always to be worked on, a site where, according to Ralph Ellison, “black is and black ain’t,” because “black can make you and unmake you” (Invisible Man [1947]). It means letting go of closed systems of cultural authority and of claims to be overseers of persons and texts. The “folk” who have been placed “behind the veil” (W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk [1903]) challenge all of us to run counter-intuitively from the cave of shadows into zones of marronage, in which is to be constructed a different arrangement of the epistemic The agenda of ISS must be focused not only on the slavery, the epistemic closure that is scripturalization, on its isolation and description and analysis but also on the types of practices of mimetic excess that may open the way toward our freedom, or seeing and embracing the subjunctive. Ultimately, we should want to model—for our own sake and for others—some ways, in relationship to the scriptural, that we may embrace a type of freedom. I mean a freedom in thinking, gesturing, talking, being agents in the world. A freedom of the sort about which Jill Scott in her “Golden” (“I’m Taking My Freedom”) (2004; written by Jill Scott and Anthony Bell), and before her Nina Simone in her classic “I Wish I knew How it Would Feel to Be Free” (1976; written by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas) sang so spiritedly and hauntingly—this is what we should be striving for. Who are we that we should orient ourselves this way? We are a circle of friends and colleagues—at this point, just under 100 in number, in various categories of membership. We are several hundred in communication via e-mail and internet. We are curious, intellectually honest, risk-taking persons of varied self-described backgrounds and areas of interests—anthropology, sociology, social and cultural history, musicology, philosophy, art history, psychology, feminist criticism, postmodern hermeneutics, American studies, Meso-American studies, subaltern studies, Coptic Studies, Native/Indigenous Studies, New religious movements, West African religious practices, African religious movements, Ancient Mediterranean religions, biblical studies, African diaspora art education, Buddhist/Japanese religious traditions,

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Confucian spirituality, History of the Book, ethnography of reading and naming, and so forth. We represent wide interests in creative writing and in the plight of local communities and the globe. We are located in India, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, France, Ghana, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, across the United States, and so forth. We represent no one tribe—ethnic or religious, social or political, or field academic. As a group, we unsurprisingly have complex relationships with traditional academic fields and their conventional politics. To be sure, our composition at any one time may favor this or that direction or emphasis. But we are by formal self-conceptualization a discursively promiscuous group; in terms of the discursive, we are transgressive, even radical, insofar as we name ourselves the circle of friends who aim to think about and through the fields themselves (not merely the one now we might argue only metonymically named and projected) as scriptural formations! We are a fledgling, now independent organization—with no school or foundation or academic field or tribe to direct us, define us, set our agenda, and promise to save us, on the basis of our good (scripturalization-mandated) behavior or that universal need to belong, to be en-scripturalized into what appears for the moment to be dominant or traditional. Who we are is reflected most clearly not so much in our staging conversations or producing scholarship, but in our constant self-checking to determine whether we are always talking about/wrestling with things that matter most—things having to do with the push and pull of slavery and freedom that defines the human and its “order of things.” The examples listed at the beginning of this address were not those in search of the text to be isolated and interpreted; they were about the dynamics and structuring of the human, for which the scriptural is shorthand. So not only the nature of the enslaving grip of scripturalism and scripturalization but the possibilities of the freedom that is scripturalizing humanness must capture our attention and orientation. We must for ourselves and for other humans figure out how to live in the subjunctive mood. And we must always make the case that—and in what ways—living subjunctively is an inflection of the scriptural. NOTES 1. Real Clear Politics (March 14, 2013). 2. The Washington Post (June 15, 2010). 3. See elaborate discussions in Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora CO: Davies Group, 1995 [1986]); and Tai-Nehesi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

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4. See first as one site of provocation, Amiri Baraka, Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 176; but note the fascinating discussion of all pertinent sources in Kimberley Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of AfricanAmerican Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000), 204–6. 5. See C. Phelps, “Removing Racist Symbols Isn’t a Denial of History,” Chronicle of Higher Education (1/8/16). 6. See N. Lehmann, “What Should Graduates Know?,” Chronicle of Higher Education (1/8/16). 7. See Douglas W. Shadle, Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth Century American Symphonic Enterprise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), for historical background and perspective for critical comparative thinking. 8. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 255. 9. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap 7. 10. The Norton Anthology of World Religions, 2 vols. (Jack Miles, ed.; New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014). 11. See M. de Certeau, The Writing of History (trans. Tom Conley; New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), Part III; and The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); also, because this reading of matters is consonant with Jacques Rancière’s views, see his The Politics of Aesthetics: Distribution of the Sensible (ed., trans., Gabriel Rockhill; Bloomsbury, [2000] 2004) 12. Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University 2003), 18, passim. 13. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950). 14. Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin, 2006). 15. See my White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), passim. 16. See my Paul the Worldly Ascetic (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1987); as already referenced above, Taussig, Mimesis; and Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1939]), 3. 17. See A. Sekyi-Outu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Chapter 22

“If the President Does It . . . It’s Not Illegal. . .” The Modern Nation/State as the Scriptural (2017)

If the president does it . . . it’s not illegal . . . —Richard Nixon, April 6, 1977 The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. —Donald Trump, November 22, 2016 [Trump] is the president-elect, so [what he does] is presidential behavior. —Kellyanne Conway, Trump Adviser, December 4, 2016

So many other political figures and political situations around the world— Modi of India, Putin; Mugabe; Assad; the situation in the Gambia, in the Congo, in the Philippines—can be added to the articulations just quoted to represent the phenomenon, the problem of the “strongman,” as one writer put it recently.1 The biggest weapon in such situations? The politics, that is to say, the manipulation, of language and meaning. Last year’s inaugural Annual Meeting, held in Portland, was aimed, and I think rightly functioned, to orient us to the hard but important level of thinking and engagement many of us want and clamor for. Focused on the topic MEANING—what “it” is; why and how and by whom “it” is constructed, communicated, and represented; how “it” is maintained and upended; the other ongoing questions, problems, and issues “it” begs; and some of the consequences for human enslavement, striving, liberation, and agency—it provided opportunity for us to think at the most basic level about our thinking. 305

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Provoked by Toni Morrison’s Beloved, it help us make ourselves aware again of the reality—not often faced—that meaning is not the simple universal need; that not all can or need or must invest in meaning; desperation, being “dirtied,” being not loved or not remembered, can make one eschew meaning, can help one see and experience pursuit of meaning as something other than benign or rich or affirming or natural experience; it can be experienced as violence, death. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière, in his Politics of Aesthetics, challenged us to think about the formation of meaning as the political and this in terms of le partage du sensible (“the distribution of the sensible”), that which can be apprehended by the senses). Among the many other questions/issues raised last year that lingered, one had to do with the identification of the party, the one collective, unit, so to speak, that has or taken upon itself primary and ongoing interest/investment in constructing and protecting and using meaning—the modern nation/state. This party or category—the nation/state—was only referenced lightly last year; we agreed to return to it as focus of our seminar theme this year. With it we intend to include all levels and types of modern forms of polity/of the political. (To be sure, at our last meeting we were aware of the onset of the presidential campaign and 2016 election, so the situation in the United States was very much in mind, even as we heard in our ranks the appeal to remain sensitive to other situations around the world.) Among the issues that should concern us, then, has to do with coming to terms with the state as meaning-maker and meaning-manager/governor. How did such responsibility or arrogation or duty come about? How does it work? With what results or consequences? How do we participate, how are we implicated, in it? How are we complicit in it, suffer from it, or transcend it? Since the invention of writing, so Claude Lévi-Strauss has taught us, there have been and remain in evidence corresponding politics of the scriptural, with a few elites in possession and control of the scriptures, but after the invention of the printing press such politics became fevered and sedimented, the former effectively facilitating the invention of religions of the modernworld (i.e., “world religions”) and the modern nation/state, both of which are formed/bound (religio-, religare) not by blood but by a type of “distribution of the sensible,” by the collective “imagination” reoriented, as reading formation.2 My epigraphs cited earlier about Donald Trump were ripped from the (daily) headlines of the time. They were meant to be not simply shocking (have we not lately had our fill?), but suggestive. They certainly indicate that the phenomenon to be more poignantly named and analyzed is of our own time—not merely modern and contemporary worlds in some vague sense that becomes filler for scholarly introductions. No, the epigraphs force us to see that the matters are directly before us, threatening and challenging us. Yet this

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does not prevent but should encourage a critical historical—not historicalcritical!—perspective. I have in mind a brief turn to a few historical examples as windows onto the making of the modern nation/state as (deadly serious) play with or manipulation of meaning may provide perspective on the situation we here in this room along with so many other contemporaries have in common. The examples are from a highly representative slice of Europe of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: First, France: In his L’écriture de l’histoire (Writing of History), de Certeau makes eighteenth-century France a rather wide-open window onto how a society came to be “managed” (policé) through the structuring of language and religion, religion as language. These two fraught categories in functional terms are made to become one domain, one sphere of control and manipulation. Their confusion makes the religious–secular divide somewhat insidious if not laughable. The clerics during this era come to be socialized as the functionaries—the living embodiment, carriers, guarantors of the right order—of a system, network, and ideology called “the church” or “religion.” They were in this era committed to getting right—even living, reflecting— the interpretation of the broad society-defining, society-regulating/-ed texts (scriptures) and the practices and rites the texts called for. They began to see themselves as those primarily responsible for the management of doctrine, ritual, and all other pertinent practices that mark the modern French-inflected and more broadly Western structure captured as the religious sphere.3 For the sake of the organization, consolidation, and control of the (French) state in this period what was stressed by ideologists was the need to govern “social nature,” the emotions and beliefs of all subjects: Gouverner, c’est faire croire. . . (“To govern is to make [subjects] believe . . . ”)—so went what was understood to be the animating ideological principle under Richelieu. De Certeau indicates that philosopher Marin Mersenne of the same general period is said to have argued rather bluntly the “management of minds” as the overarching rational goal of the state.4 De Certeau’s unelaborated almost cursory reference to Nicolas de la Mare’s second book (Livre II) of his famous Traité de la Police (1705) belies its importance. La police here should be understood more along the lines of Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible”—that which aims to provide a totalizing account of the population by assigning to all the titles and roles deemed appropriate and natural, fixed. Devoted to religion as “the first and principal object of governance” (le premier & le principal objet de la Police), de la Mare’s book makes dramatic the point not only that policing of society and culture in general was for elites at issue, thought to be their right and burden, but that “religion” in particular, first and foremost, was to be policed and to function as police; and that this policing would be done through manipulation and control of discourse, manipulation and control as

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discourse (Premieres preuves tirées de l’Ecriture Sainte, des Conciles, des Pères & du Droit Canon), that is, it should have to do with sacred texts and all textual productions that flow from them.5 In other words, for the sake of serving the interests of the new nationalist and nationalizing elites, religion was partly (re)constructed as discourse, in terms of the scriptural. In this regime, clerics were directed to be differently oriented, to uphold certain practices and regimes: they began to function no longer on the traditional order of shamans and priests, but in the new order as scholars and exegetes, “living scriptures,” defenders of the language of dominance and against non-Catholics and the religio-social-culturally impious.6 If we fast forward to the late nineteenth century, we can see in stark display some of the dramatic and disturbing and perduring consequences of the ideologization of Europeanist discourse management in what can be considered the advancement of nationalization on the order that we recognize and experience today. Consider what is now known variously as the Berlin Conference, the Congo Conference, or the Scramble for Africa, of 1884–85. Convened by Otto von Bismarck, the meeting was intended to divide Africa according to the interests—social, political, and economic—of the European powers at the time. Never has Europe been so united, so much in agreement. In this case, it was in agreement around its power and prerogatives in regard to Africa. It presumed the authority to the (re)drawing of boundaries, (re)naming of peoples of another part of the world, and the subjection of such peoples and their lands and all the wealth their lands held to different (European) languages and customs, rules, and laws. The conference ushered in a period of fevered activity resulting in a period of colonial rule, disruption, and violence that obtained well into the twentieth century, with the rise of mid-century independence movements. Aspects of the conference agreement continue to have their effects to this day. The major point to be made here—“Africa” was through the conference signified, more to the point, it was (en)scripturalized, written up according to the interests of this or that state; inscribed as (“new,” almost “modern”) as subject, humiliated peoples. The differently inflected scripturalizations of the French peoples, of the British, and so forth, provided the ideological and political conditions for the (en)scripturalization of the “Africans” as Others. In this new order of nationalizations, those who cannot be placed or cannot place themselves within, or learn to negotiate, the particular scriptural regime around which a nation is constructed and defined are considered Other, as marginal, with the severest consequences. The possibilities for humiliation and subjection of the Other are wide-ranging and consequential. Those who cannot “read”—in respect to and in line with the nationalist politics and management and social orientation—cannot participate, cannot be considered citizens.

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Now to the United States: Given the setting of this meeting, we can hardly fail to take notice of the eighteenth-century scriptural foundations of United. States, especially that which is termed its history of civil religion. This unusual if not unique incipient state–church nexus that is the somewhat odd U.S.-style civil religion has its foundational texts, its scriptures—among which in the earliest period were the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Washington’s Farewell Address. These civic texts reflect roots in the English tradition of common law and natural rights, as well as in dissenting Puritanism. These civic texts as canonical texts reflected and helped to produce a nationalism that in turn promoted what Americanist Francois Furstenberg in his book In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation called “consent . . . and a sense of mutual obligation.” Consent as concept became “a powerful mythology” of the Founding Fathers, centered chiefly around the morality and ethics, the orientation and sensibilities of and corresponding honors bestowed on George Washington as the “Father of the Nation,” the “national patriarch.” As scripturalizations/memorializations of the likes of Washington, these civic texts “bound Americans into members of a single nation.” Their uses were made to parallel the phenomenon of the reading of the Bible, not just in the scope (or universality) of readership but also in the types of practices by which they were engaged. “Citizens” were told to read and interpret these civic texts as “sacred practice.” They were taught to “‘engrave’” Washington’s words on their hearts just as they had been taught to internalize passages from the bible . . . to take Washington into their hearts just as they took Jesus into their hearts . . . to read the Constitution as they read the Ten Commandments.” One cleric, in eulogizing Washington as he referenced Washington’s Farewell Address, is recorded as having exhorted mourners to take a rather amazing psycho-cultural and hermeneutical step: “bind [the Address] in your Bible next to the Sermon on the Mount that the lessons of your two Saviors may be read together” (my emphasis). This step is of profound socio-culturalhistorical-political and analytical importance.7 Identifications between the nation, the Constitution, the Bible, and the texts of the founders were strong to the point of reaching fever pitch—what religion scholars would describe as “enthusiasm”—in some places. The phenomenon is made clear in the frontispiece to a Bible, the first to be printed in New York, in 1792 (see fig. 22.1).8​ The center of the image was an allegorical representation of “America” as a woman in a headdress, her elbow resting on a plinth with the names of Revolutionary “fathers” listed, Washington first. In one hand, the figure holds a scroll of the U.S. Constitution; her other hand reaches forward to accept the Bible from a kneeling woman. A third woman holds a pole atop which is the liberty cap. Washington’s life had become, in effect, a “sacred text,”

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Figure 22.1  Frontispiece of John Brown’s Self-Interpreting Bible (2 vols.; Edinburgh, 1778). Image in the public domain.

needing to be read in order for citizenship to be secured, for American-ness to be confirmed. The skill and practice of reading these civic texts were made the requirement for and registration of civic engagement. Like the situation in ancient Athens or Alexandria or India or China or Calvin’s early modern Geneva, citizens in the society that was becoming the United States were understood to be scripture-readers who through their reading could continually affirm their consent to the fathers. There were immediate but also perduring and profound implications and ramifications in such cultural practices: for one thing, the practices were also complexly intertwined with the problem of slavery. The reading of civic texts promoted a paternalist understanding of slavery supposedly grounded in “bonds of affection”; that is, for those (whites) enslaving others, slavery seemed to make more plausible the social-political myth about and more natural the practice of tacit consent on the part of enslaved blacks. Insofar as the paternalist image of slavery masked the brutal violence upon which it was established, it helped make easier the acceptance of the lesser forms of coercion involved in persuading “free” Americans to “consent” to the nation in the making. The notion that had obtained in the oratory and writings of

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Jefferson and (to a lesser degree) Madison that citizenship for “all” was a matter of consent of the living in ongoing dynamic relationship with the living was powerful. But by making allegiance to the nation “in the name of the fathers,” in connection with the use of civic texts, they feared that some had or might betray part of the vision of a nation grounded in the consent of the living. The exaltation of the Founding Fathers/Founding Texts was turned uncritical veneration and genuflection. Furstenberg provokes us with what I consider to be for all moderns, especially those undergoing the U.S. inflection of modernity, a still haunting question: “By persuading future generations to live by the will of dead fathers, and to do so by their own choice, had civic texts ultimately turned Americans—this people so . . . prepared to live free or die—into slaves?”9 Here is the critical point—U.S. civic texts were written and made to function, made to work, and be engaged and disseminated in much the same way with some of the same rituals, practices, and processes, politics, and were located in the same psychic space as “religion.” The religion as scriptural practice/civic-text-reading analogy begs more analysis of how “religion” figures in these (and other similar historical and contemporary) phenomena and situations in which the nation or state or governmental polity is constituted, manages, and is managed. Benedict Anderson should be referenced again: he challenged readers to think about modern nationalism as a cultural-discursive system, much like religion.10 And our common seminar texts from last year and this year provoke our thinking and more question-raising about (among so many other things, to be sure) where and how religion figures in the political, and with what consequences. We have only to continue to play with these categories in order to tease out more of the powerful ideas they register in more expansive transdisciplinary terms. Two theorists in particular I have found helpful in analyzing the categories and the phenomena they reflect, including the types of situations and examples touched on in the epigraphs for this address. Zygmunt Bauman, big-theory sociologist who taught at Leeds, UK, for many years, in a fascinating interview in 2005 reflected on globalization, what it means, specifically, the forces and dynamics it provokes and the challenges it holds for us, especially pertaining to conflict and violence: . . . a monopoly on the use of force which, according to Max Weber, formed the basis of the modern state, ceased to exist long ago. It has become clear that that this monopoly, which the nation-state has long claimed for itself . . . was designed to fit in to the framework of territorial battles and wars . . . Today’s terrorism . . . [is] a phenomenon of the era of globalization . . . The most powerful armed forces of all time . . . are helpless against the . . . adversary [that] has no headquarters, no military base, no barracks to be

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bombed . . . Its organizational structures are of only theoretical importance . . . If al-Qaida really exists, it is as a global, extremely Manichean conception of the world with a wide array of potential disciples . . .Which came first, the chicken or the egg? We are facing much more than a politicizing of religion, whether Muslim or any other. The issue is the religionising of politics, where the normal conflict of group interests is regarded as an eschatological matter, and the confrontation of these interests as having an apocalyptic character.11

I also turn your attention to a scholar of international politics and conflicts, with special focus on Islam, Bassam Tibi. In his book Islamism and Islam, Tibi references the same concept and seemingly takes credit for coining it: . . . I have taken in the past years an approach I call “Islamology,” to distinguish it from standard Islamic studies. Islamology emultates the earlier model of Sovietology in dealing with Islamism as a source of global conflict. The underlying argument is that political, economic, and social concerns are articulated in terms of religious claims, thus heralding what I have termed the religionization of politics.12

Both analysts argue the importance of the notion of the “religionising” of politics, viz., a particular influence or determinant on and manipulation of the nation/state or body politic. This is in distinction to the more typically simplistic and naïve and dangerous notion of the politics of religion or politicized religion with its deleterious and corrupt effects and what such a notion usually assumes and conveys—among other things, about “religion” as a thing or a separate domain, normally beyond and free of the dynamics of politics. Although without detailed explication or analysis, both seem to want critical analysis to reorient itself to the ways in which religion is unpacked to be experienced in/as the public square, on/as the public stage, in terms of certain social-cultural practices, with profound psych-social-cultural consequences. This we have seen with the two examples I cited already. Bauman relates this phenomenon to his theoretics regarding modernity as “solid,” on the one hand, “liquid,” on the other. The former represents the onset of modernity, with felt need for certainty and order, including Manichean sensibilities and politics. The arrangement that developed from this impulse is frayed and has long since collapsed, even though this does not mean that the structuring—the Manicheanism that defined it—remains a force.13 Tibi has addressed the phenomenon through focus on the radical tension and conflict that defines Islamism, which although different from other religious systems in many important respects is ultimately seen to be poignantly metonymic of the Manichean politics conceptualized and driven by modern developments among religions.

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But what I should like to do is push the analysis to the point of making religion and religionization less vague and concrete, less otherworldly and beyond critical analysis of the sort we aim to model in our discussions and projects. I maintain that what is misrecognized or unrecognized in the theoretics of Bauman and Tibi and others has to do with scriptures, or in more precise functional or operational terms, with scripturalization and scripturalizing. Modern-world and contemporary “religion” is in my view, basically and complexly for the most part the phenomenon/politics of scripturalization and the varied complex iterations, performances of it and responses to it. This suggests, of course—as I made reference earlier—a scrambling, an upending, of the traditional modernist dualistic categories and concepts of religion and the secular. Scriptures in terms of the theoretics of scripturalization/scripturalizing and as analytic wedge leads us in another direction and to another depth of analysis. It suggests the analytic potential in playing around with the formation, orientation, and politics of the human, of human collectives, including the nation/state, even including “religion,” as (projection of the politics and ideologies of) the scriptural. The possibilities for understanding the social psychology, the expressivism, the politics, of our collectives through such focus on such phenomena are enormous. As a rather astounding and articulate challenge to the sort of rhetoric reflected in the epigraphs for this address and not uncommon around the world among strong men, Barack Obama’s Farewell Address delivered on January 10, 2017, in Chicago, will be, I predict, much remembered and analyzed and engaged. It reflects a rather astute understanding of the nation as scriptural formation and matrix, with its possibilities and challenges: Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power, give it meaning—with our participation, and with the choices that we make and the alliances that we forge.14

To be sure, authorities generally work to create realities and truths for the rest of us—what I call the work of scripturalization, defining us, labeling us—in terms that are not merely hurtful but absurd: how can a human being be “illegal”? How can a living breathing being or agent be deemed only three-fifth of the specimen? Or be sold for a sum of money? But we may, we must, also see that we can talk back, scripturalize in alternative keys. I remain enthralled and disturbed by the work of the late Black Arts-era poet Lance Jeffries, who in his poem “My Blackness Is the Beauty of This Land” modeled what I call for here as he rendered the nation a scriptural phenomenon that both required and facilitated scripturalizing practices and

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play. One reads his casting of different readers/instantiations of the nation. I draw your attention to a couple of stanzas that draw us in: My blackness is the beauty of this land, . . . yet my love and yet my hate shall civilize this land, this land’s salvation.15

Was Jeffers channeling sentiment already registered by J. W. Johnson in the now famous “Lift Every Voice and Sing”?16 Might the latter be reconsidered as the most authentic, most poignant, most truth-telling national anthem, in which death/inhumanity as defining ongoing acts are acknowledged and the founding fathers and native land are poignantly and hauntingly misidentified? We need to conceptualize an ongoing project for ourselves that begins with contemporary and ongoing nation-making and unmaking as scriptural politics and ideology. We need conceptualizations of the type compellingly translated and further problematized and expanded by Hector Amaya17 that will take us far beyond the vague and vacuous focus on religion as their exceptional domain and texts as their obsessional objects. NOTES 1. “The Strongman Problem, From Modi to Trump,” Daily Comment, The Atlantic, January 17, 2017. 2. So we are reminded by the provocative works of Tomoko Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Univeralism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). 3. See The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 [1975]), 189–90. 4. See Etienne Thau, Raison d’Etat et pensee politique a l’epoque de Richelieu (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 2000), 169f. See also de Certeau, Writing, 155. 5. See Nicolas De La Mare, Traite de La Police… (Paris, 1722 [1705]), Livre Second: De La Religion. Titre Premier: Que la Religion est le premier & le principal objet de la Police , & que dans tous les temps les soins en ont ete consiez aux deux Puissances, la spirituelle, & la temporelle. 6. De Certeau, Writing, 187; 189, n#131. This orientation throws different light on the scriptural politics that obtained among European nations, protestants versus catholics, especially the British versus the French. The French, the Catholics generally, were not at uninterested in the scriptural; they simply played a different style of scriptural politics from the protestants. All played the management game. It is worth noting that Equiano figured himself a proper protestant Englishman through his firm

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opposition to Father Vincent’s supposed French Catholic biblical illiteracy. See Interesting Narrative, 200; WMM, 87–89. 7. Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 10–11, 14, 16–17, 19–20, 220. That such a phenomenon is not unique to the U.S., and should be understood in terms of a comparative history of religions and culture is reflected in several works, including the work of Buddhism scholar Alan Cole. See his Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Mahayana Buddhist Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). 8. See The Self-Interpreting Bible: Containing the Sacred Text of the Old and New Testaments, by Scottish cleric-theologian Rev. John Brown (New York: Hodge and Campbell, 1792 [1778]). See Furstenburg, 60; and http://www​.electricscotland​ .com​/bible​/brown​/index​.htm. 9. Furstenberg, 103, 220, 230–1. 10. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 63, and chaps 1–2. 11. (“The Unwinnable war: an Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” with Lukasz Galecki, https://www​.opendemocracy​.net​/globalization​-vision​_reflections​/modernity​ _3082​.jsp, 1 December 2005; accessed January 19, 2017). 12. Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven and London: 2012), 35. 13. See his Liquid Modernity (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000). 14. https://obamawhitehouse​.archives​.gov​/farewell 15. See his My Blackness is the Beauty of this Land (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970). 16. cf Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem, ed. Julian Bond and Sondra Kathryn Wilson (New York: Random House, 2000). 17. See his Citizenship Excess: Latino/as, Media and the Nation (New York: NYU Press, 2013).

Chapter 23

“They’re Ruining the Game” (Mis)Readers of the Nation-State (2018)

Often noted about Donald Trump’s speech at a rally in Huntsville, AL, on September 22, 2017, is its registration and promotion of confusion, in that sense of lack of clarity in terms of choice of words and structure of logic for which he is well known: Wouldn’t you love to see one of those NFL owners—when somebody disrespects our flag—say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now; he’s fired, fired . . . , that’s a total disrespect of our heritage . . . total disrespect for everything we stand for . . . ” NFL ratings are down massively . . . [because] Today if you hit too hard . . . (They say) “15 yards . . . Throw him out!” . . . (I say) they’re ruining the game . . . But what’s hurting the game more than that . . . when You see those people taking the knee when they’re playing our great national anthem . . .1

But I should like here to draw attention to the registration of confusion in that original sense of the term—from the Latin confūsiōn/confūsiō/confundere—meaning “to pour together, mingle, place alongside or in relationship” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). How I wish setting up the critical analysis needed were in this case only a matter of and occasion for the typical scholarly gnashing on etymological and rhetorical-critical fine points, with little or no immediate real-world resonance. Alas: there is poignancy and no little amount of real, even palpable, concern felt in noting the intended or unintended (as in reflexive) confusion (in the sense of juxtapositioning) in Trump’s spitfire rhetoric quoted above. In other words, an analysis of the sort I should like to invite us all to join is no laughing matter, no mere professional academic performance or game; it is a matter of discerning and coming to terms with the United States as a nation being manipulated and made—given 316

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the office of the one who speaks—along with much of the rest of the world, anxious and fearful.2 So I should like to ask for your patience as I try to fathom and engage Trump’s rhetorics; there is some profit and challenge for us in the effort. “Confusion” in the sense of the more popular and narrow (and mostly U.S. English) meaning of perplexing and confounding may always obtain even when “con-fusion” in the sense of the originary meaning—of placing alongside something—is evident. For the sake of deepening and widening our critical theorizing and analysis, including possible liberation from the thicket or mire created by Trump’s rhetorics, focus in my argument is placed on the originary meaning for the sake of exposing a rhetorical sleight-of-hand and advancing an analysis that has serious discursive implications and socialpolitical ramifications. Our theme for this year’s Annual Meeting—“Interpreters”—is at the heart of this rather deadly game. Note the following: Trump makes reference both to the kneeling protest act associated with the player Colin Kaepernick—deliberately and dishonestly trying to make of the gesture (only) a charged symbol of unjustifiable and inexplicable disrespect for the flag and nation—and to football as a game of violent contact, intended to be played (only) by violent characters. There is certainly in his comments—whether made or received (heard or read) separately or together, the usual confusion (-making), as in deliberately making non-sense or causing bewilderment. But there is something more—the two references in the same political red-meat rally speech in football-drenched Alabama suggest that at issue is something that may cast a bright light on or open wide windows onto our theme for this year’s meeting. Consider: what does it mean to declare, pretty much in absolute terms, in the fashion of an absolute dictator, that footballers—most, but not all of whom are persons of color, registering in the popular U.S. mind as big black males; what does it mean to call these persons “sons of bitches” who in turning their backs or sitting or kneeling during the playing of the national anthem and the hoisting of the flag should be fired? The name-calling rings alarm bells; it is resonant of a long history of names/descriptors created by white dominants to secure and maintain what in the modern world has become (according to the inaccurately but now poignantly translated English title of Foucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses) “the order of things.”3 In the context of Trump’s rally speech, we clearly have to do with the nationalist racial order of things. The gestures on the part of the players—gestures that are normally popularly seen as quite passive poses, actually imitative of historically pacifist or ascetical movements: the shrinking of the body, the vocal quiet(ism), completely opposite any kind of violent assumption of territory—are ironically amazingly and pointedly and immediately among some, including Trump himself, denied legitimacy, made illicit, even defined as threatening.4

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Note how the cover of New Yorker, Jan 15, 2018, with the inclusion of Martin Luther King, Jr., alongside Colin Kaepernick and Michael Bennett (of the Seahawks), captures the real point—the footballers’ collective point behind the bodily gestures (see figure 23.1). They were channeling those driving the historical moments for civil rights and in fact imitating their bodily gestures. And often—when not singing and praying and marching—these historical figures of the civil rights movement practiced an askesis of silence. The imitative silence on the part of the protesting players—during the singing of the national anthem, a most strategic point of timing—is paradoxically heard and responded to as alarming and destabilizing noise, as though it were nothing other than the shrill fear-inducing strains of urban boom boxes (Radio Raheem redivivus!).​ Furthermore, with a jarring, neck-snapping rhetorical transition or bizarre turn in logic, even for him, what does it mean for Trump to proceed in the same speech to go on—in a manner that I dare say would have embarrassed even René Girard—to extol the virtues of U.S. style football as the highperformance spectacle of violence, defined by “hard-hitting”? First, we have the weird focus on the players’ passive resistance as refusal (to engage in nationalist ritual play) as seemingly shocking displays of anti-Americanism. Then we have the turn to the defining and extolling of the game of U.S.-style football as a (good old) tradition of violent clashing. What goes on here?

Figure 23.1  Cover of the Jan. 15, 2018, cover of the New Yorker, reprinted by permission of Condé Nast Publishing.

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Make no mistake—notwithstanding the halting, simple/simpleton’s ungrammatical, inelegant speech, the president of the United States was in this situation poignantly and not at all innocently confusing, in that more originary and more layered meaning of juxtapositioning, throwing two seemingly unrelated things alongside each other. The two things being thrown here are the popular notions of football as violence, on the one hand, and social protest (in various forms or gestures of signification), on the other. Of course, we can discern confusion of both types of meaning at work here. But it seems most important to Trump to use the one as ruse in order to advance the other, in other words, to plant in the listeners’ ears the association of playing football with, on the one hand, the crunching/clashing sound of the hard hitting of mostly black male bodies, and on the other (rhetorical) hand, there is the reminder that there is the long-standing assumption among all those who follow the game of U.S. football that players are assumed and expected to be silent—and crunch other bodies. Not silent, mind you, only in the absolute sense that there is no speaking, but silent in that liquid sense of there being no meaningful articulation of any sort, no signification of anything beyond that which players as players are (historically) supposed to signify and within the boundary markers on the “field” of the game of football.5 So players who are not “hitting hard” or facilitating hard hitting are of course thought and argued by Trump to be “ruining the game.” But of course no player, no team, has actually ever renounced hard hitting. This rhetoric is therefore rather shifty and disingenuous; simply by referencing concern about hard hitting alongside the act of taking the knee or sitting down or not gesticulating in some conventional manner assumed to be right for the public ritual, Trump was planting the idea that the one thing cancels or undermines the other: Those players who protest in any form at any time during the game—the playing of the national anthem being very convenient—are according to Trump’s world of logic presumed to be not focused on hitting hard, thus, they are “ruining the game.” Now a bit about what in the speech was un/veiled about “the game”: There is indeed a game being played, but in the most fundamental terms, it is not being played on the football field. The game of real interest to Trump, and to the folks who are a part of his political base, is played on the field of nationalist discourse. It involves meaning-making and meaning-control. It is the nation—represented, sometimes officially, at other times furtively, in the moves of the appointed guardians or elected officials in the domains of politics, jurisprudence, the academy, religion, the media, entertainment, business, and so forth—that is invested in and committed to meaning.6 Critical histories or deep excavations of social formations inform us that most human beings for most of human history have not been invested in or committed to the establishment and management of meaning, but have historically tended

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to be oriented rather differently—when not mostly just playing or mostly just surviving. The “vision thing,” as a former U.S. president used to put it—or the quest for meaning, as (Axial Age-type) elites in general might put it—is, if not a relatively recent phenomenon, certainly a more pressing and widespread concern in the modern world of nation-states. Among the latter it became important in order to better manage polities, societies, nations. And scriptures, that is, centering nationalist writings, myths, origin-stories, songs, declarations, etc., that serve as vectors of the nation’s meaning/meaning of the nation, have been critical to nation-building and maintenance throughout the modern world. Some nation-building efforts can be deemed efficient or successful, some others less so, particularly in connection with the “vision thing,” what I prefer to call and have conceptualized as scripturalization in the interest of nationalization.7 In point of fact, all modern nations (and perhaps many if not most of its pre-modern precursors) are more or less reading formations, scriptural economies.8 Navigation of such economies requires facility for reading, the capacity for interpreting the (particular or relevant dominant/national) reading formation or the nation as or in terms of the scriptural. In his Alabama stump speech, Trump seems to me to have represented, regurgitated, performed, if you will—whether badly or artfully may depend on your sensibilities if not politics—somewhat persuasively before his audience, a part of his base. He performed not over against, some criticism from progressives notwithstanding, but as accurate reflection of part of the United States as (nationalist) reading formation. We must take care not to be confused (in that second sense of the meaning of the term), that is, to mistake Trump’s audience as mere oddballs, “deplorables” (so Hillary Clinton), as merely the bible- and gun-clinging folks (so Obama), as if they were those who are outside the national reading formation. No, Trump’s crowds are very much the mirror of the United States as nation, precisely insofar as they reassert, crudely, some of us might think, one of the pillar assumptions on which the nation has been built—that official interpreters/handlers of national scriptures/managers of national meaning must not be (historically and normally, by practice and tradition; at times by laws, but always in terms of natural default) confused with, reflected by, except by special permission or qualification, non-white flesh, that is, black bodies. The game that is being played and is threatened with possible ruin is that same game played even before the establishment of the modern nation. There has long been a game all about the politics, the management, of meaning, about the at times necessary re-assertion or obfuscation of what is real and natural and of significance (and its opposites). And management of such is accomplished only through the offices of authorized interpreters. In some cases and domains, these interpreters are found to be those who are officially

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and superficially designated as such—with titles, degrees, and other certifications, and symbols of office. In such a situation are to be found pedigreed teachers, scholars/professors, doctors, lawyers, jurists, heads of organizations/corporations, media moguls, journalists, and so forth. In some other cases, persons may be assumed to be unofficial, extra-institutional avatars, instantiations, of the nation’s meaning. There may now not be clear—probably never has been—broadly understood clear-cut or explicit statements or rules about who can be tapped as authorized interpreters of the nation. Yet history provides plenty of evidence about who—in terms of social (racialethnic) background and training—has been and who has not been accorded such privilege or authority. The full truth about who has been allowed to interpret has not been told; it has mostly been not said or sometimes denied. What is absolutely clear is that the underlying reigning ideological assumptions Trump so haplessly but truthfully articulates is that some particular groups of persons have been and continue to be excluded from being considered full and unqualified legitimate readers or interpreters of or for the United States as nation. In an effort to defend the nation and one’s complicity in what the United States as nation has wrought, some may disingenuously deny that such exclusion now is or has ever been the case. On the other side of Obama’s presidency, such denials are hollow. Among the myriad explanations that attempt to account for the rise of Trump, the mere appearance of Obama is one that cannot be denied. The b(l)acklash is clear and obvious, palpable, virulent, violent. The originary white-dominant, slave-holding nation did not retreat, was not fundamentally denaturalized or undermined, even in the aftermath of social unrests and degrees of advancements on the part of non-white especially black peoples. Neither the post-Civil War reforms that the formerly enslaved in the 1860s and 1870s helped usher in nor the social protest and laws that the persistently segregated of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s provoked resulted in a radically differently defined, differently oriented nation. B(l)acklashes followed with a vengeance. Then of course there followed the issue and the moments of immigration among non-whites—legal and not legal—from the early twentieth century to our times that threatened to further roil or disrupt the spin of the myth of the white nation. In response, the white nation has emerged again most recently as defiant response at fever pitch in connection with the election of Trump. History teaches that the default orientation, the canonical myth, revolves around, persists with, the white nation. With Trump’s bombastic and in many respects all too revealing rhetoric, we are reminded of the complexity of the politics of authorization of readers or interpreters of the nation. The authorization does not turn strictly or exclusively or bluntly around race or ethnicity. It is a convenient truth (for many) that most of the resisting footballers are Black. And we know, because

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he tells us so, that Trump is “the least racist person” we’ve ever encountered. But beyond the matter turning around Trump’s particular sensibilities, it is not strictly about the racial identification of this or that player; within and far beyond Trump’s circle, indeed, throughout most of the nation, persons of color are likely to be said to be welcome; what matters is less whether Ben Carson or any other spokesperson is Black; what matters is their orientation, subjugation, the willingness to comply, to be sent to the “sunken place” and to undergo the experience of the “coagula,”9 the phenomenon of self-emptying, into the order (of things). So the matter of determining who can be legitimized as interpreters is not about the race of the person per se, but about race-ing and racializations, that is to say, about who is authorized to speak. The footballers are said to be “ruining the game” because they appear to be self-possessed as black persons and they were resisting. They were Black and independently signifying, signifying about something different from that relating to the game involving “hard hitting”; they were “ruining” the “game” of nation-state construction and maintenance—pax Americana—in arrogating to themselves the right to be independent interpreters of/about the nation, that is, apart from the acceptance of the system of ventriloquism and mimetics expected in which the national foundation or canon is assumed to be white. With Trump as the self-chosen authoritative voice in the matter of the perceived arrogance/arrogation on the part of the black (for so they were all read) footballers to signify in regard to the epidemic of anti-black police brutality and inequality in the nation, the players were deemed out of place. Their critique was deemed insufferable because it exposed the violence of the lie of the nation—about its origins, how it was forged, who built it, how it has been maintained. The resisting football players did indeed present themselves as interpreters of the nation. But the type of interpretive gesture or play or work of critique coming from these (mostly) black bodies was felt by many to be clearly intolerable. The footballers and their kind have historically been deemed misinterpreters, misreaders. Some will recall here the title of the volume that was culmination of the ISS multiple-year collaborative research project on the scriptural practices of U.S. communities of color, entitled MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference.10 Limited as it was in scope—originally conceptualized by me around the problematic of modern scriptural fundamentalism, with these communities providing open analytical windows—the project could not possibly have been considered definitive; nonetheless, it demonstrated the potential of and need for more ethnographic and ethnological research and critical analysis on these communities and challenged us to work on a reconceptualization of the phenomenon of scriptural fundamentalism as a project having to do with the politics of modern national and transnational forms of scripturalism, as well social-cultural mimetics.

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As important—as I indicated in the Introduction to MisReading America— we were with the final title of the volume channeling literary critic Harold Bloom’s too narrow and oddly apolitical concept here of misreading—the phenomenon of alternate readings of a commonly held, taken-for-granted/ unproblematized “text.” With such channeling, we were provoking and reflecting the problematic of (racial-ethnic cultural and political) “influence” and the assertion of what Bloom calls a “strong” reading as difference.11 I see in Trump’s excoriation of the footballers more to think with about these matters having to do with misinterpretation. As Barack Obama was, as president—perhaps, especially, as president—viewed by some (if internet blather as well as State of the Union eruptions are figured) as not quite a reliable, legitimate, or authorized interpreter/reader of the nation, as someone who does not “get” America, because according to those who constitute a cult/ure called the “birthers,” he is not originally from the United States— just so the footballers who signified on, or who resignifed the flag/national anthem, are seen as misinterpreters and as such are suspect as “Americans.” This is rather different from the “difference” that Bloom conceptualizes in mostly apolitical terms. Our taking-the-knee-silent footballers are part of a rich tradition of black circum-Atlantic world signifying runagates, maroons. They are those who in the context of modern world violence that is slavocracy and jim-crowism resist, fight back, run away, march, sit down, and set before themselves the task of inventing with resolve, discipline, and imagination a new mix of signs, sounds, images, symbols, and gestures for the sake of constructing alternate worlds in what Houston Baker has characterized as psychic marronage.12 They are the interpreters who distinguish themselves from the other two types of interpreters I have previously identified and isolated—the enslavers, who cannot, because they do not have to, see, acknowledge, and address their own ways in the world (yet make others invisible as Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man put it, to their “inner eyes”); and the enslaved, who having been made invisible by those of the modern Coagula cult—as filmmaker Peele imagined the workings of white dominance in Get Out—are cast in the “sunken place” whence they are rendered imprisoned, without capacity to hear or speak about themselves or address or even recognize (fully or consistently) their own plight. (These are not always and only to be identified with the black enslaved.) As those who are made to be and remain invisible and silent, they cannot possibly be considered anything but mis-interpreters of the nation or of the world.13 But, of course, it is very possible that the “game” that Trump referenced is another example of his shocking unwitting truth-telling, as well as his strange penchant for making accusations about others that actually reflect his own (and his tribe’s onus and) sin. The game he plays is a scam not without

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serious consequences; it is obfuscation about the order of things, including how the white fantasy of supremacism and the correlative non-white, especially black, denial, works in all domains in all parts of the nation that is the United States and throughout much of the modern world. It is a game ultimately about keeping up the appearance of a colossal fiction, insuring that the lie about things that matter is not addressed. And what is found to be most unsettling is the recognition that those historically most readily and easily accused of being misinterpreters of this game that is nonetheless about a real and deadly serious regime are thought in a rather twisted way actually not to be so, are not deemed misinterpreters at all, but authentic, strong—with all the ramifications, fears and, as James Baldwin argues, the pathologies appertaining thereto: Americans have made themselves notorious by the shrillness and the brutality With which they have insisted on this idea [of white supremacy] . . . that white men are the creators of civilization . . . and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders. Thus it was impossible [for them] to accept the black [folks] as [being like] themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status. . . . But not so to accept [them] was to deny [their] human reality. . . human weight and complexity, and the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic they approached the pathological.14

Here with the footballers and their kneeling we have precisely the pathological mindset. Perhaps, the fact that the charge that, in this case, the footballers—a stand-in of a sort for articulate voices with non-white or female voices and bodies, they might just as well be any among those around the world defined as those who must be silent or must gesture according to script: women who have cause to bring accusations against powerful men; dalits, kaffirs, and so forth—these are among those who are “ruining the game” as played in different national fields and in authorized public social-cultural spaces. We are confronted here with nationalist and/or pan-european white supremacist ideology—with whiteness here serving as synecdoche for dominance and violence. And Trump’s fretful rally cry is nothing short of a confession of the palpable fear that the historically silent non-whites and females, whatever their station, may once again be arrogating to themselves roles as interpreters in/of the world. What for so long has prevented such assertion or protected the silence and control is also made clear in Trump’s panicky but also arrogant rally speech. The game endures because of the nature of the rules, so to speak, or the order of things, for speech. Such ordering is powerful and multifaceted, hard to recognize, even harder to grasp and engage. So whether understood as the “racial contract” that subtends the Western social contract by which white societies order themselves, pointedly involving the subjugation of non-white

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peoples;15 in terms of the translatio imperii et studii that sums up the agenda and modus operandi of the founding legend of Western civilization as a complex of marauding peoples (social-cultural and political Trojans) who persistently compel the colonization of others via culture translation, making the others think through European language and categories;16 whether seen in terms of the “sexual contract,” the mystification of embodiedness along lines of gender, for sake of the interests and advantages of patriarchy;17 or whether, as I prefer, it is understood as scripturalization, that is, the regime of language and communication, refracted into media, signs, symbols, gestures, discourse or language—all these dynamics and situations among so many others point to types of control and violence. Over time and in various controlled situations some others beyond the originary natural circle of those in control—white men in the modern world—can be taught to read and interpret the scripts of control, the “scriptures.” Even black footballers may in the view of white dominants like Trump read these scriptures; but only when that reading reflects proper recognition, gestures, and performances, viz., appropriate translation or mimetics of the authoritative voice. To try to speak otherwise or outside this order is a serious problem and challenge. The independent interpreter (a type of Nat Turner or Sojourner Truth from one world situation) will face charges of insanity and inanities, psychosis and pathology, hubris and haughtiness, with lynching/execution always a possibility. So according to Baldwin, the cultural-ideological-political maroon registers the sad and pathological situation that is faced: “even if I could speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.”18 The rhetorically violent eruption from Trump certainly does register in a sick—as in Baldwin’s pathological—sense: How could the footballers be allowed to “speak,” to be articulate, to project their views? Too much is at stake, too much at issue. Philosopher Charles Mills, drawing on Habermas’s notion of “the ideal speech situation”—which might be aptly summarized as “a sober dialogue among equals characterized by scientific detachment and institutional reason”19—poignantly describes the politics of interpretation in the modern white-dominated world in relationship to Black subjects. The situation, he argues, “requires our absence, since we are, literally, the men and women who know too much, who . . . know where the bodies are buried (after all, so many are our own).”20 Yet as represented by the footballers, such people who “know too much,” or know enough, are not absent or silent; they are very much present, and have spoken and continue to speak, continue to project their images, visions, and ideas, continue to “misinterpret” the nation and much of the world. I turn to a summarizing of arguments here with two breath-taking examples recently unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery (part of the Smithsonian

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Institution and, as such, as a public memorialization institution, a canonical institution, to be sure). The examples are the “official” portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama (see figs. 23.2 and 23.3), these two national, if not now world symbols, as rendered/interpreted by Black artists known to be sensitive to “the politics of race” in their works.21​​ I encourage the reader to go to the National Portrait Gallery to view the works. I have no time/space here to linger and dig deeply in analysis of the sort required for in-depth trans-disciplinary thinking and conversation. But it may be helpful as I draw to a close here to point to a few observations from critics—and my own summarizing ones—about the paintings: There is of course the striking fact that Black faces are inserted into what we should consider the “canon,” in official portraits or portraits of officials and unveiled and placed in a museum, no less. I agree it is important to ask: Was the interest on the part of the commissioned portraitists—politically conscious readers/interpreters both by their own admission and as reflected in

Figure 23.2  Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, oil on canvas, 2018. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama Portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia.

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Figure 23.3  Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama by Amy Sherald, oil on linen, 2018. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama Portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia.

their previous works, but certainly so under these circumstance—to remedy the obvious historical exclusion or to destabilize the tradition? Barack Obama’s face—of note should be that intensity of gaze, with the absence of the smile, how it contrasts sharply with the tradition of presidents’ faces and their general bearing reflecting the expected “bland propriety,” “expressionless and composed” (Kennicott), the “uninflected dignity” (Cotter).22 Might President Obama’s difference here suggest not so much the feigned (self-) or national satisfaction and accomplishment that the stances and the environment historically project by portraits but instead something approaching impatience for something, longing still for something? Furthermore, we note that he is shown full-bodied and seated, not just a head, not on or near a horse, not framed as though transcendent, but leaning “tensely forward, frowning, elbows on knees, arms crossed, as if listening hard. No smiles, no Mr. Nice Guy. He’s still troubleshooting, still in the game” (Cotter). His “engaged and assertive demeanor” does not project detachment, but the professorial-statesman leading the seminar about

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problems of the nation or the world, listening, probing, arguing, taking matters seriously even as he is “embedded in . . .flowers” from worlds—Kenya, Hawaii, Chicago—that betray the basis or perspective from which he listens and opines and the springboard that makes him authentic man of the world. Michelle Obama—what is at first so striking is that her body is not part of the long ugly racialized tradition of overexposed fetishized black female bodies. Although she does not escape—I wonder, can any female public figure escape?—being a “couturial spectacle,” I agree that she here “projects rock-solid cool.” The chalk-grained face draws attention away from the usual color-fetish, color-anxiety. She seems comfortable and utterly self-possessed, natural (Cotter). I agree that both figures carried so much of the collective fantasy and hopes of a rather different United States as “America” with them to Washington years ago. This hope was premature and unrealistic; only now it is clear how powerfully it “animated [the] meanest impulses of those who reject it.” Yet these portraits will likely remind generations to come just how much “wish fulfillment” was embodied in the Obamas, and “how gracefully they bore that burden” (Kennicott). Just as the body-gesturing on the part of the footballers signified, so the projection of these images of the Obamas in provoking particular sentiments through one medium signified critical and provocative and reflective interpretation. And within the larger context of Trump’s babbling and confused unwitting truth-telling about what is at issue, we have a clearer sense of the larger stakes and issues of the “game.” Trump had his way of putting the matter; I like how a couple of critics summarize the situation and the stakes: In his provocatively titled book Rage for Order, Joel Williamson, although naming the chief problem on terms that Trump could never do, nonetheless actually elaborates on our situation by eerily using the same term Trump uses: Race . . . is a problem of the mind and not . . . the body. It assumes . . . white people have the power to make scapegoats of black people, to manage them sufficiently to create the illusion that they want to see . . . The uses to which white power put black people in this fashion [are] virtually limitless. Once the game started, the Negro could be made the scapegoat of any number of ills, either of body or the mind . . . (quoted in Barrett)23

Although not specifically named as such, this “game” that has begun is understood by another critic Lindon Barrett as positioning “blackness . . . as excess in relation to a more ‘legitimate’ and significant presence known as whiteness,” and further chillingly understood in terms of “riddled intramural relations” for the sake of safeguarding the “valued form of whiteness.” The latter is challenged by “equally unsettling extramural dynamics”:

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In the same way that valued whiteness must struggle to occlude its internal mechanism—the originary and ongoing violences that maintain its privileged status— so too it must struggle to occlude competing formations of value sponsored by and within the ‘excessive’ communities designated as black. (Barrett 56-57)

On such a fraught and dangerous field, the games are played. Of course, these are simply some of my examples to think with, about social practices, politics, and pathologies in terms of the dynamics of ongoing modern racism/racialization and the dynamics that I call scripturalizing/ scripturalization. Each of you may begin elsewhere or use other examples as windows onto the field of analysis. But let us agree that our charge must be to stay focused on explaining “the game” being played on the field—who’s on first, who’s dribbling, who hits whom hard—and the state of play and of bodies and minds, including damaged ones, haunting/haunted buried ones!; and that these all should be examined in terms of the mechanisms/orders that are scripturalizing/scripturalization. The real “game” has always been and is now nothing if not about the scriptural and its authorized interpreters or proclaimed or positioned mis/interpreters and the value projected onto or denied such figures. We are all implicated in this game. The worst sin is to proceed with the play as though it were natural and pacific. Here lies a compelling reason for our gathering, our conversation, our excavation work. NOTES 1. http://www​.cnn​.com​/2017​/09​/22​/politics​/donald​-trump​-alabama​-nfl​/index​ .html (last accessed October 1, 2018). 2. Trump’s confounding 2017 address to the United Nations (“Little Rocket man. . . ”) is only one powerful example of the palpable impact of his rhetorics on the rest of the world. This event was found to be almost immediately disturbing by the world, even as it represented the traditional modern world platform and format in contrast to his usual exploitation of the rather late if not post-modern mediatization and connectivity of the world in the form of tweeting. 3. See his The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, Inc., 1970). 4. See for historical and cross-cultural perspectives on ascetical, world-renunciatory gestures and some of their meanings: Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook, ed. V. L. Wimbush (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); Asceticism, ed. V. L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (Oxford University Press, 1998). 5. But not only football: Recently, conservative pundit Laura Ingraham’s row with superstar professional basketballer Lebron James, deemed by many to be the best in the game. She admonished him to “Shut up and dribble!” This suggests a wider attitude about athletes of color that is fairly popular in U.S. culture. (A documentary

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series inspired by these words—and with exact title, on basketball and social history—has recently been produced.) 6. This was part of the discussion of the first ISS seminar (2016)—the topic on “Meaning.” This in turn led us to focus the following year on the topic “Nation/State.” 7. See my White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. chap 4. 8. Michel de Certeau, Writing of History, tr. Tom Conley (Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. chaps. 3 and 4, with focus on France, but with a great deal of application to European modern nations more generally. 9. The terms in quotation marks come from Jordan Peele‘s well-received and disturbing 2017 movie Get Out in which some black characters are made to undergo the experience of having their true inner selves vacated from their bodies and made to host “white” selves. 10. Ed. V. L. Wimbush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 11. See his Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1973]. 12. See his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 13. See my SBL presidential address, “Inte​rpret​ers—E​nslav​ing/E​nslav​ed/Ru​nagat​ e,” in JBL 130, no. 1 (2011): 5–24. Also see note #9 above, in re: Peele’s film. 14. See his Notes of a Native Son (1949) in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 127. 15. See Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 16. See Richard Waswo, Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), passim. 17. See for elaboration Carole Portman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 18. See his The Fire Next Time, in Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 317. 19. Charles Lipsitz, “Afterword: The Black Body as Proof: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination,” in Celeste-Marie Bernier, Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 372. 20. Mills, Racial Contract, 132 (italics his). 21. See portraits and discussion in Philip Kennicott, “The Obama Portraits are Not What You’d Expect, That’s Why They’re Great,” Washington Post, February 12, 2018 https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/entertainment​/museums​/obamas​-portraits​-unveiled​-for​-americans​-presidents​-exhibition​/2018​/02​/12​/d9f3691a​-1000​-11e8​ -8ea1​-c1d91fcec3fe​_story​.html​?utm​_term=​.36b626795e57 22. According to Holland Cotter, New York Times, February 12, 2018—https:// www​.nytimes​.com​/2018​/02​/12​/arts​/design​/obama​-portrait​.html 23. Quoted in Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 31. See Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 199.

Chapter 24

Who Counts(?) Scripturalization as Classification (2019)

Strongly worded radically oppositional sentiments came out of the dramas and traumas that we here in the United States called the 2018 midterm elections. The latter term is shorthand reference to U.S. election events—at all levels in different types of jurisdictions—in non-presidential election years. These events traditionally present opportunities for corrections/adjustments to the most recent previous presidential election. Here is a sample of a few of the sharp-edged, simplistic, and embarrassing barbs and tired tropes: [She’s] not qualified[,] [She’s] weak on crime . . . / [He’s a] strong man . . . [He’s] tough on crime.

—Trump on Abrams/Kemp: Competitors in Georgia Governor’s Race, 2018 She is an outstanding person who is strong on the Border, Crime, Military . . . / He doesn’t fit. . .

—Trump on Hyde-Smith/Espy: Competitors in Mississippi U.S. Senate race, 2018 In Florida there is a choice between a Harvard/Yale educated man [Ron DeSantis] who has been a great Congressman and will be a great Governor‒‒and a Dem who is a thief and who is Mayor of poorly run Tallahassee, said to be one of the most corrupt cities in the Country! —Trump Tweet on Gillam/De Santis: Florida Governor’s Race, 2018

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past campaign; we were left wondering what on any given day may come next: Another shutdown of government, or, perhaps, the persistent threat of a government shutdown as one of the signs of the ongoing toxicity in our polity and society? Noteworthy about the 2018 midterms were the types of outrageous gestures made and violent rhetorics spewed by Trump to advance certain candidates of his liking. These were efforts to exploit and exacerbate deep and persistent psycho-social-cultural and political fault lines, categories, or names that define us and show us how we are categorized and ordered. Such categorization and ordering may at times assures us; at other times, it provokes and frightens and threatens us, and stoking anxiety and animosity. What appears significant for our consideration—that is, for the consideration of a group of friends committed to thinking and wrestling honestly and earnestly together about how and why things are and came to be inscribed as they are and what we might do about such (a good way to understand what ISS is and must continue to be about)—are the rhetorical formations of Trump and some other contemporary public officials. (“Strongmen” the latter are sometimes called here in the United States and in other parts of the world. Consider Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Venezuela, several situations in Africa.) I have in mind how he and others tend to name and categorize and isolate individuals and groups. As critical theorists of the scriptural and its politics, we must always be alert to the continuous not always subtle efforts among such figures to impose, to exploit, to exacerbate the crude, violent historical and ongoing inscribing, ordering and classification, the type-ing and hierarchical-izing, of peoples throughout the world as part of a type of violence. What is at work if not the scratching of the historical and persistent wounding of certain peoples of the United States (especially, but also reflected in other parts of the world) when Trump crudely and bluntly exclaimed that his preferred candidate (white/mostly male/same party affiliation) is such and such—(strong/tough on crime/smart, and so forth)—and the other candidate (of the other party/a person of color/sometimes male, sometimes female) is the exact subpar opposite of his (i.e., weak/not a good fit/unqualified, and so forth)? What in such rhetorics is he playing with, trading on? Here we have striking examples and quickening of the adage—recovered by philologist F. Max Mueller and applied in the consolidation of the spoils of the modern colonial period—“classify and conquer.”1 Trump was (re)drawing tropes and stereotypes about differences between peoples in the system of classification as hierarchizing—or subduing the others—that has long defined the West. For a number of reasons—none or very few of them ennobling or honest—the direct and open verbal articulations of the harsh racial and gender classifications in the West have lately on the whole been somewhat muted, covered up by different sorts of deflections, denials, subtleties, and codes. But then enters

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Trump, who as elephant in the all-is-well, all-are-equal discursive-political masking shop ironically wreaks both political success and havoc. Why is this phenomenon so important to our thinking and conversation about the scriptural? I should like to suggest that the matter goes beyond establishing classification as an odd phenomenon in the historical constitution of the modern world we know and experience that Trump as an odd person in our present digs up and exploits. At stake are power and the order of social relations, power in the order of social relations that obtained before, obtains still, and will obtain beyond and long after Trump. What Trump dramatically exposed was not only in place before he assumed the political stage, it was also in place in several if not all domains of modern life. The ubiquity of the phenomenon should provoke heightened awareness on our part and a commitment to responding accordingly. The problem having to do with classification is everywhere in evidence— in politics, education, science, religion, and so forth. Science has long been embroiled in the matter. In spite of attempts to cover up its history of leadership and onus in this arena, a weak (or honest) link shows up to push back the curtain/veil. Consider the Nobel-winning biologist James D. Watson, who did pioneering work on the structure of DNA (the Human Genome Project). It was reported that in a conversation with a British journalist in 2007 he shared that he remained “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really” (New York Times, Amy Harmon, Jan 1, 2019). In a PBS documentary American Masters: Decoding Watson broadcast in January 2019, Watson was asked whether his views on linkages between race and intelligence had changed: “Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between Blacks and whites on I.Q. tests . . . the difference is genetic.” In his memoir Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (2007), with its title channeling that humility that marks scientists of the twentieth century, Watson made the following strong statement: A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.2

The roiling around Watson and his strong sentiments and pronouncements in regard to matters of race and intelligence—with Black peoples positioned lowest on the rung—continues. But a final note here about what is most striking and unsettling about the Watson example: not only might his sentiment

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not represent the minority view among scientists but some scientists, it is suggested, seem to understand that Watson exposes himself as an outlier, not simply in terms of his personal eccentricity or the ravages of dementia or in terms of his substantive views and sentiments held about race and intelligence, but in terms of not holding such views and sentiments “close [enough] to the vest.” That is to say, in making “public” the views held by many, Watson showed himself to be incompetent not so much in terms of the science but in being impolitic. A different but sometimes overlapping domain, that of demography, practiced by scientists of all types, including social scientists and students of public policy as it intersects with and is made to serve politics and government, opens an especially wide even if disturbing window. Demographers tell on us in regard to our deep existential anxieties and fears, and so on, more than they tell us the facts about things. Consider the glimpse the discipline provides into our collective psyche as we turn to the issue of the trend in the explosive increase in difference in U.S. population. The revelation of the trend—toward the loss of majority in number on the part of the white population—clearly leads to anxiety on the part of whites as historical majority dominants, anxiety specifically over the historical center, and the category/classification appertaining thereto, no longer holding. In an article written published in the New York Times in November 2018, “Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous,” Sabrina Tavernise provides insight into classification anxiety, anxiety over the changes in the relative position of the various unquestioned traditional social categories—how the changes have struck nerves, the work they do, what they might portend. All of this of course reflects thick and layered history of what I call the freighted psycho-socio-logics, or (following the provocative work of Nidesh Lawtoo who followed the theoretics of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), the “patho(-)logics”3 as response on the part of dominant-majority whites in the face of the very scary prospect of whites as a group becoming a minority group, or at least no longer a clear and convincing majority solely in terms of numbers, wealth, and political power. The simple movement and prospect of a shift of this sort throws many from indifference to anxiety to a sense of real crisis. According to Tavernise, the Census Bureau report released in 2015 “made demographic change look like a zero-sum game that white Americans were losing” The report so disturbed former Census Bureau director turned academic Kenneth Prewitt that he feared it “could provoke a political backlash.” “Statistics are powerful,” Prewitt opined, “[they] are a description of who we are as a country. If you say majority-minority, that becomes a huge fact in the national discourse.”

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Prewitt is joined by other academics, especially social scientists, many of whom question the government’s use of “race” in federal research projects; they question not only how such research is used but also the lack of critical orientation to the categories themselves. Some also despair over the effects of the research—“scaring the hell out of white people”—and sharply question whether we get a “true picture” of the present situation or the possible or likely future. At issue, some researchers say, is “whom the government counts as white.” Most interesting to note is the fact that in CB projections, people of mixed race or ethnicity have been counted mostly as “minority.” Dr. Mary Waters, sociologist at Harvard, sharpened the question before us, hardly reading like a scientist of the social: “[there] are all these people who look white, act white, marry white and live white, so what does white even mean anymore?” It is acknowledged that the topic of population projections was not given the type and degree of attention that is now common and broad-based until mid to late 2008—around the time when it was becoming clear that the prospect of Obama becoming president was a real and high. (Although some think the heightened anxiety should be traced to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.) There were in many places conversation about, even fixation on, the projection that non-Hispanic whites would drop below 50 percent by 2042, earlier than previously projected. “That’s what really lit the fuse”—so stated Dr. Dowell Myers, demographer at USC. “People went crazy.” But Myers and colleagues learned, in the way that social scientists usually do, the obvious—that the way the data were presented made a difference in regard to difference: “negative effects that came from reading about a white decline were largely erased when the same people read about how the white category was in fact getting bigger by absorbing multiracial young people through intermarriage.” “Race,” Tavernise wisely argues, is a most difficult category to grasp (beyond the most tightly wrapped group prejudices), much less a stable social category to count, because “it” “shifts with changes in culture, immigration, and ideas about genetics. So who counts as white has changed over time” So, take note of those who came to the United States as immigrants from Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. “Eventually, . . . immigrants from eastern and southern Europe came to be considered white.” Consider today those whom the border wall is intended to keep out. Why is “race” so elusive? Because, as Tavernise reports the argument of Dr. Charles King, political scientist, Georgetown University, “race is about power, not biology. The closer you get to social power, the closer you get to whiteness” He made it shockingly clear that in U.S. history the one group that was never allowed to “cross the line into whiteness was African-Americans . . . —the long-term legacy of slavery.”

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We are, according to Dr. Richard Alba, sociologist, CUNY, with the CB projections, stuck in an outdated classification system, in which we assign “nonwhite label” to most people having mixed ancestry. This binds us to the insanity and perversity of “the one-drop rule,” a nineteenth-century system of racial classification, in which having even one African ancestor meant you were Black. Many if not most numbers analysts have come to understand that the numbers should “have many interpretations,” and that the “white-versuseveryone-else” as the only interpretation is problematic representing, in my view, a most insidious and tight psychical and cultural-ideological bondage. The multiple interpretations of demographic and of (self-) representation and racial identity can be seen poignantly and starkly in a recent piece in the Washington Post entitled “’I am Who I Am’: Kamala Harris, Daughter of Indian and Jamaican Immigrants, defines herself simply as ‘American’” (Kevin Sullivan, Feb 2, 2019). Senator Harris sets out in the glare of public life that is national politics to argue for a type of complexity and fluidity in terms of representation. She is said not to have spent much time “dwelling on how to categorize” herself. . . . when I first ran for office that was one of the things I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created. My point was: I am who I am. I’m good with it. You need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.

Alas: Is she conceding the fact of race as an historically and clearly persistent insidious fulcrum for construction and its maintenance of difference, and all that difference brings on in terms of social and other forms of power? Or does she think she has freedom toward race-identity-fluidity? The work of theorists of gender—a similar complex fulcrum for construction —is informative here. In addition to the well-known and highly regarded work of Judith Butler, I have recently found illuminating and rather provocative the work of biologist and historian of science Anne Fausto-Sterling. Her book Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Reality (2000)4 throws much light on the fraught and sometimes even violent history of conflict over the constructedness of gender and—like race—the work it is made to do as a guarantor of the politics of fixedness. We should take note of Fausto-Sterling’s discussion in her chapter One (“Dueling Dualisms”) that surveys the long histories of conflict over different kinds and degrees of difference that could be imagined. A sharp concluding argument by Fausto-Sterling on November 2018 (Facebook entry) is most difficult to gainsay and impossible to avoid in any discussion regarding classification:

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The term “sex” has at least two meanings. When referring to reproduction, it is true that as a species, humans have binary gametes—there are eggs and there are sperm. But if we move from sex cells to whole human beings, whom the Title IX rule changes propose to label as either male or female (a second use of the word “sex”), we lose the certainty of binary classification. (Facebook entry, November 2, 2018)

We might think of the Trump administration’s recent ruling that bars transgendered persons from serving in the military as one of the latest big-stage examples of a rather despicable effort to freeze gender as category or classification in place—or sadly, literally out of place. This was done clearly as reflection of and for the sake of a certain politics of stability and discrimination. But it is even more important for us to recognize this move as part of a shameful game and to relate it to historical and ongoing efforts among human beings everywhere and in every domain to “classify and conquer.” Furthermore, it is important to come to see that this phenomenon is in many quarters—too many!—protected, masked, or veiled. I have, as some of you know, called it—in heightened awareness of how the term has been used in history, including colonial history—a kind of “magic,” mystification (cf White Men’s Magic). The combination of the effort to freeze in place and to mystify all the dynamics around such effort is what we might with some theoretical and analytical profit term “scripturalization.” Profit because it ties together phenomena and dynamics that otherwise—in terms of the traditional shortcomings and syndromes of disciplinarity—would be kept separate and thereby underestimated, misunderstood, and misidentified. So the term helps us understand that it refers not to a simple thing or object but to dynamics, workings, and that its workings are far outside the traditional postEnlightenment-era domain and role accorded to “religion.” Gender, race, and a host of psycho-socio-cultural and political-economic issues are relevant here. Hear these most uneloquent and rather scary but nonetheless haunting words as faithful rendering of the politics of the modern scriptural: Some have suggested a barrier is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside. The only thing that is immoral is [for] the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized. —Trump’s address to the nation regarding the border wall, January 8, 20195

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Such words and sentiments are reflective of nationalist scripturalization, voiced by one who has already assumed high office in a scriptural-constitutional polity, in what I suggest in fact is the most complexly developed model of modern-world scripturalization. It is not surprising then to read and hear words from the leader of such a polity—words that harden construction of one group of humans against another. Here is the politics of managing the Others. A powerful politics, indeed, that has deep roots in history. What else can we make of the historical and ongoing phenomenon of the masquerade of blackface, of the taunting of a presidential candidate with the sobriquet “Pocahantas,” of the obsession with the Wall to keep at bay those on the outside? Classify and separate. Classify and humiliate. Classify and conquer. More correct than he knew, Levi-Strauss’s point about the impetus for writing (and we extend such technology to include the whole range of systems of discursivity that mark our times), having to do with registering/recording (and we would this year add therewith naturally ordering/classifying) is chillingly true.6 We humans always classify. We scripturalize in order to facilitate our classifying. We invent scriptures to hold classifications—including our own practices and politics and their psychologics—in place, to freeze, naturalize, canonize them. There is no easy out. Our world, as several critics and scholars have observed, has become a world that is constructed or molded—like “soft wax”7—out of stereotyped Others, including racialized Others and females, as “fixed reality, fantasy and fetish.”8 Such work—classification—is an important part, if not the most important part, of the legacy of scriptural cultures and societies. From male and female to sheep and goat to the faithful and the infidel and so many other competing and conflicting dyads, we are encouraged and manipulated to see and think and relate accordingly. It would seem that it is our need to divide/classify and conquer things (or “the Other”) that leads to among other dynamics and actions the invention/ sanctification of texts/scriptures, which we in turn “forget” we have invented so as to facilitate our obfuscation of what we have set up and ordered as the nature of things. To be a scriptural formation is to be embedded in and become an agent of the politics of classification. With our focus on classification, we are challenged to see ourselves as scripture users/wielders. If we are to be deemed readers, then, we are such then not so much of letters or texts but in ironic and layered and coded terms—as Sojourner Truth said of her “reading” of “men [women] and nations.” The men, women, and nations are almost always read in terms of their relative status or classification. This makes the reading of the scriptural a powerful human activity, always a site of contestation and power dynamics because the scriptural is always about classification.

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Also at stake here for most of those who might be in conversation with us is the notion of power or agency and freedom, the freedom of refusal—not to be counted, not to be classified, not to be placed in that “strange system of human society” that turns around, as Shelley’s monster learned, reading in her society “the division of property . . . of rank, descent, and blood.”9 So as a part of our challenge in analysis there must henceforth be deep and expansive and self-sensitive excavation of the scriptural and of the human-making with its ordering and ranking obsession. As a final point of reflection, I should like to indicate that I have in the last few years turned for help with such a challenge to the well-known Martinican novelist, essayist/critic/poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011). He speaks to me and to many others still and perhaps ever more loudly and profoundly about the danger and tragedy of the molding/flattening and reductions of human beings, the attempt to make them simple and transparent as a kind of violence. He was a fierce advocate for resistance in terms of a refusal to be molded and flattened, classified, and made transparent. He made pleas for holding onto and relishing our individual and collective thickness. Note in his Poetique de la Relation his arresting arguments about opacity and selfformation and social relations: If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency . . . I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy . . . I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within the system. I create you afresh—But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction. Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy . . .Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components . . . The right to opacity would not establish autism; it would be the real foundation of Relation, in freedoms . . . We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone [nous réclamons pour tous le droit à l’opacité . . . . ]10

Opacity—we might with Glissant think of it as part of the cure for the turbulences and violence of the work of classification, which remains a profound part of the psychosocial and pathological work of the scriptural.

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NOTES 1. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 2. James D. Watson, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (New York: Vintage, 2010), 326. 3. See Nidesh Lawtoo, Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). 4. Judith Butler, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Reality (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 5. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/01​/08​/us​/politics​/trump​-speech​-transcript​ .html. 6. See his The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chap 2. 7. See Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 39, 48, 63, 193, 207, 238. 8. Zohreh T. Sullivan, “Race, Gender, and Imperial Ideology in the Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 13, no. 1 (1989): 25. 9. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (Warbler Classics, 2019), 99. 10. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation [Poetique de la Relation] (trans. Betsy Wing; (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1997), 189–194.

Chapter 25

Scriptures, Race, Nation Thinking through our Mystifications

“Changing peoples’ heads around/Go underground, young man.” These words are part of what may on first hearing seem the simple-minded lyrics and too flatly patterned rhythms of the now classic early 1970s (1972) rhythm and blues (“Philly-style”) soul song called “People Make the World Go ‘Round.” The song is understood by some observers and critics of Black popular music to have been a departure from the typically apolitical soothing romantic love tones and lyrics that characterized much music of that genre and era, especially music sung by and associated with the Stylistics, the group—probably the end of the run of the widely recognized strange male falsetto voices (featuring Russell Thompkins)—that made the song famous. The writers Thom Bell and Linda Creed appear in this song to have struck a rather different note—the song is not at all about romantic relationships and their dynamics but about how “the world” is ordered and structured, how it is made to “go ‘round,” and how “peoples’ heads” are manipulated, made to “turn.” The focus is on social criticism, about the “ups and downs” and the circular patterned nature—like a “carousel”—of the circus and of the quotidian of the larger world, with its irrationalities and absurdities, all of which are presumed pretty much to be unquestioned by most people most of the time. All such absurdities obtain because the song asserts again and again it is “people,” with their attitudes, their orientations, their lack of questioning, their resignation, and so forth, that “make the world go ‘round.” The emphasis can be placed either on people as the source and focus of reality—that is, those who “make” or determine the shape of the world; or, on the fact that all things “go `round”—that is, all things assume an odd, over-determined, repetitive pattern (mimesis, anyone?); or both. We leave aside the exegetical/textualist fussiness (a running sub-theme of this address, consistent with ISS discussions/orientation) in regard to what 341

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examples are included or not, or the way examples are registered. Let us go digging—into what the work does, into the psycho-political effect of the lyrics and the carnival or circus-carousel-like repetitive patterns of the music. They lead to some hard questions and serious implications, if not clear and final conclusions: the words betray a bit of cynicism and resignation about— even a hint of psychic detachment from, and psychic resistance to—the phenomenon and structure of arrangements that is the “world.” The words are written from a perspective of being somewhat involved, affected, implicated, to be sure, but also from that position of not quite belonging, not being fully invested in, not being altogether integrated into, the ongoing conditions and arrangements. The somewhat amusing even eerie and high-pitched male falsetto lone singing voice of the original recorded performance seems to represent a complex positionality—someone close enough to observe and comment on all things absurd, yet seemingly perched on the margins in physical and existential and psycho-social terms, the margins whence he can exit and re-enter (and re-exit. . .) “the world.” At the point of what seems like the offering of a concluding word, the strange singing voice directly addresses a “young man.” Is the “young man” a 1970s-era gendered and racial/ethnic stand-in for the mixed urban-stressed and -cynical listeners? Might he have been thought of as representative of all stressed and anxious and paranoid urban-dwellers, notwithstanding the gender and racial-ethnic tilting or winks and nods? Whatever the case imagined, this “young man” is directly and pointedly exhorted to “go underground.” To what does the “underground” refer? To what place—physical or psychic— does it point? The call to the young man to turn to such a place seems to represent social critique, a call to get off the carousel, to get away from “reality,” the “world,” the system and set of odd quotidian social-cultural and political and economic practices, dynamics, and arrangements. Curious it is that the practices and arrangements inveighed against are never specifically named as being endemic to any ethnic or racial or tribal group, and there is nothing that seems at first and on the surface of the song to limit the sentiments to one “race”‒‒or even socio-economic group. Yet on subsequent closer re-hearing/re-reading, there seems to be something quite poignant about the words sung by a clearly Black male falsetto-voiced soloist who is part of an all-Black male normally hyper-sugary-romantic and apolitical rhythm-and-blues and urban soul group. Writers Bell and Creed, a Black male and white female team, in collaboration with the soloist who was part of the Stylistics as a group, compellingly conveyed the general (non-raced or not overdetermined racial) sensibilities of a lightly politicized late twentieth-century urban style. (This was not, after all, Miles Davis! And it was likely part of a few attempts to try to go beyond the exhaustion of the violent dramas and dynamics of the 1960s. The fatigue that had set

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in, it seems to me, is reflected in the genre and farcical-ludic rhythms of the song.) At any rate, who goes—or from what place would one normally go, or be advised to go—“underground”? Alternative urban artists and their ardent fans and oppositional social and political and cultural leaders and their followers have been at times associated with the underground (or the storefront, located in the marginalized city centers). The term “underground” also suggests a long history of critique of, and opposition to, the dominant spin or arrangements that in the United States extends back into the era of the historic “underground railroad” of the period of black enslavement in the nineteenth century. This “railroad” referenced the networks of slaves, ex-slaves, and sympathetic antislavery whites through whose agencies and collusions slaves in the United States ran away or were “stolen away” from slave plantations, and by which some—as maroons—were secured passage in the woods and marshes in order to get to free spaces.1 With the reference to the underground in the song, one can hardly avoid being reminded of resonances aplenty in Black American/Black Atlantic vernacular forms of expressiveness, namely, the spirituals (“Steal Away”), and formal literatures, especially the novel (Ralph Ellison’s “invisible man” (1952) and Richard Wright‘s “man who lived underground” are among examples that come immediately to mind). But there is also Aime Cesaire, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Edouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Wynter; now also Isabel Wilkerson, Saidiya Hartmann; and the more recent emergence of the school of Afropessimism. These are among the compelling literary and rhetorical influences on, resonances and parallels for, and refractions of, some of the sensibilities that the soloist of the song being discussed here represents. The one whom the narrator-soloist calls the representative “young man” is in poignant if somewhat subtle and coded solidarity with the full range of the modern Black Atlantic imaginary. Clearly related to the sensibilities that the soloist and “young man” represent is the matter of the politics of language use in terms of mimetic practices and related claims regarding knowledge, history, and reality. What is at issue for the narrator-soloist if not alienation from and critique of the daily grinds, the “ups and down,” of the “carousel”? What is the point of referencing the nonsensical routines and activities and in exhorting the listener to escape from them all if it is not criticism, refusal, and resistance? And does the soloist criticize from a position on the (resentful and cynical) margins or from below as he references “big men” and their cohorts as manipulators of the dominant routines and structures? Can there be any doubt that the song was intended to express solidarity with, even challenge listeners to turn to, the marginalized, those who are vulnerable and ex-centric? I am moved to raise again the issue of the necessary interrelations of knowing ex-centrics

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and ex-centrics’ knowing. With the song with which I began I hope I am modeling with some clarity the need to begin critical inquiry with vernacular expressivity, with where most folks are, who they are, as touchstone. I began with a song imaging a young urban man of some color being told (as the movie warned characters and the rest of us) to “Get out!,” to run away and go underground. This is where we begin our thinking/conversation about the overdeterminations, the mystifications that are scriptures/race/nation. The position on the margins or in the underground would seem to represent ultimately something short of the absolute negative situation: although the routine activities of the world are understood to be less than utopian and in need of reform, if not radical overturning, the situation actually appears paradoxically to represent opportunity, perhaps, even a type—an odd type— of advantage: the soloist calls the young man to go underground not merely for the sake of escaping the unfortunate carousel-like experiences of life, but also in order to save himself, to be advantaged or secured in knowledge and perspective and kept somewhat safe from the world’s corruption. The underground is assumed in this song to be that site that can provide refreshment, respite from stress, opportunity to get a clearer view of things, a more expansive and encompassing knowledge and perspective, a different knowing, a different grip on reality, and possibly, at times and for a time, if not ultimately so—no redemption need be argued for here—a safer and less unstable environment. The latter then is time and space for the next steps deemed compelling. This assumption or argument regarding the advantage—epistemic, psychosocial, psycho-political—afforded by marginal positionality may be thought to be counterintuitive: it is not easily understood, explained, or attained. The song does not address this difficulty of marginality and its histories—how it came to be so and why it seems natural. Being underground is normally hardly thought to represent that which is standard, conventional, acceptable, and secure. It is counterintuitive to suppose that from such a position legitimate or empowering knowledge and perspective about reality emerges. The epistemic status of positionality, especially the positionality associated with the underground, cannot be taken for granted; it is to be fought for and asserted again and again. That seems to be part of the rhythmic structure and logic or conceit of the song, with its emphasis in substance and tones on going round and round. The knowledge and perspective associated with the underground as the margins must necessarily be associated with that which had previously been denied, hidden, or held in secret. That is what motors the flight or retreat. The problem with the world is seen as having to do less with the routine activities themselves or as activities per se, but with consciousness, perspective, and the agency that brings such things about. The song’s call is to retreat

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not simply from the routine activities but from the attitude that accompanies them, the logic and spin on them. Which in turn causes heads to change or spin “around,” that is, to be rendered uncritical, undiscerning. Going underground is the call, then, to deeper insight and knowledge, regarding how “people make the world go ‘round,” regarding the ongoing human construction or fabrication of the world—constitution, I dare say—with its attendant foibles. It is at the same time an assumption about if not also radical arrogation of possession of compelling communication from and knowledge about the underground. This arrogation has profound implications—for thinking about thinking—and strong ramifications—for social-political orientation and affiliation and practices. Back to the reflection on the song. Its provocation means among other things that an investigation into the history and dynamics of the language- and knowledge-claims and significations from/of the underground is important. The most important of the claims of the overground—dominant society—has to do with the naturalization, the unquestioned status of its discourses, structures, politics, operations, practices, hierarchies. This is comparable to what we have been given in our circle to calling “scripturalization”2—with the tensive verbal play with scriptures as phenomenon that is metonymic of formation/constitution. The underground must—as the song goes—question the overground at every point and in every respect; it must assert the surreality or the constructed-ness of the overground (in the face of its bold claims and registrations of power, its violence). Such assertions by the underground also provides potential for alternate construction or—assuming the need to return to and engage the overground—a different orientation altogether. The song is powerful—worthy of our attention for social critical and larger theoretical and analytic purposes. It simply begs attention and consideration around issues having to do with mystification, how things become naturalized, how and why things “go ’round.” “Scripturalization” can and should serve as an apt handle—far beyond, but certainly including, the domain of religious texts, far beyond constructed antiquity focusing on a single religious tribe—a handle, yes, for that meta-discursive regime of language/text use and knowledge claims that structures and defines (significant domains and aspects of) modernity, or, to stay with the language game associated with the song played and discussed here, the implied overground/people making the world. It is this situation, of (made-up) “reality.” In contrast, the underground as the margins is here the handle for the psycho-social situation and orientation and portal to the alternate language world, the domain of secret knowledge or “hidden meaning,” including that which scripturalization tries to keep mostly veiled—the underlying deep truths or secrets about how things are structured—and tries to manage, in terms of a complex politics of control.

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The song begs raising of the specific question—how did this come about? How does it work still? The song also provides springboard for /gateway to advanced analysis. It provides at least three major concepts or nodes around which we might consider deepening our thinking and criticism—about why we are what we are. I should like for the short time I have here to name and only cursorily/briefly consider three such concepts: First, “Big men (sitting in their easy chair).” Second, “Changing people’s heads around.” Third, “Go underground, young man.” Each represents not only a nodal point of theoretics—to think with—-but also, even if in somewhat complex and overlapping respects, some historical-evolutionary relationships and even development. In connection with each nodal point, I’ll here draw attention to one or two compelling examples to think with. But with such I’ll not be able to linger in the details warranted in a full analysis. Given the constraints of time, I shall drop these examples and then leave them for the hauntings—the provocation, the inspiration, perhaps, the destabilization of assumptions about our mystifications (where and how to begin the thinking about such, how to advance the thinking about such, how to tie elements and phenomena together, and so forth)—yes, the hauntings about such I hope will follow you (as they have followed or haunted me). First, in regard to “Big Men sitting in their easy chair.” The image, is it not, is simple but also powerful, very suggestive. We’re made to ask—how did things come to be the way they are? How is it that things “go ‘round”—and in the way they “go round”? It is the question if not about origins in overdetermined and strained disciplinary terms (Who? What? Where? When?) at least with respect to an identification of one of the motors—historical and ongoing—for the way things are constituted. This is then less about origins, about what single event got things going round, than the identifiable historical and ongoing motoring for the dynamics—the shape of the world—we see and experience. As I am also led to think about the larger world in which Bell and Creed wrote the song and the Stylistics sang their song, I cannot avoid thinking about the work of arrogation that made what we experience daily so natural. Consider with me the theme of the song as poignant starting point for understanding the nature of our shared world, in particular the beginnings of the European colonial settler society that has become the United States and the ideological assumptions and arrogations needed to be in place for us to be what we are. The “Big Men sitting in their easy chairs” of the song are the ideologists and managers of white rule in the “discovered” Americas, the place disingenuously called null/empty, ready to be dominated. There needed to be powerful ideological precedents and currents to pull off what was pulled off— that is, to make the argument that this land was null and void and, furthermore,

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that it was the last hope and last stand for the civilized West. This was effected through the play with and manipulation of some now well-recognized tropes having to do with “translation,” broader than our concept of translation. The use of the Latin trope translatio imperii combined with translatio studii came to be powerful shorthand for the expression even performance of the “transfer” of learning and power, from the old regime to the new and more powerful one. (One can easily even if also chillingly relate such tropes to the recent and ongoing roiling and angst over the infra-national “transfer of power” that the United States. recently faced.) From Greece to Rome to the Renaissance to the Early Modern period, we see France, Spain, England being the most powerful players in the early modern dynamics of translatio imperii.3 (Again, these days, we in the United States should also think about what this may mean in terms of infra-national transfer of power (between political parties, perhaps, if not also some other couplings—what it means; how it’s normally done; what actually is being transferred/translated. But on this matter, I’ll not dwell at this time.) We simply must not avoid thinking seriously about how we in different polities have come to make assumptions about, and grow to accept, how things “go ‘round,” are transferred/translated, become natur​ alize​ d/tex​ tuali​ zed/s​cript​urali​zed/m​ade part of a regime of scripturalization. (Interesting in connection with this phenomenon—we should think about what other factors are relevant, even determinative of, our ongoing transfers of power in broader psycho-social-cultural terms. We should consider how our “economy of attention,” what we are allowed to consume in terms of knowledge, is structured and manipulated by social media and the like. And what this means for our ongoing formation and politics.) Because of their impact on us, a few early modern American examples are in order: Languaged most powerfully in regard to settler communities, in what was being constituted as the United States/America by the combination of engagement on the battlefields and through determined discursive battles and machinations, Irish philosopher-cleric Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), in his “Verses On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” (1752), famously but at the time prematurely articulated the dominant Western cultural-political view of the future of the American colonies, especially what was to become the United States as the most Western and last outpost of translation, in a poetics most poignant that provoked thinking and more discursive play for times to come. About the American colony: Westward the course of Empire takes its Way; The first four Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; Time’s noblest Offspring is the last.

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This part of his poem was ignored for a while, until the near penultimate period of Revolution/Independence. On the eve of revolution, there arose the felt urgent need for ideologization of the moment: so many, especially school boys—shall we say the boomers of the period, steeped in and adept at the currents and social media of the day?—entered the political discursive media fray. Among such types was a pair at point of graduation from the College of New Jersey. The two—the now famous Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Breckenridge—provocatively summed up that generation’s view regarding the coming into being of a nation. In response to the call for a graduation oration on the subject of the formation of the nation, the collaboration resulted in the now famous complexly woven poem as commencement (national not just collegiate) narrative oration which expanded on the touchstones of the arrogation and assumptions that were somewhat premature in Berkeley’s poem called “Rising Glory of America.” I share with you here only the last few lines, with their ownership of the arrogation of the wondrous end of time appearance of America: The seat of empire the abode of kings, The final stage where time shall introduce Renowned characters, and glorious works . . .4

No shrinking cultural-political violets here in translation, regarding thinking about what has been left behind and what lies ahead for the nation being constituted. No wonder what ever happened. And little wonder what happened was construed as destiny manifest. The truth is that this sentiment was more or less defining of the modern West. So much to dwell on here, so many examples to think about that flows from and is consonant with this one example—the license, the appropriation, the arrogation, the assumptions, the framing. What is addressed and assumed; what is already claimed—it’s all rather astounding. It’s everywhere throughout the history of the West. Those who think their exegesis of authoritative cultural/religious texts are untouched or not over determined by the psycho-politics evident in arrogations of the school boys of the College of New Jersey had better think again. Translatio studii et imperii, indeed!5 Perhaps, it is better or more truthfully said that what is imaged and imagined and written about is “America” violently transferred/translated—from the English, who had already translated Renaissance versions of the biblical and Greek and Roman worlds. Then we have to do, of course, with the violences of internal translations. Beyond slavery and internments camps and Jim Crow laws, I should think that wrestling with our normally uninterrogated notion of “crossover,” for example—in culture, especially in the entertainment world—think of music, dress, even speech—might as continuing

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metaphorization help us better understand what is at issue in translation: Who crosses over? And into what? Find/follow the (flow of the) power. All such and more are about the real ongoing work, the operations and effects, of translation. Second, “Changing People’s Heads Around.” This one disturbing window onto the trope of transfer of power as having to do with domination that over time produced the “big men smoking in easy chairs” should not be taken simply as the first step in historical-evolutionary terms. The trope is here isolated only in terms of the conceptual—particularly, the conceptualideological conflict with England (and other European powers and the United States) as window on account of where the Stylistics were located. What we should be alert to is the fact that the ideologization work that was required for the “translation” phenomenon here described in fact seemed to require the complementary or overlapping/simultaneous work of consolidation as classification/“statistics” as the making and management of hierarchy, as the ordering of society, what French theorist Michel Foucault argued to be the onset of “governmentality.”6 With this term, he was referencing three issues—the “ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics” that facilitate exercise of power; the development of such ensemble toward the “pre-eminence” for advancement of government of “a series of knowledges” (savoirs); and the result of the process by which the exercise of justice/“state of justice” became the state or became “governmentalized.” In sum, governmentality—with all apparatuses and instruments appertaining—came to be understood as quite necessary as a way to discern and define difference, then order and manage meaning, and hierarchicalize difference, that which was encountered through the “first contacts” and ongoing contact with peoples who remain subjugated. Among the tricks, viz., apparatuses in this new situation—what we variously call “statistics,” catalogue/classification, ethnology/anthropology, sociology, and so forth. Two examples on which I’ll not go into detail, but with which I hope to provoke your thinking: First, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).7 In its earliest version, it was a response to a request on the part of French diplomat Monsieur Barbe Marbois for (colonial-imperialist understood) information—about the “state” of (the “state” of) Virginia (among all other states, if the French were to assist the colonists in their quest for independence). Notes is argued to have been one of the most widely read publication of the times—on both sides of the Atlantic. It sorely needs to be re-examined with some of the questions and issues being raised here in mind. Regarding “genre”—with Foucault’s concept of governmentality in mind—it fits perfectly. It is an excellent example of the new colonial-era discourses, the science of “statistics,” classification. Jefferson participates in

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the creation and advancement of such genre insofar as he includes the “facts” as such needed to be understood and deployed. It is dripping with heavily ideologized description—of the state of the state, again, the real meaning or point of the title and import of Notes. And as such, it was per this relatively new orientation to genre (in terms that poignantly go far beyond but certainly was as important as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) a type of performance constituting the nation. It is worth the effort to take note of the varied types of description/classification of the state population, including counting of types of Black peoples among stock and other objects inventoried. It is clear to me as it has been to other interpreters that such peoples posed a particular problem and challenge for Jefferson that his tortured mind and rhetoric could not help reflecting. Of course, this is what the nascent genre of statistics/ethnology/ethnography in the service of governmentality looks like and effects. Another even more dramatic—can it be more disturbing?—same-genre example, I turn your attention to the text of Mederic Moreau Saint-Mery, a contemporary of Jefferson, who worked for France in order to help manage its colony Saint Domingue (fig. 25.1). His obsessive overweening color-coded/ laden classification of human beings—with his 128 types of possible combinations of types of persons, according to their distance from whiteness, or according to amount of black blood—is so insane that it nearly renders me silent.​ It is worth noting that in roughly the same general time period within the French colonial power arrangements in Saint Domingue a revolution was underway that gave birth to what we now refer to as Haiti. In light of the politics of classification—what Jefferson called “calculations” as a rendering of his work (letter to Melish)8—perhaps it is enough to indicate that the 1805 Constitution of Haiti reflected knowledge about colonial-era obsessions with classifications and calculations. And it shows us hyper-consciousness about and orientation to the possibility that such matters could be different, even radically so. Take note of how “We the People” could have been differently understood and made an ideal: In the context of European colonial-imperial competition at fever pitch, the 1805 Haitian Constitution text, as though in heightened awareness of the anti-black ideologization that helped constitute these nations, reflected rather clearly and forcefully in its Article #14, that there would be henceforth only one category for all citizens—noirs. All would be called black (see fig. 25.2): Les Haitiens ne seront desormais connus que Sous la denomination generique de noirs [“All Haitians shall henceforth be known only by the generic name ‘Black’”]9

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Figure 25.1  Title Page of M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description Topique, Physique, Civile, Politique, et Historique de la Partie Française de L’Isle Saint Domingue (Philadelphia, 1797).

Of course, there ensued another revolution, poignantly including the gens du couleur, in violent reaction to such radical move. Emperor Dessalines, already representing and facing problems aplenty, was killed and cut in pieces. And Haiti has never really recovered from this situation, this bold deformation of the modern world, the effort to grab hold of it on different terms. In the United States, in our own real time, in the wake of the recent siege of the capitol, this matter of (re)defining the nation is very much worth pondering—what might it mean, what kind of reaction might ensue, were the Haitian-inspired revolutionary ideology, translated in our own times as BLM, for example, to become the order of our times??? It seems clear enough to me that among the impulses for the siege was the idea that non-white peoples, especially Black peoples, threaten, on so many different imagined fronts, to overwhelm. Might this exercise of the poisoned and warped imaginary have been really what the Jan 6 capitol siege all that preceded it have been all

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Figure 25.2  Image of Haitian Constitution.

about? The voter suppression fever in the wake of the 2020 elections would seem to provide even more evidence of such. Third, “Go Underground, Young (Wo)Man!” in response to a friend offering to write her life, a nineteenth-century woman is reported to have responded that she was “not ready to be writ up” These were the words attributed to Isabella Van Wagenen or Isabella Baumfree, who poignantly renamed herself Sojourner Truth.10 What was she channeling? What was she fearful of? The experiences on the part of the Black circum-Atlantic of having their bodies conscripted and, in efforts to justify such actions, later having them “writ up” or inscribed on as part of the scripturalization that is EuroAmerican “translation,” in which Big men make the world go ‘round—these were likely some of the issues, even if not described in precisely these all too compromised and soft terms. There were myriad examples of persons registering the same attitudes as those associated with Sojourner Truth. Charles Long’s twist on the situation faced is simple and profound: “my community . . . knew that it was a community signified by another community.”11 Celeste-Marie Bernier’s book Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (2012) unknowingly draws out the provocative but spare argument in Significations by focusing in some detail on several historical and historically mythicized characters that cohere around “the

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inextricable relationship between coded systems of signification and overt enactments of violence.” Sojourner Truth is among the characters so discussed. “Hero” here seems unimaginative and weak category of description.12 Among the historical responses on the part of Black subaltern to the situations we have discussed the most persistent in various forms has been not so much the amorphous “resistance,” but the imperative toward the gesture of flight, running away/the runagate, escape that is so capacious in terms of form and meaning. This has included escape of the type in those transatlantic settings—Jamaica famously, and some few other places in the Caribbean and in South America and North America—where the woodlands and forests, swamps and waterways made the form of escape that has been quite literal, viz., maronnage—feasible to think about and act on. In such situations, alternate communities were established (so Jamaica’s Nanny of the Maroons)—if only on limited terms. But in most sites in the circum-Atlantic where slaves were made to toil, such an option was never really viable. In most other sites, flight/escape had to take other forms and be understood on other terms, such as on the plane of signifying (as theorized by Long and Gates, others). And here again Long was among several critics looking at this issue. He is found to be provocative and in good company with his focus on opacity in re: oppressed peoples, the “primitives.”13 His hints or asides are significant, having to do with thickness/ layeredness/complexity of the experiences and orientation of the world, the meaning (of the term [opacity]) developed in some cases with the hidden, therefrom to association with being inscrutable, and connoting flight from meaning. This is a complex history that cannot be unpacked here. But suffice it to say that we are here confronted with development on the part of a marginalized/made ex-centric people part of whose oppression entailed being at first denied any history, representation, place or meaning to being flattened and signified/scripturalized to their using the flattening and signifying or taking up and developing (their own) scripturalizing practices. The latter is descriptive and analytic shorthand for a phenomenon having to do with the deployment and politics of language and representations such that oppression comes to be associated with (i.e., until deliberately turned on its head in “escape from” or critique of or opposition to) over-meaning or fixed meaning in the (ideological/discursive) service of empire.14 Sojourner Truth provides application of heady arguments about a life representing fierce struggle for escape from meaning. According to Bernier, she constantly defied straightforward memorializations, rejected fixed interpretations that traded in flat stereotypic Black female identities, rejected descriptions of her physique as “the real African type,” her name change speaks to her orientation—: her rootless, “sojourning”‒‒toward “truth,” “I don’t read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations”—these gestures reflected

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her view that writing was a second rate form of knowledge and communication. These gestures and views reflected her recognition of limitations and possible stranglehold over her legacies that literacy presented—over which she had little or no control (issues over how she was perceived and identified often prompted her complex responses: her feigning southern speech/ accent. . .; her trading on the metaphor of sojourning/traveling as way to emphasize her notion of the limitations of experience, representation; her preference for the visual as recorded testimony).15 With the development of technology in photography—daguerreotype and traditions of carte de visite—she invited others to “read” her poses, but made it difficult if not impossible to do so (221). Some of her hard to read or at least owned poses are now famous.16 “Truth’s enigmatic expressions, unreadable physical poses, and symbolic artifacts challenged and ultimately rejected superficial reimaginings of black female experiences as repeatedly manufactured within a white mainstream imagination.” She escapes being (simply or easily) read: “I sell the Shadow to support the substance.”—this was the famous inscription at bottom of her sanctioned photos and her theme governing her self-interpretation. Her refusal to be “writ up.” The Shadow? In such images she shows her freedom from slavery, shows herself, in the one image with a bag carrying her “shadow” (so it will not be “dogging about here and there”); and, in the other, as she sits at her own domestic table, with flowers, a book/The Book, knitting, etc., she belies her other role in public life. So who is she? Who can tell? She is illegible. She is free. In the multiple confounding meanings, she escapes (over)meaning or being scripturalized.17 Opacity, indeed. Truth is one powerful example of Black people generally not finding themselves in the “ideal speech situation” and so wove discourse/communication/ performances necessarily “replete with ellipsis and indirection”18 They were inspired to produce “a politicized aesthetics [that was] organized indirection, fragmentation, ellipsis, masquerade, and disguise.” Because they were denied the opportunities to articulate their ideas “openly [they] became masters of allusion, allegory, metaphor, and metonomy.”19 No need to argue that all Black folk were oriented this way all the time. I need to argue only that this orientation—this refusal to mean or invest in (over) meaning by which the West functioned and enslaved—is a powerful and profound strain or orientation in the circum-Black Atlantic, with powerful ongoing resonances and ramifications. It must be honored through our critical questioning and analysis, if not our imitation. It is provocation enough to continue my own escape from the particular site of an ongoing discursivity and disciplinary, viz., scriptural politics (about scriptural politics). And it may also be inspiration enough to translate/model for others what it may mean in this era to persistently “go underground” by refusing to be “writ up,” and to

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figure out how with more imagination and courage, as Ms Truth suggested, to “sell the shadow to support the substance.” This as part of the ongoing effort in rejection of constitutions to constitute a self, a nation, a world. One last example: In my view, a splendid outgrowth of Truth’s escape from meaning performance/gesture can be seen in 2021 Inaugural Poem of Amanda Gorman, another young person of another age—someone who could have engaged those College of New Jersey boys with poignancy. She sums up the sense of another time and generation: Her reading reflects ongoing nation-constituting performance. Worth noting is what her poem does with classifications/differences; she even makes of herself a pointed member of an overdetermined class (“skinny black girl”). And she adds with beauty and delight to the larger point made in this chapter that people continue to “make the world go ‘round,” and that those of her kind can and should be part of ongoing efforts to constitute/compose reality, including the nation. With hands waving and fingers flickering she declared, We are striving to forge a union with purpose To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man . . .20

What is brought into focus through the attention placed on the Stylistics’ odd song are many issues that should be allowed to haunt and vex us. Among these are four I highlight here and with which I shall end: First, again, people constitute the world. There are no texts/documents/ offices in isolation from peoples’ practices and interests. Do not begin consideration of the mystifications that surround and determine us within the framework, within the textual frame, within the frame of mystification itself, but in some other middle place. Beware the snarling/berating of the exegetes—“the text says . . . the text. The text!” Second, given the fact of people making the world, the nation-constituting work/play is ongoing; it never ends. Interpreters’ work should reflect as much. Third, the frame (ing) work (so “framers”) is intended to occlude if not upend this ongoing dynamics work/play of constituting reality. So we must always be mindful of and be prepared to respond to framers—of all kinds— and their work. Again, beware of the framers, exegetes, the textualists! Fourth, the underground: escape from framing, from meaning. We should take seriously the opportunities to go there. We must also be courageous in the face of it. It is opportunity to see things ex-centrically. To see how things are yet being constituted, to see how we constitute. To see what is being framed, who is being framed. How the framing represents the systemic— scriptural-ization. Being underground in the dark affords some clarity: it is epistemic enrichment or opportunity: it helps us see things ordinarily not

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seen. In the dark underground, for example, we may see more clearly “the real” (a la Lacan and Foucault; a la Fanon and T. Morrison!), as well as the “reality” we produce—the texts/framing, the dynamics/phenomena involved and what is at issue. This is what Toni Morrison saw and named so clearly—what could be seen more clearly in the dark underground, perhaps, because and more importantly, what can be seen through black flesh to black flesh in order to make “reality.” With this issue, we find the real “text” that was being translated or framed that has always constituted and continues constituting the West, especially the United States. She gets to the heart of the issues regarding how it is we who construct and hold onto our mystifications, the things we make natural, unquestioned, reality. Furthermore, and even more disturbing, perhaps, she argues it has been and remains the haunting Black presence in the West and in this nation in particular the “means of thinking”—about all matters: body, mind, chaos, kindness and love, in short, all things that matter. I would put a little bit more analytical pressure and framing on her breathtaking perspective and argument and shorthand it with the concept “scriptures”/ “scripturalization”; and I would update our reference to the century in which all arguments are applicable. Otherwise, I think it imperative to have her words here at essay’s end make the case, make plain what is at issue and at stake, make plain a disturbing truth: In what public discourse does the reference to black people not exist? It exists in every one of this nation’s mightiest struggles. The presence of black people is not only a major referent in the framing of the Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the illiterate. It is there in the construction of a free and public school system; the balancing of representation legislative bodies; jurisprudence and legal definitions of justice. It is there in theological discourse; the memoranda of banking houses; the concept of manifest destiny and the preeminent narrative that accompanies (if it does not precede) the initiation of every immigrant into the community of American citizens. The presence of black people is inherent, along with gender and family ties, in the earliest lesson every child is taught regarding his or her distinctiveness. Africanism [Black presence seen through white-ness] is inextricable from the definition of Americanness—from its origins on through its integrated and disintegrating twentieth [twenty-first]-century self. Encoded or explicit, indirect or overt, the linguistic responses to an Africanist presence complicate texts, sometimes contradicting them entirely. A writer’s response to American Africanism often provides a subtext that either sabotages the surface text’s expressed intentions or escapes them through a language that mystifies what it cannot bring itself to articulate but still attempts to register.21

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NOTES 1. See for discussion on history of Black runaways Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Hugo Prosper Leaming, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995; and John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2. See my White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 3. See Eric Cheyfitz, Politics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 4. For background and perspective, see Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and The Rising Glory of America: 1760-1820, ed. Gordon S. Wood (rev. ed.; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990). 5. For more examples of such sentiments, I refer you to de Certeau’s brilliant discussion, in his “Writing vs. Time: History and Anthropology in the Works of Lafitau,” Yale French Studies: Rethinking History, Number 59 [1980]). Consider the frontispiece to Rev. John Brown’s Self-Interpreting Bible (1792), a popular publication on both sides of the Atlantic. There were at least 26 known U.S. editions. The frontispiece of the first American edition pictured Columbia as a woman with an Indian headdress. In her left hand she holds the Constitution; with her right hand she receives the Bible from Peace, kneeling before her. The names of American patriots were written on a liberty tree behind her. “America became part of the biblical world.” (© The Dunham Bible Museum, Houston Baptist University, 2008.) 6. See his Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78 (ed. Michael Senellart; trans. Graham Burchell, 2007), 108–9ff. 7. Notes on the State of Virginia (ed. Frank Shuffelton; New York: Penguin Books, 1999) 8. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 5, May 1, 1812 to March 10, 1813, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 562–566. 9. See discussion by Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 24–27. 10. See Narrative of Sojourner Truth…Drawn from Her “Book of Life,” with Frances W. Titus [1878.) 11. See his Significations (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1986), 2. 12. Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 13. Long, chaps 3, 7, 10. 14. I have in the past turned and continue to turn to artists and critics regarding ideas about how “escape” from the violence of signification/scripturalization as over-meaning is experienced/realized on/in relation to the bodies of the “primitives.”

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Suffice it to indicate here that there is much to be fathomed: Derek Walcott (The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, 1992), regarding the break-up of stable meanings ensued from Africans’ enslavement and continuing destabilization and exploitation—so the “shards”; tradition as “cracked heirlooms,” as “shattered histories . . . shards of vocabulary,” “fragmented memory.”Joan Dayan (Haiti, History and the Gods, 1995), theorizing about how the brutality of slavery and aftermath led to total breakdown, in Haiti especially, but throughout African diaspora, in tradition (-ing). In the story of Haiti, especially with the fascinating development of stories and lore around Dessalines, one can see how meaning and history were exploded, how history was reduced to “deposits . . .[to] [s]hreds of bodies come back, remembered in ritual, seeking vengeance.” Susan Buck-Morss, philosopher analyzing some of the same events, in Hegel, Haiti, Universal History (2009), argued that trauma and disruption were seen there as sign of the gods being “radically distant.” This shared view led to understanding of “decay,” “fungibility” “transiency” of meaning . . . . This was of course reflected in way in which veves were understood to function—that is, as scriptural messages and images to be received, experienced, then to be wiped away. Martinican novelist, essayist/critic/poet Édouard Glissant (Poétique de la Relation, 1990) makes the argument most directly—nous réclamons pour tous le droit à l’opacité . . .[“We claim for all the right to be taken seriously in relations, to attain respect for opacity of the Other’s difference/layeredness, to resist attempts to assimilate or objectify it or classify according to a hierarchy in the tradition of the West . . .we assert the right to be an unreadable & unintelligible presence . . . Perhaps, we need to end the very notion of classification. Do away with all reductions . . . Opacité . . .liberté.”] 15. See Bernier, Characters of Blood, 222–23, 233–35, 242. 16. There are many images that are famous and widely available. See Bernier, 210f. (A couple of them are discussed elsewhere in this volume.) Truth invited others to see these images as enigmatic “texts” that she seemed to challenge gazers to look at and try to read them/her. In them she appears to me to hold back some expressions; she seems not to want to play the female bourgeois game of representing meaning/ identity—at least not in terms of flat straightforward meaning. 17. Bernier, 221. 18. So George Lipsitz, Afterword, in Bernier, 372. 19. Ibid., 369. 20. See general news coverage of event, The New York Times, January 21, 2021: https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2021​/01​/21​/books​/amanda​-gorman​-biden​-inauguration​ -poet​-performance​.html​?sea​rchR​esul​tPosition=4 21. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 65–66.

Chapter 26

Religion as the Scriptural Or, the Mimeticization of Reality

“Religion”? As we—hyper-connected/mediatized but also fractured moderns—now experience “it”? The term is freighted shorthand intended to reference—when not actually to misdirect focus from—the gestures and performances, rites and rituals, discourses and other registrations, ideologies and (sub)formations having to do with the fetishization and related politics of the scriptural/scriptures. The latter, etymologically and still having to do basically with “things written,” nonetheless represents not objects—this or that “text”—but refractions of discourse throughout all domains and aspects of the modern world. No domains, sectors, institutions, practices, sites or registrations of power, no claims about idiosyncratic experience lie outside such refractions. It is through these refractions that “we”—as mostly self-occluded readers, texts, authors—are complexly “ordered,” classified, are managed (including our own enabling gestures). Scripturalization is the term I think best captures the larger psycho-social, psycho-political, political-economic, and meta-discursive regime—shaping and shaped by nation-states—by which we all are scripturally managed. Historically driven by an agenda of making and maintaining difference/ Others—“classify and conquer” has long been the not so hidden even if sometimes denied set of marching orders—this regime continues to be consistently and sharply gendered and reflective of myths of class and ethnoracial hierarchy. Scripturalism can with some analytical profit be made to refer to the ideology behind or spurred on by scripturalization. Tradents assume that stable meaning can be captured by and transmitted only through the written, as projected by those representing auctoritas. This assumption works only to the 359

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extent the scriptural, as theorists of the written have instructed and challenged us, is understood to represent discourse and media in broad terms. Scripturalizing points to the ongoing mimetic practices and representations that are reflective not only of the reigning regimes and ideologies but also— mostly among the Others who have historically been forced into mimetic practices—the threat of ongoing regime instability provided by continuous play with the scriptural/scripturalizing of the human. Objections and calls for qualifications no doubt can easily be anticipated. I had thought scripturalization as theorizing focus capacious enough to avoid falling down the holes of reductionism. I kept hearing, sometimes aloud, other times in my inner ear, and learning as a result of reading reactions, that scripturalization as theory was much too broad, too engrossing, that it tries or threatens to explain too much. Should I assume critics suppose that scriptures/the scriptural/ scripturalization/ scripturalism/ scripturalectics to be about—or to be relevant only in and limited to—the domain of “religion”? I find this supposition or inference to be both typical (generally expected) and curious and provocative (insofar as it comes from a clearly fine mind). I thought I had consistently in my arguments pressed hard the point that my theorizing aims to cover and help explain dynamics and social relations and practices within and across society and culture. To be sure, my theorizing efforts draw on language popularly associated with “religion” in the modern world. But the point is they are made to stretch far beyond the domain invented mainly by the West for its imperial interests. My theoretics are not even about the Bible—at least, not about the exegetics of the Bible. To put the matter more poignantly, having ignored the politics that try to resist or shut down theorizing the terms around which religious knowledges and social relations as protected domain are understood and experienced as power and violence, I now know the theoretical-analytical floodgates to be wide open. I call the intellectualpolitical practice I am modeling theorizing or signifying (on) scriptures. This entails investigation not of an object, but of orientation, of sensibilities, social relations, socio-psycho-logics, of gestures/practices/rituals. “Religion” or “scriptures” or “religion” as the scriptural (in the modern West, certainly) can be made to be the shorthand for any or all such matters only to the degree that the referents are radically enlarged or exploded, re-conceptualized and re-deployed, vis-à-vis, popular and most scholarly practices and politics. Is my explosion of the scriptural into many different dynamics in many different sectors of society and culture fated to be the fall into reductionism? Perhaps, such a fall is always possible in the all too serious business that is theorizing playfulness. But is such a fall really the big problem or challenge to be faced? Is it a problem or challenge bigger than that of the refusal or

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inability to explode the tightness around the construction and politics of knowledges and signs? Is the problem that scripturalization as associated with my theorizing is (assumed to be) only about “religion” and not about some other thing or problem? Or is it that scripturalization is too refractive, that it threatens to connect too many things, issues, arenas, domains, problems? I should like simply to confess being comfortable falling/erring—don’t we all (want to) experience such in our work and play? That is, I can accept possibly making connections far across domains, gestures, and relations (when is it too many?) with the hope of understanding better how we have become, and on what terms we remain, complexly connected and human? My anxiety or fear is less about making too many connections, making the quest too big or broad; the fear is rather about keeping the frame of reference and questioning narrow and shallow and tight, and making judgments about and constructing stable and harsh politics and social relations and arrangements that are narrow and exclusivist. From my personal experience and my reading of history and the heightened sensitivity that ensues from both, the latter mode or way of doing things brings with it a kind of violence that we should (on this side of the Trump–Pence administration and in the era of Proud Boys-whitemale-aggrievement) be on guard against and want always to stand guard against and resist. Nuance, qualification, making exceptions, corrections, and so forth—these can and should be employed always, going forward. The extent to which “scriptures” are exploded into the complexities of scrip​tural​izing​/scri​ptura​lizat​ions/​scrip​tural​isms/​scrip​tural​ectic​s—to this extent they are made a fundamental part of certain types of human/bodily/ social expressions and expressivities. As such, they can be subject to all sorts of critiques—in terms of (certain systems of internal and external) logic, politics, and (certain standards of and assumptions about) aesthetics. Consider what impact the conceptual explosion I argue for might have on the body? That is, not only the movement and manipulation of the body but also on the “reading” of such movements? From the literary to the rhetorical to the senses of hearing, smelling, seeing. Again, with theorizing of the sort that I propose, in which “scriptures” is made to shorthand social dynamics, dynamics of the embodied/enfleshed human in complex relationships with other embodied/ enfleshed humans, there would be more, far more, opportunities and expectations and even demands for layered responses and judgments than would be the case with the more traditional flattened notion of “scriptures” as text. The implications in terms of argument and the possible ramifications and consequences are stark and very much an enlargement on, and correction of, what we now mostly experience. Now having referenced the embodied and the enfleshed human and having made the point that “scriptures” (basically or operationally or functionally

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capturing “religion”) have to do with the embodied and the enfleshed human, I should like to address the question about my focus on Black Atlantic history of experiences and expressivities. The point that Black peoples have been through European “discovery” and colonization systems and made to be enslaved in body and even beyond the operation of European enslavement systems obsessively and fetishistically overdetermined by their bodies—this point and its history need not be detailed here. But it needs to be clearly and emphatically stated that this matter of Black embodiment/enfleshment must be the historical and critical-analytical backdrop for high-level thinking and discussion about Western constructions of the politics of knowledge and of embodiment. This is reason enough for my focus on the Black Atlantic as door to open up wide and deep and challenging wrestling with (Western world) “religion” as “scriptures” as social relations, social power, knowledges, and expressivities. As I have resorted to it on several occasions and in several essays, these are among the types of “concerns” that Toni Morrison made compelling for me in her 1992 analytical readings of U.S. /American literature that were the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization turned into her brilliant essay Playing in the Dark. The essay included engagement of such literature as Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer prize-winning Voyagers to the West: A Passage of the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986), with its focus on European settlers traveling to what becomes the United States and becoming “Americans” as a dissertation on modern U.S. and Western identity formation. In Bailyn’s interpretation of these modern-white-dominant-male-specific “concerns,” there is nothing particularly new or surprising. But what begs more special consideration and analysis is Morrison’s identification of what she calls Bailyn’s and others’ recording of a white male constructed “Africanism”/ “Africanist” presence as “staging ground” and “arena,” as a “dark and abiding presence,” a “means of thinking” or “meditation,” “a visible and invisible mediating force.” Such construction of the dark others—what might ironically and with different paradoxical intentions and politics appertaining on some occasions be called “blackness”—was meant, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, is still meant, in the twenty-first century, to help “limn out” and structure and articulate the ramifications of the “quintessential American identity,” of what is now often assumed to be, even if not always labeled as, “whiteness.” It is the response to the presence of black bodies that leads to the self-understanding of white American males (and by extension American/Western whiteness). And it is that black bodily presence as limited and limiting that Morrison argued was very much worth noting. Black bodies as signs of the extreme, of that beyond which there is no other—on the order of literary and cultural critic Sylvia Wynter’s argument (“1492”) regarding the useful

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modern and contemporary application of the historical cultural deployment of the expression nec plus ultra—become a powerful means by which American identity and Western-inflected meaning, in nearly all matters important, are structured and maintained.1 Morrison has never been more correct and articulate in her argument that there is hardly any place or event or set of relations in any period of history in what has become the United States that is not made significant by black bodies: In what public discourse does the reference to black people not exist? It exists in every one of this nation’s mightiest struggles. The presence of black people is not only a major referent in the framing of the Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the illiterate. It is there in the construction of a free and public school system; the balancing of representation in legislative bodies; jurisprudence and legal definitions of justice. It is there in theological discourse; the memoranda of banking houses; the concept of manifest destiny and the preeminent narrative that accompanies (if it does not precede) the initiation of every immigrant into the community of American citizens.2

Nothing need be added to this statement—except an updating to include the first twenty years (or so) of the twenty-first century, including the Trump years, and to make clear that the several types and examples of “public discourse” should be regarded as—because they function as—“scriptures.” What is required in such a situation is a critical approach of the type that recognizes the need not so much for exegesis of the scriptural, that is, of the discourses of the realm, but defamiliarization—of the entire phenomenon of the invention and mimetic uses and politics of discourse. I think helpful in this effort would be theorizing work that draws on categories and concepts I have played with—critical analyses of the modern world social-cultural dynamics that I call scripturalectics, and/or the modernist ideology that I term scripturalism. Included in such dynamics to be analyzed would be scripturalizing (mimetic practices, some of which would be deemed significant, others not) and the phenomenon elaborated on in this essay as scripturalization, a psycho-social and cultural-political regime with its slate of scripturalizing practices, its regulating/policing functions, its violent effects. We need to be able to get out of and beyond the regulating/policing “box,” what Pierre Bourdieu (Outline of a Theory of Practice) calls doxa, things taken for granted, represented in modernity mostly by “texts” (narrowly understood), the engagement of which represents pursuit of assured lexic​ al/th​eolog​ical/​relig​ious/​polit​ical-​canon​ical meanings.3 The modern-world colonialist structures require the invention of and then obsession over

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meaning magically pulled out of “texts” for the sake of control. Examples of such psycho-social-cultural phenomena and dynamics, such as the Bible, the Koran, and Mormon scriptures, have been historically engaged through mimetic practices in order to facilitate and enlarge an already constructed box. Stepping outside the box is not a matter of reflecting the fetishistic mimetic practices in pursuit of the correct meaning of this or that text, which registers as the familiar cultural practice or operation intended to result in stasis. It is or should be a matter of questioning the construction and donation and uses of the text in the first place, that is, what they are (in psycho-socialcultural terms), how they have come about, and their meaning in connection with meaning, including the bald and subtle politics involved. This different orientation is easier said/written about than accomplished, to be sure; the occlusion from the naturalization of the textual is akin to a type of sleep, a lack of consciousness, and so is difficult to scrutinize. There is much at stake in forcing oneself into staying awake and in turn provoking awakening. A good beginning in wakefulness should entail giving more attention to the rather explicit anti-black racialist scripturalizing practices and politics that provide a fascinating window onto the making of the modern world. Self-reflexivity around such matters will doubtless have an impact on the cultivation of agency and freedom. Self-reflexivity should entail reading scripturalectics—the dynamics, mimetic practices, the politics, the forms of violence, the forms of resistance and adjustment—that pertain to the impulses behind the very construction and construals of scriptures and their deployment in connection with the isolation and manipulation of bodies—especially black bodies—and therewith the management of freedom (in thinking and orientation) and difference. But this would beg the question whether such bodies as boundaries are themselves the scriptures always to be read (into nationalizations). Here are profound implications for thinking about thinking and the ramifications for the ongoing structuring of political and social relations. Is there “religion” in any of these developments? Does it matter? What we confront all around us is the crude and nasty politics of language/symbolics, reflecting the deep-seated need to make and maintain difference, to classify and conquer, in reaction to chaos, fear, limits (to what had been considered the myth of the frontier).4 Peoples of color are made most clearly and conveniently to be projections/reflections of the difference, chaos, and limitations that spark and stoke the fear and anxiety. They were the ones whose bodies/ skin were, could be, most easily written on/written up, made different, as projected fear and desire and contempt, and made most poignantly the focus of the freighted dominant cultural script. In our time, we have to do not so much with “religion” over there, real and accessed through the inside voice; no, “it” is here and there, everywhere, in all domains, embedded in our psycho/

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patho-logics and social relations and their dynamics (racializing, gendering, religionizing as scripturalizing, etc.), and motored and projected by making, freezing, and managing difference (scripturalization). It is stuff that matters. NOTES 1. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Bailyn, Bernard, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1986); and Sylvia Wynter, Sylvia “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. V. Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 2. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 65. 3. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 4. Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019), 272–73.

Chapter 27

Scripturalization as Violence

Here I wish to identify and open a window onto what can be argued to be some of the most important dynamics and practices that account for the formation—in the broadest senses, ideological, psycho-socio-cultural, legal, economic, and political—that is the modern Atlantic world in which we all, including this learned society, participate. Because it assumes such formation to be the ordo verborum, the complex and comprehensive system or regime of discourse and consciousness, this chapter—as part of a larger project about religion as discourse and as such in agreement with Foucault that discourse is “at once controlled, selected, organized…a system of control, . . . fixing . . . limits through the . . . reactivation of . . . rules, . . . a violence that we do to things . . . a practice we impose . . . [and that] it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity.”1 This perspective may help us focus more sharply, more self-critically, on what we moderns are as formation, how we came to be what we are, how and why we persist in being such, why we engage each other on the basis of a certain orientation, through certain ongoing practices and gestures, including our engagement in the ongoing rather odd, complex yet unfathomed practices that are scriptural exegesis. The latter I understand to be mimetic cultural practices, in general (no matter the object of focus), in terms of popular and professional interpretations of the Bible, to be sure, among all other socio-culturally canonical “texts.” The consequences—psycho-social-cultural, political, ideological, and so forth—of such practices have barely begun to be fathomed to the depths needed as far as I am concerned to warrant the qualifier “critical.” The larger project, of which this presentation is a part, with which this chapter challenges readers, is critical and trans-disciplinary in orientation and focus and is concerned not about the orientation, foci, and psycho-political agenda of exegesis; it is not about the various themes, topoi within the texts du jour, 366

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but about how texts are deployed or are made to work, about texts as occluding shorthand for a complex of psycho-social dynamics and operations and politics. To facilitate the window-opening, this chapter continues the theorizing work with which I and the members of The Institute for Signifying Scriptures have been associated for several years. This is work that first conceptualized and still turns around what I have for several years called and still call “scripturalization”2 as a modern extensive psycho-social-cultural phenomenon and so as a way to understand and explain—as complement to and expansion of the arguments of M. de Certeau3—the scriptural as discourse among the dynamics, especially of violence, not merely in, but as modern formation. In order to explain scripturalization as violence more fully, this chapter focuses (and so as a kind of continuing case study of the larger theorizing project, with more and continuing insight and perspective) on the registration of the experiences and exploits, the images and sentiments of a mid- to lateeighteenth century ex-slave now known around the English-speaking world as Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa. Equiano understood and projected himself—whether he relates the “facts” or not, as part of historical backgrounds/ origins project is not so important here—as an ethnic Eboe tribesman by birth and background but as Bible-reading Christian (“almost a white man”) in his narrative. As related in his now famous autobiography (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, 1789),4 the experiences and exploits, images, and sentiments of the self-styled “stranger” are significant for providing a most valuable because rarely if ever registered perspective by a black-fleshed and formerly enslaved person about the wide range of dynamics and experiences that were part of his formation process, but also the window he opens to the degree that happens in few other narratives the complexities, the psycho-socio-patho-logics that defined the early modern North Atlantic colonial, slave-holding world. Among such matters are the mimetics of violence as the wielding of texts/ discourse as the wielding of toxic socio-psycho-politics in the form of and within the regime that is scripturalization. I should like at this time to focus again on some of the issues and ramifications of this phenomenon. I am focused here not on “violence” within any set of texts (Hebrew or Greek or otherwise), but ultimately on the performativity of texts as kind of violence, in connection with what cultural critic(al) psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon emphasized with respect to the “dream” being “put . . .back in its time . . . its place” [replacer ce reve en son temps . . . et dans son lieu].5 But I offer first for the sake of a larger theoretical perspective an example about the making of the modern world we share, and that Equiano seems to me anticipate, to help us understand more clearly what is at stake and what has conditioned our common situation and challenge in regard to the politics

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and social psychology of language as violence. The example—the publication of the multi-volume encyclopedic project that the famous philologist/ Sanskritist F. Max Mueller supervised and edited and called Sacred Books of the East. (I have little doubt that this massive publication project is found in the libraries accessible to all readers; it has probably been determinative and a staple resource of college and university religion programs since the early twentieth century, if not the late nineteenth century.) This enormous project, fifty volumes total, produced during the fraught years 1879–1910, the period of the height of European colonial expansion as a type of violence, so subtle, so seemingly benign, even a sign of modern efficiency if a noble gesture, in its re-making/re-drawing of the world—especially Africa and parts of Asia and beyond. It reflected and determined much about how we would understand and negotiate the world. It reflected and modeled and consolidated what I now call the ideology of scripturalism—the religion of modernity across other artificial lines of difference (the nation, ethnic tribe, gender, and so forth). Also, it reflected scripturalization as its projection as a stable politicaldiscursive regime, the semiosphere, the political and framework of sign-ificance. Billed as a collection of the “sacred texts” of the world—scandalously excepting the books of the Jewish-Christian religion (“the Bible”) as those books not to be signified and interrogated on the same terms—Mueller’s project firmly consolidated and legitimized the “aristocracy of the book religion”; and he made clear the framing agenda of dominance and violence of his project that was captured in his own description of his work in his use of the old empire expression dividé et impera, shockingly but bluntly translated by him as “classify and conquer.” This is the ideological-cultural backdrop against which we—most of us, still—do our work.6 Here is the complex larger situation that blares at us notes of violence: the ChristianWest’s books are not to be classified, not to be the focus of critical historical inquiry, not to be interrogated/excavated (in terms no matter how [un]sophisticated), alongside all other scriptural traditions deemed “religion” (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.), not to be seen as having been developed along the lines of Christian tradition (or, if so, only as inferior versions of such), with Judaism serving simply as faux-historical/mythic backdrop. Like white supremacism itself as default and subtending ideology of the modern world, textual Christianism or the constructed complex of the so-called Abrahamic “religions” (with anxiety over Islamism, notwithstanding its textedness), is never to be interrogated, certainly, not on the same terms as other traditions, that is, as texts to be excavated, fathomed in terms of their functions in worldmaking. The modernist historical-“critical” inquiry (including obsession with historical origins and language) on the part of the curious dominants whose classification of language (as classifications of religions and culture) was being performed have made clear that their interests in the past are only about

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giving back to Western-dominant contemporary culture a fairly mirror of itself. Stiff and difficult questions can be put to the outlier traditions, but the reality is that even here such questioning is not sustained or focused enough to make the West look rosy, unique. With their presumed stable transcendent truths, Jewish-Christian texts were only to be examined for content, and so exegeted, in order to draw out their transcendent truths and symbolics of power—and increasingly—with the development of professionalization and their societies—only by insiders, authorized clerics, religious, academic, or high cultural. Here is example of a type of warped orientation and sensibility, if not blindness, even violence. Certain human tribes and their literary traces and products—those without even the traces of the literary and low level scriptures, but only oral gestures—do not even figure in analysis except as exotic backdrops and are collected and classified/named, thereby effectively bringing into focus certain social-cultural phenomena and politics—including now “religion,” if not into “the real” for the first time, certainly now the framing, the hierarchializing and consolidation for the times. So to state the matter plainly, this sort of cultural practice and its politics (of naming/marking/codifying, focus on the phenomenology of . . .) marks where like Equiano we live and the times in which like Equiano we live: we now sojourn still in the time of the consolidation and extension, far beyond the domain of the religious, of the ideology of scripturalism and the socialcultural-political violent regimes of scripturalization that maintains it and scripturalizing as the ongoing mimetic cultural practices, with their complex politics and psycho-logics. With these concepts I aim beyond this chapter to continue to model and try to advance a type of critical social analysis that is disciplinarily transgressive. It is essentially a challenge to invent and model a different transdisciplinary field of critical studies, scrambling and upending the traditional fields and disciplines that serve to mask sophisticated (religion- and socio-cultural-politics- inflected) apologetics that are played out in the academy/learned and other professional societies and beyond. (I leave it to you to wrestle with the matter how you as individual may fit within this schema. I should say that the critical student of scriptures and member of SBL will need to take note of the founding and expansion of SBL within this larger psycho-political and social-cultural context.) Becoming comfortable with my own hunches and interests, and coming to a point of embracing and using my own research on broader African/African diaspora experiences and expressivities based on my own background/history/experiences as touchstone, as portal and as analytical wedge, this critical project I call signifying (on) scriptures. The matrix and safe space for it— necessarily, for the time being and given the politics that obtain, located independently of a particular institution if not altogether outside the traditional

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academy—is the research organization (ISS) I referenced above for which I along with others am working hard to lay tracks. The term “scriptures” is for all involved with ISS a complex abbreviation for the dynamics having to do with the ultimate politics of language, part of the establishment and management of meaning that is part of the making and management of the human. Fears and anxieties inspire and construct scriptures, as the latter—in different forms across different cultures—are made to stoke and more broadly manage these fears and anxieties. We aim to excavate different sites on which scriptures are constructed and deployed, played with, in order to understand better how we make worlds and manage social relations of power. I have set for myself a multiple-volume research and writing project that aims to account for some of the major issues having to do with this ultimate politics of language shorthand for which is scriptures, using the history and forms of expressiveness of the African diaspora as touchstone for raising of issues. Hence, this set up now requires me to go back to Equiano: In WMM, I made use of Olaudah Equiano’s signifying on early modern/late eighteenthcentury Britain in his Interesting Narrative as an analytical window—onto the makings of the world which Mueller’s project (and others) presumed and consolidated (including the formation of what is now SBL). This narrative was one of the earliest and in my view one of the most complex anglophone so-called slave narratives. It is a provocative text to think with, about the formation of the modern, especially with its complex engagement of the texts that were the English scriptures (broadly and narrowly understood). Equiano’s most interesting adventures as slave/ex-slave on the sea and on different lands led me to coin the term scripturalization as a modern extensive regime of (different types of) violence. The term is more expansive than—even as it includes—“religion” and “text.” Certainly, at least beyond “religion” as conceptualized and delimited by the religion-allergic and -anxious “enlightened” figures. Scripturalization must with some irony be conceptualized as itself a product if not syndrome of the Enlightenment. What can be referred to as scripturalization facilitates some differences and conflicts among us, but it also paradoxically and ironically binds us together—into the shared “universe of the undiscussed” (or doxa).7 So scripturalization, I should like to argue, is the defining orientation of our texted/textured/semiotic world, the semiosphere of the things that for moderns have become naturalized. I return here in this presentation to Equiano because I continue to learn things from “him”—the narrator—about the violence of the scriptural world that I believe must be focused on and dealt with. I remind you that Equiano’s time of the mid to late eighteenth century and his base in Britain is part of the period of “first contacts” between “civilization” and the “savage,” the “West” and the “Other.” A famous and disturbing incident, about one of his many

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sailing adventures, recorded in his chapter 11, can be argued to be a locus classicus for analyzing what in my theorizing scripturalization is all about, and how it works: Recollecting a passage I had read in the life of Columbus, when he was amongst the Indians in Jamaica, where, on some occasion, he frightened them, by telling them of certain events in the heavens, I had recourse to the same expedient, and it succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations. When I had formed my determination, I went in the midst of them . . . I pointed up to the heavens . . . I told them God lived there, and he was angry with them . . . and if they did not leave off, and go away quietly, I would take the book (pointing to the bible), read, and tell God to make them dead. This was something like magic. (208)

Here it is in all its crudeness and poignancy—scriptures used as culturalistdiscursive/nationalist weapon, even threatening death. (So crude, much like Donald Trump’s hoist of the Bible on in front of the church on Lafayette Square, it almost amounts to giving up the trick!) Here it is—as “white men’s magic,” ironically and poignantly used by one who is a self-described “stranger,” who is made Black, but also performs whiteness as performance of scriptures in a white-dominant world. He used the (white men’s/English) scriptures to show himself “almost a white man,” and as such in possession of power to dominate, even to kill. Mimetics galore. Here is scripturalization as part of the regime of meaningtranscendent, as part of meaning-making and meaning management, a system in which the (stable) meaning is actually only in the performance of identity, positionality, and control. There are (in this scene) Indians—they are the bottom rung, primitive, savages; and there are white men—they are dominant; they are scripture-readers/wielders. Only an ex-centric, a “stranger,” in this case a Black stranger, could signify on scriptures, as a system, in this compelling and doubly ironic way. The whole situation is absurd. A masquerade. And Equiano plays the game. This game is violence on the level of the large screen: it is public psycho-political drama. It begs to be read honestly and earnestly. One other example I feel I must include here, difficult as it is to do so. It is a little scene not often referred to in discussions about slave narratives. It is disturbing, to say the least. It is the little scene somewhat out of time (even in a narratological project that has little respect or facility for hewing to the Western linear view of time and logics). It is that scene in which Equiano as a boy shows us how he has introjected the violence done to the black body/ psyche. He begins to discover he is not Ebo; he is in his strange situation signified as black, a Negro/nigger; savage. The scene—Equiano’s communication of his remembrance of an incident during his youth with a young girl—5

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or 6 years old—with whom he is brought into contact and observes. (How does this contact come about? “my master placed me . . . left me in the care of”) There is already so much needing to be unpacked in this arrangement alone. At any rate, he recalls his “often observed” quotidian event involving the young girl: . . .when her mother washed her face it looked very rosy; but when she washed mine it did not look so; I therefore tried oftentimes myself if I could not by washing make my face of the same colour as my little play-mate . . .but it was all in vain; and now I began to be mortified at the difference in our complexions.(69)

Well, there it is again—in a different context, in even more disturbing and personal terms: through Equiano’s reporting (he does not dwell on it; only reports as something that obviously traumatized him, something to be fathomed by readers) the internalization/introjection and sedimentation of the domination of the white-skinned world as experienced through/in a black body, a body made to mirror negatively whiteness/the white body. On this scale—involving a young boy thrown into close contact with another young person—it must have taken a toll: It was just barely referenced. It was likely the case that it had could not be told and it could not be told. Here is example of the “dream” that psycho-analysts would want to exegete—as a kind of violence. But only if we heed Fanon’s challenge of placing the dream in its time and place—in the world of the hyper-signification of black flesh such that a man looking back on his experience as a boy comes to see and (re-) experience the traumatic situation, if not clearly, possibly, at, in deeper and more poignant terms. Here is the racialization and scripturalization of black flesh, racialization as scripturalization, scripturalization as violence: here black flesh is given hyper-meaning, meaning around which the world turns. The scripturalization of such—making it mean on terms that are fixed, thick, settled, as part of a way of knowing and being in the world—has already set in. It is beyond the textual per se, that is, as content. It is embedded in the psycho-political and cultural narrative, already perceived on the terms that would have moved Merleau-Ponty.8 It is merely passed along or re-registered in Equiano’s narrative written 200 years before the famous dolls tests administered first and most famously by Black psychologists Drs. Mamie and Kenneth Clark that established in the 1940s and 1950s the harm, the violence, that legal and social-cultural segregation/universal white dominance does to Black children, the violence that we can easily see in the trauma inflicted through the communication of despair and anxiety of a child (narratologically and psychically split from him/her self).9 How much more real or more natural can something be as it is registered in this way? Equiano represents an early example of historical and ongoing contemporary attempts within the Black Atlantic to imitate, signify on, critique,

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interrupt, reframe, extend, the sign/phenomenon that the King James Version of the Bible represents and advanced. But these attempts insofar as they are focused on (the content meaning of) texts miss the point that Equiano’s storytelling (and other’s stories) reveal. What Equiano was confronted with, what we through him are confronted with, is auctoritas, power, the center, and the naturalization of such. The center or power is registered, performed; it is not an object or thing with independent or stable existence. There is no African, no Black man or woman, no (fixed) race; there is no Bible or scripture (Greek or Hebrew or Latin or . . .) per se; there is only the ongoing performance or fabrication of such. This performance or fabrication is itself a form of violence the extent to which it paradoxically fixes or freezes the frames but then nonetheless manipulates—“like soft wax”10—the situation, the black bodies in tow. The brilliance of Equiano’s book is not in the facts presented, not in its artfulness in conventional literary-critical terms; it is in its registration of positionality as consciousness, of performance of the scriptural as invention as psycho-social-cultural violence. One must be forced into or willingly position oneself as ex-centric, as outsider, marginal figure, in order to see what scripturalization is, how scripturalization works. What among other things is needed is a clean mirror: this is not only what appears within Equiano’s narrative but what Equiano’s narrative is—a clean and disturbing mirror: a haunting mirroring of the social-cultural-political order as scripturalization, the order as scripture that tightly defines, orders, structures, manages, dyselects black faces, canonizes white faces. In the near final analysis, of course, the narrative teaches us that there really is no scripture—except what men have historically invented and performed and made others perform. Such work is scripturalization. And it is by design a type of discursive and psycho-political violence. The focus on violence only within already selected/canonized texts is cooptation and enabling of the violence that is scripturalization. Such work occludes what is really at issue—the scriptural construction of the world, with violence appertaining thereto. Is it ever not the time to make this phenomenon the singular intense focus of our critical inquiry, our mimetic practices? It’s not violence in the scriptures, colleagues, it’s scripturalization as violence that begs our attention. But this requires (a different orientation to our) work. NOTES 1. See Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith; New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 215f. 2. See my White Men’s Magic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), passim, for discussion.

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3. See de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Part IV: Uses of Language, 131f. 4. (ed. Vincent Carretta; New York: Penguin, 2003).Page numbers of quotations to follow will be indicated in parentheses. 5. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (trans. Charles Lam Markham; New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952]), chap 4. 6. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap 7, for discussion of historical background and dynamics. 7. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1977), 168. 8. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Donald A. Landes; New York: Routledge, 2014 [1945]). 9. See among the several types of sources in connection with the famous Doll Study, see Kenneth Clark, The Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) 10. See Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 47–49.

Chapter 28

“Backgrounded by Savagery” Black Flesh as Scripture

The two categories/concepts—scriptures and literature—that continue to define this gathering of scholars have in the academy historically been in my view as separate terms or phenomena certainly, badly theorized or woefully under-theorized. They should not now be thrown together—with the confounding supposedly neutral copula—in hopes of creating the big theoretical breakthrough or even facilitating conversation among us. Not only might the juxtaposition be discovered not to be that illuminating; it may prove to be (even more) problematic, more occluding and confusing in its effects: As the more freighted and problematic of the two categories/concepts that headline this gathering, “scriptures” should in my view be theorized as a cultural placeholder or fraught abbreviation for something bigger and more complex than the simple juxtaposition of the two—the subsumption of the one into the other or the simple contrast between the two—would seem to suggest. I maintain that notwithstanding its straightforward Greek and Latin origins and meanings, the term “scriptures” is not in “our” (including this gathering and its conversations as well as disciplines and fields aplenty) historical academic and popular cultural parlance, deployment, and usage (within or beyond the domain of religion) simply a funny or weird type or less layered and complex subset of the larger category writings or “literature.” And “literature,” with all of its widely recognized and accepted genres, is not the worldly antitype to the assumed otherworldly and vaguely and less interestingly genred “scriptures.” No. A critical transdisciplinary orientation might suggest other assumptions and arguments. I should like to propose some of them: I propose that we begin by challenging the very notion of our use of the term “scriptures” to refer to a text or type of literature or any other simple object or artifact. Such a challenge, again, is not to be made strictly in terms of word origins 375

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but in terms of the work—the psycho-socio-logical and psycho-political work—we have made and continue to make the term (and its representations or dynamics) do for us. The loaded word reference, then, is less to things to be compared (even if complexly so) to literature; the term is maddening—both flat and obvious and fraught and provocative shorthand for discourse broadly construed—in the way Foucault referenced it in the context of discussion about discussion or pointedly, discourse: . . . in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures . . . We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity.1

Here it seems we are challenged to think about discourse in radically broad terms, as a reference to phenomena, dynamics, social–cultural relations, social-cultural and psycho-social, and political work having been done and still being done in terms of ramifications violent. To be sure, such things/ happenings/dynamics/relations traditionally and historically and even now especially in the West and in other parts of the world go on in complex relationships to things written down. But the things written down are only one part of several components and dynamics of modern world discourse and attendant complexities. We need to think more about why we use such shorthand for such complex and layered matters.2 Also important to us should be the types of issues that Toni Morrison noticed and isolated in her 1992 analytical readings of U.S./American literature that were the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization turned into the brilliant essay Playing in the Dark. Such readings included attention to Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer prizewinning book, Voyagers to the West: A Passage of the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986), with its focus on eighteenthcentury (Scottish) European settlers traveling to the United States and becoming “Americans”—all such as a dissertation on modern identity formation: . . . the process by which the American as new, white, and male was constituted . . . is a formation with at least four desirable consequences . . . : “a sense of authority[;] . . . autonomy . . . not known before[;] a force that flowed from . . . absolute control over the lives of others[;] [and] . . . a distinctive new man . . . of property in a raw, half-savage world.” . . . The site of . . . transformation is within rawness: he is backgrounded by savagery . . . each [consequence] . . . is made possible by, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and

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employment of a constituted Africanism. It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.3

It is Morrison’s reading of Bailyn’s reading of these modern-white-dominantmale-specific “concerns” that lead me to ask you to divert your attention away from Morrison’s argument so that I might indulge in a relevant and I think compelling bit of the personal-professional. I am as a part this gathering and conversation likely the only person who was trained and first intellectually socialized in a graduate program in scriptures. It was in the context of a study of religion program within the larger governing framework of arts and sciences curricular offerings in the context of an elite university. My teachers— the directors of my sub-field program—were all male European Christian (two Germans, one Swede, a British Tory, and U.S.-born white male) having come of age during World War II, at least four being also clerical by title/ profile and background. Their interest and orientation were on what they called “origins,” “christian origins,” a part of the history of religions, in their arena, having to do with the originary movement(s)/phenomenon(a) that became Western christianism or Western christian civilization. They were as a collective in the decades of 1970s and 1980s intensely focused—on the relevant texts and historical textures, as they understood such—and garnered the reputation of being one of the top centers, if not the top center, for the sub-field. It was, as the popular expressions go, the “hay day” period in a noted program—and at Harvard University. I was thought, and was supposed to think myself, to be (for more than one reason, no doubt) most fortunate to be a student there in that place at that time. But here is a sign of the profound and shocking insanity and insularity of the academy—the only scholar (Euro-Canadian Christian by background) who had actually consistently theorized and written about comparative scriptures—the only scholar of scriptures! per se—was outside this (biblical studies) subfield. As a student, I “stole away” to learn about and from Wilfred Cantwell Smith, comparativist-oriented historian of religion, who would become author of What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (1993). He was during my student years deeply interested in comparative and phenomenological study of scriptures; and as I reflect back on those years, it is clearer to me now that I was looking for a discursive window or maybe just a hole or small opening through which I might be able to fit my curiosities about and interests in what the folks who were part of my world. (Still not conceptualized on a level or on terms that have since been worked on, even if not, completed, I was in the sub-field because I figured my people’s story or forms of expressivities ought somehow to be included, not merely as exotic figures, but as part of theorizing itself.)

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At any rate, Smith was in my sub-field circles hardly ever mentioned; he was certainly never brought into seminar discussions or onto dissertation committees. My dissertation advisor, Krister Stendahl, addressed scriptures as scriptures when on occasion he opined in comparativist-theoretical mode, as something akin to the off-highway turns for which he was famous. At any rate, focus on such issues were rare occasions—it seems only when he thought readers/listeners were in different respects (field or training, and so forth) quite mixed; this was not to be the stuff of the sub-field. But even his categories (“holy”), like Smith’s (“transcendent”), left too much to explain. Stendahl’s asides and Smith’s focus alike were dripping with irony, clear reflectors of the assumptions and anxieties of modern Western dominants.4 Smith certainly challenged students and readers to think beyond “text” (and/or “literature”) and “religion” in theorizing scriptures. His argument about trilateral relations—pointing toward social relations and social dynamics—were intriguing and were loaded with potential for analysis. But with the rare, almost perfunctory nod to ex-centrics—African American spirituals, as singular and odd clip reference—he tended to leave these relations between and within the domains of world civilizational powers and religions and their activities, leaving an impression that the phenomenon had to do only with Europeans or of no other elites around the world. The disappointing and shocking fact was that there was among these scholars little or no self-reflexivity, little or no registration of how their backgrounds shaped their predilections and prejudices, how colonialist and racialist and gendered was the orientation of the programs they directed. There was little or no clear and sustained sensitivity to the issue of power or of violence that scriptures, as projections of the “world religions” and colonial civilizations, and the very academic programs—with their mostly apologetic discourses in their avowals or in their silences or occlusions. And, of course, they would not have ever guessed or fathomed the desire or need on the part of someone of my background to critique and to escape from and attempt to turn on its head the program paradigms that they knew. From their perspective, at least as I reflect back on what actually took place or did not take place, who I was and what I represented could not—certainly, at the level of theoretics and analytics—have much to offer.5 My critique and alternative theorizing and program modeling reflect my arrogation of the right to think through my own history and experiences— outside at least the simple traditional colonialist assumptions about world religions as part of the imperial-colonial world civilizations framework. Such ex-centric work I call the project of “signifying (on) scriptures” and “fathoming the work we make scriptures do for us.” It is advanced through the work agenda of the research vehicle The Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS). ISS is a small trans-disciplinary organization or circle of scholars and artists

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and other thoughtful persons fathoming formation of the modern using the concept/phenomenon of scriptures and power—broadly construed—to think with. It represents an alternative critical study of scriptures, among other respects, in terms of its intentional and deliberate registering of Black presence (and other non-white communities) in theorizing about the dynamics of modern world formation and management. I should like here to return to the matter of what ISS represents in terms of psycho-social orientation and politics, the orientation and politics I think Morrison hinted at in her reading of Bailyn’s reading. It would seem the haunting of Black presence, of black flesh, was always—and still is—the case for moderns. But even if it was not hidden, it was certainly not addressed squarely and honestly as the motor for fear and anxiety-inducement and poignant mis- or under-theorizing it seemed to be. What among other things ISS can provide—what at least my own work insures ISS provides—in terms of critical theorizing offices is help in challenging theorizing to be always alert to what is at issue and at stake in what Morrison called “playing in the dark,” what I call “signifying (on) scriptures.” It is seeing what really is at stake and hidden and at issue drew me to Morrison’s reading of Bailyn’s reading as a reading of the scriptural. What begs more special consideration and analysis is Morrison’s identification of what she calls a white-male-constructed “Africanism” or “Africanist” presence as “staging ground” and “arena,” as a “dark and abiding presence,” a “means of thinking,” or “meditation,” “a visible and invisible mediating force.” Such construction of the dark others—what might ironically and with different paradoxical intentions and politics appertaining on some occasions and called “blackness”—was meant, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, is still meant, well into the twenty-first century, to help “limn out” and structure and articulate the ramifications of the “quintessential American identity,” of what is now often assumed to be, even if not always labeled as, “whiteness.” It is the response to the presence of Black peoples that leads to the self-understanding of white American males (and by extension American/Western whiteness). And it is that presence as limited and limiting and controlled (also unintentionally controlling?) that Morrison argued was very much worth noting. Black bodies as signs of the extreme, of that beyond which there is no other—on the order of literary and cultural critic Sylvia Wynter’s argument regarding the useful modern and contemporary application of the historical cultural deployment of the expression nec plus ultra6— become a powerful means by which American identity and Western-inflected meaning, in nearly all matters important, are structured and maintained. Morrison has never been more correct and articulate in her argument that there is hardly any place or event or set of relations in any period of history in what has become the United States that is not made significant by black bodies:

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In what public discourse does the reference to black people not exist? It exists in every one of this nation’s mightiest struggles. The presence of black people is not only a major referent in the framing of the Constitution, it is also in the battle over enfranchising unpropertied citizens, women, the illiterate. It is there in the construction of a free and public school system the balancing of representation in legislative bodies; jurisprudence and legal definitions of justice. It is there in theological discourse; the memoranda of banking houses; the concept of manifest destiny and the preeminent narrative that accompanies (if it does not precede) the initiation of every immigrant into the community of American citizens. The presence of black people is inherent, along with gender and family ties, in the earliest lesson every child is taught regarding his or her distinctiveness. Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness—from its origins on through its integrated or disintegrating twentieth-century self.7 (Playing, 65)

Nothing need be added to this statement—except an updating to include the twenty-first century, and to make clear scriptures are examples of “public discourse.” I bring to these issues and to the larger conversation about literature and scripture a peculiar history of sensibility and orientation—one might say a history of refusal or even academic-intellectual and psycho-political orneriness: having spent the span of a whole career trying to reorient myself and persuade colleagues to reorient themselves away from the obsession with the content-meaning and historical backgrounds of “texts” to the phenomenology and psycho-social-cultural logics, performativity, and politics, in other words, the radical disciplinarily transgressive problematizing of such. So I should like to challenge all to consider that what is before us to be examined in terms of religious traditions (e.g., Mormon Methodist, Calvinist, Islamic of various orientations), or in terms of the varied domains of society and culture more broadly, are not scripture per se, or in se, not such that can be set up over against whatever is classed as literature. What is needed going forward with the focus on literature or discourse as focus of cultural criticism, then, is less attention to the content of this or that thing written or discourse communicated or performed (scripture), and more attention to the politics that structure or limit or determine the social functions of the discourse. All empires, all regimes of power, all governments—ancient world or modern—are produced and enabled and maintained over the long haul by scriptures/discourse (of some form). Such regimes necessarily operate as discursive police, charged with defense and naturalization of the reigning order. Writing and other forms of discourse or media surely enable this effect. This situation typically obtains without much of a fight or without sustained and effective resistance. This is because the situation that obtains usually is hardly

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recognized to be what it is. It is difficult to resist that which is taken to be all too natural and obvious. What is required in such a situation is a critical approach of the type that recognizes the need not so much for exegesis of the scriptural, that is, of the discourses of the realm, but defamiliarization—of the entire phenomenon of the invention and mimetic uses and politics of discourse/scriptures. This should entail critical analyses of the modern world social-cultural dynamics that I call scripturalectics and/or the modernist ideology that I term scripturalism. Included in such dynamics to be analyzed would be scripturalizing (mimetic practices, some of which would be deemed significant, others not) and scripturalization, a psycho-social and cultural-political regime with its slate of scripturalizing practices, its regulating/policing functions, its hierarchizing, violent effects.8 The modern world colonialist structures require the invention and then obsession over meaning magically pulled out of “texts” for the sake of control. Examples of such psycho-social-cultural phenomena and dynamics such as the Bible, the Koran, and Mormon scriptures have been historically engaged through mimetic practices in order to facilitate and advance an already constructed box. Stepping outside the box is or should be a matter of questioning the construction and donation and uses of the text in the first place, that is, what they are (in psycho-social-cultural terms), how they have come about, and their meaning in connection with meaning, including the bald and subtle politics involved. This different orientation is easier said/written about than accomplished, to be sure; the occlusion from the naturalization of the textual is akin to a type of sleep, a lack of consciousness, and so is difficult to scrutinize. There is much at stake in forcing oneself into being and staying awake and in provoking awakening. A good beginning in wakefulness should entail giving more attention to the rather explicit racialist scripturalizing practices and politics that define any one (self-ascribed) scriptural tradition as provocative example of and window onto the making of the modern world. Self-reflexivity around such matters will doubtless have an impact on the cultivation of agency and freedom. Self-reflexivity should entail reading scripturalectics—the dynamics, mimetic practices, the politics, the forms of violence, the forms of resistance and adjustment—that pertain to the impulses behind the very construction and construals of scriptures and their deployment in connection with the isolation and manipulation of bodies—especially Black bodies—and therewith the management of freedom (in thinking and orientation) and difference. But this would beg the question whether such bodies as boundaries are themselves the scriptures always to be read (into nationalizations). Here are profound implications for thinking about formation and ramifications for the ongoing structuring of political and social relations so related.

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I end here by emphasizing again that the conversations and programs I have for years encouraged and provoked can be—should be—seen as related to the conversation for which this chapter was written. My entreaty—that we scholars of the human learn to lean into each other across the slight and shallow lines of separation, the different starting points and inflections that are the academy, in order to sustain and enlarge the pursuit of the big questions and issues that we find compelling. My continuing challenge to all of you and other interested conversation partners beyond our circle—that we come to understand that scriptures are not texts or literatures, but freighted shorthand for certain types of fraught and complex social relations, power, and violence; that the categories scriptures and literature should not be juxtaposed, except in such respects, that is, power and violence and formation; that the types of social relations that are at issue can be—perhaps, must be!—fathomed most deeply and poignantly, scarily, even—in terms of the social relations, the violence that is the making and maintenance and management of race, of (the discourse and politics around) bodily difference; that for the Western world, most certainly, this has meant and still means race-ing, or making the black body I argue the originary and ever persistent determinant of the binding/formation of the dominant white(/ male identity and its) world. So to locate and come to terms with scripture (and literature—not in innocent juxtaposition, but the latter in subsumption to the former, as only one of the domains/sites/activities part of it)—if we want to fathom scripture in the modern world we know and share, we must find that which has been persistently raced. With all the problems and challenges appertaining thereto. I should like to end the way an ISS gathering and conversation might begin and therefrom wallow in—with a show and tell, what ISS calls “Scripturalizing Here and There,” an example of some dynamic(s) or phenomenon/a in (any) society and culture in any moment past or present that may be registered as scripturalizing. Allow me to offer for final consideration an example I take from the latest issue of The Chronicle of higher Education (Volume LXVI, Number 22, February 21, 2020). In the article entitled “A Leader Makes an Ill-Chosen Racial Analogy. It’s Not the First Time,” all the points I have tried make and gather in this essay—about scripture not as text or type of literature but understood and manifested and used and made political most poignantly by elites in every domain in reference to the Black body or Black presence—are focused: When Thomas J. LeBlanc, president of George Washington University, was asked this month if he would have the institution divest from fossil-fuel companies if the proposal had student support, he reached for an analogy to argue that such pressure wouldn’t matter. “What if the majority of the students agreed to shoot all the black people here? . . . Do I say, ‘Ah, well, the majority voted?’ No.”

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The remarks may seem at first brush to be simple nonsense, but they come from the mouth of the most powerful member of an elite institution. They stir up and open up so much that beg our attention, our fathoming, as we gather here near the Mason-Dixon line, in Baltimore, Maryland, at our “first research university,” no less.9 Yes, the remarks raise so many issues about the U.S. university/academy—that domain that probably overdefines us and our ways of thinking and behaving in the world—and its fraught and ugly history of discursive formation and apologetics of race and the profit and growth from the literal enslavement and selling of black flesh. Does the absence of religious foundation or affiliation or a Divinity School mark the modern research university? And can/should there be excavation of the scriptural and its politics where there is no Divinity School? Answers to these queries will take us a long way toward excavation of the scriptural as reading of the Black body and all that means for modern world. NOTES 1. See Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith; New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 2. M. de Certeau, History of Writing (trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 3. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage1992). 4. See Smith’s What is Scripture? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); and Stendahl’s 1983 Presidential Address, Society of Biblical Literature [!], “The Bible as a Classic and the Bible as Holy Scripture,” Journal of Biblical Literature 103, no. 1 (March, 1984), 3–10. 5. I am reminded at this juncture of argumentation about my experience with learned society (SBL) Reconceptualization Initiative participant (male European) who in March 2021 in reacting to my insistence that vernacular (local and oral) traditions be part of discussions going forward exclaimed with authority—“They’re not relevant to our issues!” 6. See her “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. V. Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). 7. Playing in the Dark, 65. 8. V.L. Wimbush, White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 9. Jennie Williams, Baltimore Sun, February 15, 2018: https://www​.baltimoresun​ .com​/opinion​/op​-ed​/bs​-ed​-op​-0216​-jhu​-donovan​-20180214​-story​.html.

Afterword Mr. George Floyd—American Scripture

In the wake of the court proceedings and jury decision regarding the killing of Mr. George Floyd, a friend of many years asked me what thoughts I had. He had in mind more specifically whether I thought that any real changes might now be set in motion. I responded that I did not know. Quite honestly, I was and am still—doubtless, like so many of you—somewhat paralyzed and traumatized. It is for me both difficult to impossible and necessary and therapeutic for me to focus and express thoughts in writing of some kind. For whatever they may matter to readers, here go my attempts to channel, focus, and express raw feelings and thoughts: First, a note of serious challenge—if the discourse on which you were weaned as thinking and acting adult person in the world—whether this or that academic field or subfield or this or that other type of professional formation and jargon—if it does not provide space for, or actually enable you to think about—no—think through, what happened to Mr. Floyd, then you must seek to reform or dismantle that discourse; or “Get Out!” If your conversation circles or partners are not wrestling with what is happening, you need, as the late Congressman John Lewis often challenged us, to take it upon yourself to “Make some noise! Get in good trouble!” If your discursive circle cannot address or reckon with what happened to Mr. Floyd, that circle has lost its legitimacy in the world we share. Henceforth, there can no longer be business (political, legal, policing) or discourse/discursive practices as usual. All critical and professional, indeed, all discourses, period, should be oriented so as to make the phenomena and dynamics we now associate with Mr. Floyd—the centuries leading up to his cries and agonies in the last moments of life—the stuff of critical focus. And the latter must be directed so as to make itself an ally of those who cry for demands for appropriately radical changes. 385

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Second, we who are now associated with the Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) and, through it, committed still to modeling ex-centric discursive practices worthy of anyone’s investment of time and energy in our fraught and dangerous world—we might consider what it would mean to think with more focus and intentionality about what the “readings”/misreadings of Mr. Floyd (and too many others) represent, what they tell us about how we “see,” how we “read” things. What we all saw, what we all heard in the form of groans and cries of pain and anxiety in Mr. Floyd, and the anxiety, through the arrogation and chilliness on the part of his killer, should lead to a determination that henceforth no consideration of our world can leave that encounter unfathomed. There is so much there—histories of perceptions that as Merleau-Ponty argued, determine what we see, how we see what is/not there; of assumptions and presumptions; desires/fantasies; envy; masking; arrogance; brute force; willful and ignorant misreadings; and so forth. All there on the street under the car. Silence or obfuscation about what was there can no longer be seen as benign. Third, these disturbing questions and issues: What situations, what practices have we (re)naturalized, viz., made scriptural? What does it take‒‒nine plus minutes!?—of brutal and heavily symbolized, almost ritualized, violence mediatized throughout the world, to shake some of us out of our perception, as Merleau-Ponty argued, our natural habit of “seeing”/“reading” in terms flat and tight and fixed, but also cannily manipulable when needed in order to support averted eyes and ears? Perhaps, the sustained world mediatization of the violence done to Mr. Floyd took its toll on our usual habit of staying within the bounds of naturalized perception. We saw too much of the ugly and rancid and violent operation of the scriptural. Up close! The situation/text can always be more easily signified as normal perception at a distance, with our remaining silent. But with the whole world watching and watching and watching, with our not being able to go anywhere to escape the video spraying of the way some in real time saw what happened—that proved to be too much. Mr. Floyd and Breonna Taylor, alas!—the list goes on, far too numerous and painful to name here—those who wear (and are reduced to) black (as synecdoche for all non-white) flesh that is historically made to be prone, to assume the abject position, to become small, overdetermined, hyper-signified, scripturalized—all these must be our focus for the sake of modeling and advancing discourse that matters. We must, as W.J. T. Mitchell advised, “see through” “race.” But this means taking note that, as our experience of Mr. Floyd reminds us, being “race-d” is still mostly perceived as being black flesh. Only by seeing such flesh can we see ourselves seeing. Finally, I return to running: who should run? And why? I identify with Mr. Floyd in several respects, to be sure, most specifically and poignantly, in terms of the scripturalization of black flesh that I wear. But I am also, like the

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fantasizing and fearful officers, and even Mr. Floyd himself, a victim of the regime of scripturalization that makes black flesh the problem, the measure of that beyond which modern subjectivity cannot go, that has projected onto it pollution, chaos, savagery, that makes of it too much the reminder of just how despoiled, through our irrational and sick violence, are we all. From all of this rot all of us, then, need to run. It is perhaps, sadness upon sadness, if not merely irony, that even the officers who in their violent actions represented (and fought in defense of) our scripturalization, our perception, of the world in which is found convenient black flesh against which to “read” their subjectivity, that they probably realized at some level that they needed to run. But could not, certainly, they did not. In all of us, the violence is now too deeply imbedded. We recoiled it seems only as we were made to see the ongoing system nakedly and without clever masking operationalized. Might that not the most frightening aspect of the situation? Even as I am aware of the depth of the enslavement to which we all have been made to undergo, I aim to continue to work to keep myself fit and ready to run. We all need to run. I have tried to make of this book a display of one set of terms by which the running in relation to flesh that matters too much and not at all can be carried out.

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Index

Note: Page locators in italics refer to figures. Achebe, Chinua, 1 African Americans and the Bible (project and book), 10–11 Alba, R., 336 Aravamudan, S., 239 asceticism/askesis, 60–63, 74–76, 80–82, 198 Bailyn, B., 362 Baker, H., 67–72, 89–90, 192 Baldwin, J., 82–83 Barrett, L., 328–29 Bauman, Z., 311, 313 Bellah, R., 216–17 Benston, K., 150 Berkeley, Bishop George (“Rising Glory of America”), 347 Bernier, C-M., 352 black (w)hole, 118, 136n53 Bloom, Harold, 24–25 Bourdieu, P., 212, 363 Brown, S., 99–100, 102, 108 Buck-Morss, S., 219 Butler, J., 336, 340n4 Cameron, Averil, 35–36 classification, 333

Coltrane, J., 150, 296 Conrad, Joseph, 1–3 Constantine (American), 231–32 contemptus mundi, 25–31, 79, 113 corpsing, 3 Critical Comparative Scriptures Ph.D. Program, 14 critical history, Wimbush as scholar of, 143 CUREMP (Society of Biblical Literature), 10, 268 cursus fugae, 18 darkly, reading, 165 de Certeau, M., 174, 213, 226, 307, 367 de Saint-Méry, Médéric L. E. Moreau, 350–51 de Ste Croix, G. E. M., 38–39 Devisch, R., 63–64 Dharvadkar, V., 102–3 divide et impera, 210, 290, 368 Dorsey, Thomas A., 74 Douglass, F., 153–66, 171–72, 218–19 doxa, 191–92, 283, 363, 370 Du Bois, W. E. B., 66–68, 83–86, 89–90, 144–51, 176, 189, 219, 263, 267, 269 399

400

Index

Eisenstadt, S. E., 81, 219 Ellison, R., 175, 181–82 Equiano/Vassa, Interesting Narrative, 212–16, 239–44, 367, 370–73 Fanon, F., 367 Fausto-Sterling, A., 336–37 Floyd, G., 385 Foucault, M., 349, 376 Frenau, P., and Hugh Henry, 348 Furstenberg, F., 309–11 Gates, H. L., 19n4 Geertz, C., 28 Gilroy, P., 235 Glissant, E., 339 gnostics/gnosticism, 31 Godwyn, M., 161–62 Gorman, A., 355 Harpham, G., 61–63, 65, 81 Harris, Doc, 248 Hayden, R. (“Runagate”), 91, 182 Hefner, R. W., 50, 52 hos me, 49 Hurston, Z. N., 86–87, 271–72 Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (IAC), 12, 273 Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS), 12–16, 82, 204–6, 284, 378–79; programs, projects, 14–16; as riff (signifying) on IAC, 12, 273, 285 inworldly, 32 Jefferson, T., 349–50 Jeffries, L., 313–14 Johnson, Blind Willie, 17–18 Johnson, Rev. C. J., 17

Lotman, U., 212 Mack, B., xiii–xiv, 56 maroons/runagates, 2 marronage/schema of life cycle of, 121–22 McWillie, J., 258nn1, 6, 9, 22 Miller, W., 163 MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference, 15, 322–23 Mitchell, W. J. T., 193, 255–56 Mohanty, S., 285 Mook, James, 248 Morrison, Toni, 2, 87–89, 97–98, 190– 92, 206, 213, 263–67, 306, 356 Moses, Ethiopian/Black, 39–43, 82 Mueller, F. M., (Sacred Books of the East), 210, 290, 298, 332, 362, 368, 376 Murphy, J., 72–73 nec plus ultra, 226, 363, 379 New York Magazine, 45–47 Nora, P., 150 Norton Anthology of World Religions, 210–11 Obama, Barack (Farewell Address), 313 Obama, Barack and Michelle (portraits), 326–28 Ofili, C., (The Holy Virgin Mary), 254–57 outworldly, 3 Pagels, E., 80 People Make the World Go ‘Round (song), 341 Perkins, J., 65 Pitts, W., 73–74 Prewitt, K., 334–35

King, C., 335 Lafitau, J-F., 174 Lévi-Strauss, C., 306 Locke, A., 68, 177 Long, C., 202, 203, 238, 352

Rancière, J., 306 reading formations, 216–17 Reading Scriptures, Reading America Project, 15 Reed, I., 123–24

Index

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 23 Robinson, James M., 23, 26, 27, 48, 49 Rodman, R. C., 248 runagate (renegate/renegatus), 176 Schuessler Fiorenza, E., 223–26, 228 Schwartz, B. I., 50 scripturalectics, 18, 381 scripturalism, 210, 211, 290, 359, 369, 381 scripturalization, 3, 18, 79, 209, 211, 212, 216, 235, 290, 345, 355–56, 359, 365, 366, 369, 381 scripturalizing, 179, 211, 320, 360, 369 scriptures, 209–10, 277, 298, 375 see(ing) through, 18, 19n6, 193 Self-Interpreting Bible, The (Rev. John Brown), 310 signifyin(g)/signifying, 4, 279 signifying (on) scriptures, 3, 187, 212, 278, 279, 298, 369 Smith, W. C., 280–81, 283, 377–78 Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), 15, 269, 272 Stedman, J. G., 91 Stony the Road We Trod (project/ collection of essays), 169 Storace, P., 97, 99 St. Paul’s Spiritual Holy Temple/ Voodoo Village, 248, 291, 292n4 subjunctive mood/living subjunctively, 293, 304, 313

401

Taussig, M., 180–81, 203, 219, 238–39 Tavernise, S., 334 Tibi, B., 312 trabelin’ on/travelin’ through an unfriendly world, 113 translatio, 7 translation imperii, 347 translation studii, 347 translatio studii et imperii, 64, 325, 348 Truth, S., 226–28, 353–54 Valantasis, R., 61–62, 65, 66 Voodoo Village, 250–53 Walzer, M., 158 Warren, R. P., 99–103, 108, 114 Watson, J. D., 333–34 Werbner, R., 75 White Men’s Magic/white men’s magic, 16, 272, 370 Wicker, K. O., 39, 44nn9–11 William, S., 175, 218 Wright, R., 180, 219–20 Wynter, S., 226, 362–63, 379 You Better Run/I’m Gonna Run (songs), 16–18 Zamir, S., 145

About the Author

Vincent L. Wimbush is an internationally recognized scholar of religion, with more than thirty years of professional teaching, research, and scholarly program organizational experience. He is author of White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (2012) and Scripturalectics (2017), among others, and editor or co-editor of MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference (2013); Theorizing Scriptures; Refractions of the Scriptural (2016); African Americans and the Bible (2000), and others; and also scores of articles and essays. He has previously taught at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University; Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University (NYC); Harvard Divinity School; and Williams College. He is founding director of The Institute for Signifying Scriptures, a forum for transdisciplinary research, conversation, and programming. A past president of the Society of Biblical Literature and a visiting scholar for Phi Beta Kappa, Wimbush’s general teaching/research interests focus on the transdisciplinary study of “scriptures” as a sharp wedge for theorizing and analyzing the politics of language, formation, consciousness, and orientation; his particular ongoing area of expertise turns around the scripturalization of the modern Black Atlantic and its complex uses of scriptures for (de)formation.

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