Powers & Principalities: A Black Womanist Interrogation of Demonarchy 25 Years Hence

Abstract

In consideration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, my very brief comments this afternoon venture to position Williams’ assertion of demonarchy throughout her scholarly corpus as the most uninterrogated, yet a most critical theological category implicitly emerging from the classic text that we celebrate today. To be sure, Sisters and Williams’ broad research concerns pursue the dismantling of what she would identify as “Eurocentric Christian doctrine” and its “Afro-Saxon” endorsements. Yet, normative emphasis on the erogeneity of atonement that locates a principle stimulus in the phallic symbology of the cross and, in relation to black women’s particularity, in the pornotropic visual logics of black women’s suffering that grotesquely titivate the church and the public square, has largely ignored that which preconditions the task of theological disassembling that propels much of the black womanist theological task, especially as constituted in Williams’ field-shaping contributions; one of which I see as naming demonarchy.