Black Theology Papers Project
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/btpp
The Black Theology Papers Project contains papers presented at the Black Theology Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Panels are presented 2-3 times per year; the journal publishes one issue annually.Columbia University Librariesen-USBlack Theology Papers Project2641-2799Blackness at the End of the World
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/btpp/article/view/12519
<p>This paper argues that there exists no ontotheological grounds for black life. As such, black<br>religion and, by extension, black theology should consider the ways in which black life is life that<br>is lived ungrounded. The central claim of this paper notes that categories such as the good life,<br>the human, freedom, and citizenship are inadequate to account for the reality of black life amid<br>the totalizing effects of antiblackness. As such, black theology should position itself to imagine<br>black theology beyond the confines of the science of faith and other colonial markers of life and<br>humanity. In essence, this paper seeks to make two theological claims/interventions; first, it<br>questions the use of the category of the human as a liberatory figure through which the black<br>can attain freedom. Second, it throws into crisis the notion of eschatological time and salvation<br>and the inability or difficulty to account for the black who has been rendered simultaneously in<br>and out of time. Ultimately, this paper wants to think with black feminist futurity and Afrofuturist<br>discourse as generative tools to imagine black life beyond the confines of antiblackness, if at all<br>possible.</p>Antavius Franklin
Copyright (c) 2024 Antavius Franklin
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2023-11-212023-11-219110.52214/btpp.v9i1.12519Notes on an Ex White Man’s Form of Life Toward Social Death
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/btpp/article/view/12518
<p>This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank<br>Wilderson’s charges for Humanity to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes Du<br>Bois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soul<br>of an ex White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded to<br>shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “form<br>of life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm of<br>social death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form of life toward social<br>death</p>Andrew Santana Kaplan
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrew Santana Kaplan
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2023-11-212023-11-219110.52214/btpp.v9i1.12518Mulatto Bodies and the Body of Christ
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/btpp/article/view/12517
<p style="text-align: left;">Ten years ago, in an article for The Christian Century, theologian Jonathan Tran heralded<br>the work of three black theologians J. Kameron Carter, Willie J. Jennings, and Brian Bantum<br>as inaugurating a “new black theology.” According to Tran, these three thinkers represented “ a<br>major theological shift that [would] if taken as seriously as it deserve[d] change the face<br>not only of black theol ogy but theology as a whole.” Now that ten years have passed, this<br>paper asks: Has it? And arguing that it has not, I offer reflections on why it has not. At the<br>center of my argument will be a critique of the way Carter and Bantum offered their revised<br>un derstanding of racial identity and hybridity by reimagining the identity Jesus through<br>mulatto/a bodies and persons. This, I will claim, is a dead end. It is a project that fails to<br>do the very thing it sets out to do, and ultimately, collapses in on itsel f. My aim in making<br>this critique is less refutation and more redirection. More specifically, I will hope to resolve<br>some of the problematic impulses in their appeal to mulatto identity, and in so doing, clear<br>the way for a new direction in Black Theology.</p>Nathaniel Jung-Chul Lee
Copyright (c) 2023 Nathaniel Jung-Chul Lee
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2023-11-212023-11-219110.52214/btpp.v9i1.12517