Black Theology Papers Project

Notes on an Ex White Man’s Form of Life Toward Social Death

Andrew Santana Kaplan — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank Wilderson’s charges for Humanity to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes Du Bois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soul of an ex White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded to shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “form of life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm of social death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form of life toward social death.

Blackness at the End of the World

Antavius Franklin — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper argues that there exists no ontotheological grounds for black life. As such, black religion and, by extension, black theology should consider the ways in which black life is life that is lived ungrounded. The central claim of this paper notes that categories such as the good life, the human, freedom, and citizenship are inadequate to account for the reality of black life amid the totalizing effects of antiblackness. As such, black theology should position itself to imagine black theology beyond the confines of the science of faith and other colonial markers of life and humanity. In essence, this paper seeks to make two theological claims/interventions; first, it questions the use of the category of the human as a liberatory figure through which the black can attain freedom. Second, it throws into crisis the notion of eschatological time and salvation and the inability or difficulty to account for the black who has been rendered simultaneously in and out of time. Ultimately, this paper wants to think with black feminist futurity and Afrofuturist discourse as generative tools to imagine black life beyond the confines of antiblackness, if at all possible.

Mulatto Bodies and the Body of Christ

Nathaniel Jung-Chul Lee — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Ten years ago, in an article for The Christian Century, theologian Jonathan Tran heralded the work of three black theologians J. Kameron Carter, Willie J. Jennings, and Brian Bantum as inaugurating a “new black theology.” According to Tran, these three thinkers represented “ a major theological shift that [would] if taken as seriously as it deserve[d] change the face not only of black theol ogy but theology as a whole.” Now that ten years have passed, this paper asks: Has it? And arguing that it has not, I offer reflections on why it has not. At the center of my argument will be a critique of the way Carter and Bantum offered their revised understanding of racial identity and hybridity by reimagining the identity Jesus through mulatto/a bodies and persons. This, I will claim, is a dead end. It is a project that fails to do the very thing it sets out to do, and ultimately, collapses in on itsel f. My aim in making this critique is less refutation and more redirection. More specifically, I will hope to resolve some of the problematic impulses in their appeal to mulatto identity, and in so doing, clear the way for a new direction in Black Theology.