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Black reason is propelled by a fantastic imaginary, a changeling animus that aggregates and transmogrifies the desires and fears of whiteness.

Introduction

Black reason eludes definition. As a concept, it betrays a commonsense understanding that might seek to take meaning from either of its two constituent parts. Here, Black neither designates a particular subject of African or African-diasporic ancestry, nor does it modify reason as an adjectival indication of rational agency. As it is critically conceived by Cameroonian postcolonial political theorist and philosopher Achille Mbembe, Black reason is the animus of the fantasy of whiteness, a constellation of desires and fears that gave lie to the anti-Black cultural imaginary of modernity and therefore also to the necropolitical configurations of power in the colony, plantation, and postcolony. Black reason is a way of knowing that triangulates modern concepts of identity, humanity, and relationality by appealing to the surd of race, of Blackness as the antipode of whiteness. The conceit of Black reason has been to obfuscate its contrivance and appear as a seemingly natural ratio by which Western powers might order society, politics, life, and death. Yet as Vincent Lloyd notes, by positing the critique of Black reason in metaphysical terms, Mbembe challenges critical race studies and its subdisciplines to go beyond the register of racial “logics” as social realities to the realm of symbol and meaning.

Lloyd suggests there is much that commends the religious, especially the Christian tradition, to Mbembe’s critique. Above all, Mbembe values the critical potential of Christian epistemes to contest the symbolic power of Black reason. Yet there is an aporia in Mbembe’s thought which does not consider the mutual formation of race and religion. As a political theorist and philosopher, and not a theologian, Mbembe is hardly to be faulted. For that matter, there have been a number of recent theological works that consider the relationship between race and religion, such as Kelly Brown Douglas’ Stand Your Ground (2015).

Yet this effort can be bolstered further by elucidating the cooptation of Black reason by Christianity and its subsequent coarticulation with the white theological imaginary. I suggest that what Mbembe expresses in the Lacanian psychoanalytic registers of the imaginary and symbolic, namely, the fantasy of whiteness that animates Black reason, is akin to what James Cone named the white condition (1970) and to what Emilie Townes named the fantastic hegemonic imagination (2006). To be clear, Mbembe writes from an African-centric, postcolonial perspective, and Cone and Townes from a U.S. American, theological one. Yet I hope that by reading Mbembe, Cone, and Townes in light of one another, I can identify the intercalation of racial and religious imaginaries that constitute a necropolitical theology, what W.E.B. Du Bois called the religion of whiteness. Finally, I will make some modest suggestions as to how one might abandon the madness of Black reason for the light of Blackness.

Black Reason – Achille Mbembe

Following the global traces of half-lives lived under the aegis of necropolitical power and inscribed violently in a discursive postcolonial social imaginary leads Mbembe to the Critique of Black Reason (2017).Black reason is the tensive field of race discourse in Western modernity that subtends the officious historico-political discourse of reason, truth, and freedom inside of which a struggle over the power to narrate and administrate human existence is fought. For Mbembe, as for his interlocutor, Foucault, race canalizes the aporia of difference between oneself and the other internal to the state. The construal of the “racial” other as the polluted and polluting Other, not simply as a distinct “I” but as a perpetual Enemy who threatens the very existence of the national subject and the purity of the race, in turn legitimizes a politics of death by identifying the “raced” Other as a threat. This identification subsequently justifies their dehumanization and extermination.

Yet the critique of Black reason sharpens the blunted Foucauldian discourse of race while simultaneously ironizing the political virtues (“reason”) of modernity. Black reason narrows on Africa, white fantasy, and Blackness as primary critical loci. Against the interpretation of rationality as the singular epistemological category of Western political modernity, Mbembe’s critique of Black reason reveals the fantastical repository from which Europe, initially, drew their anti-Black racist symbols. This critique subsequently exposes the social-political imagination that thrives on the ideological aporetic that this specific race discourse constitutes. Mbembe articulates Black reason in the Lacanian psychoanalytic register of the imaginary and the symbolic as a “discourse of incantation,”a distortion of the symbolic first circulated by hegemonic colonialist powers as a shoddy rationale for African colonization. But this imaginary did not die with post-WWII postcolonial upheavals.

This racial imaginary, a tentacle-like extension of a symbolic field of meaning, has become a perennial repository from which neo-colonizing powers draw in order to justify a politics of death that, even today, inscribes Africa and Africans in a relation of enmity with the so-called First World. Black reason distorts relationality by perpetually inscribing subjectivity in the dehumanizing fantasy of whiteness, keeping anti-Blackness alive as a global social-political nomos. Black reason, one might say, is the operative surd underlying Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write About Africa” (2019), which satirizes how Africa and Africans are inscribed and reinscribed in the white imaginary. Black reason imagines Africa and Africans with simultaneous authority and perplexity, perpetually stagnant and dynamic, backwards and radical, exquisitely rich and woefully indigent, fecund and decaying.

Necropolitical Theology

            It is a mistake to think that Black reason is autonomous. Anti-Blackness is not self-perpetuating; it does not have a life of its own, propagating itself like some monad. Instead, as Barbara and Karen Fields might argue, as an ideology Black reason is re/circulated as the animus of everyday social imaginaries, the topographies according to which one traverses quotidian existence. The fantasy of whiteness is carried along by those for whom it constitutes a propitious existence, who articulate a discourse that occults the real, white racist supremacy, and points instead to the imaginary and symbolic, to race as a primordial relation of enmity destined to eternally plague us with the force of ontological insuperability.

Black reason was reinforced in modernity through its cooptation by Christianity. This unity, I suggest, has produced a necropolitical theological imaginary. In the 15th-16th centuries, Christians bent their faith to consecrate the fantasy of whiteness, which provided a seductive raison d’être for a purportedly natural, divinely-ordained ontocratic hierarchy. The Church permitted enslavement of non-Christian “pagans” so long as these lost souls were, eventually, evangelized, and relieved from what Europeans perceived to be remediable idolatry and base instinct. Once converted, they must be freed. But as dependence on enslaved labor grew in tandem with Christian colonization of the Caribbean and the Americas, so too did the need to justify slavery as a permanent condition. Efforts at evangelization and conversion were made, if at all, in bad faith, a calculated religious compromise for geopolitical hegemony. European Christian colonizers used Black reason as an ir/rationale to maintain the transatlantic slave trade and thereby deny the intrinsic dignity of the imago Dei.

Black reason continued to shape the white Christian theological imagination, including what Charles W. Mills called the “slaveholding democracy” of the United States, even after emancipation. Racist myths of the dangerous, hypersexual Black man as a threat to white Christian womanhood thrived during Jim Crow. This patriarchal fantasy infused fears and desires with the sacred to reinforce the sovereignty of whiteness as the right of God-fearing men to exercise allegedly providential control through violent social-political liturgies like lynching. And Black reason remains regnant today in the new racial capitalism and new Jim Crow, still sheltered by a white necropolitical theological imagination that sanctifies a multiform anti-Blackness. The plasticity of Black reason means, after all, that it can be variously appropriated by white supremacy as the alleged divine will.

James H. Cone and Emilie M. Townes Contra Black Reason

            Two contemporary theologians offer compelling critiques of Black reason. In 1969, James Cone published an incendiary manifesto for Black liberation and Black theology. Black Theology and Black Power irrupted white American academic theology. In this work, Cone arguably succeeded in his effort to correlate the kerygma of Jesus to what he called the Black condition, the existential, psychological, and material situation of anti-Black oppression. In his subsequent A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), Cone maintains that the gospel message is analogous to the message ofBlack power. The Word of God revealed in Jesus Christ is the divine decision for liberation and self-determination made on behalf of the poor and oppressed of the land – in the United States, for freedom for Black people now.

Cone also offered an incisive critique of the failure of white theology. The primary fault, he suggests, is the possession of Christian theology by what he names the white condition. Cone says that the white condition (whiteness), insofar as it opposes the divine will of God for the freedom of human creatures through slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, is “demonic” (1969). Cone, like Mbembe, thus also describes anti-Blackness in metaphysical terms, albeit without subtle irony. For Cone the Black condition is a result of white racist “insanity,” a surd “inflicted by the white condition” without “rational explanation” (1970). Yet that does not mean whiteness simply took on a life of its own. Cone argues white Christianity lent sacred inviolability to the irrationality of anti-Blackness by twisting theological epistemes, like the imago Dei, to its nefarious purposes.

Emilie Townes entered a theological academy which, though still a white-dominated space in the 1980s, had been forever transformed by the scholarship of Black liberation theology. And yet, as Townes and others noted, there was a deep absence of Black women’s experience represented in either the largely androcentric texts of Black liberation theology or the white texts of feminist theology. Drawing from Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), womanist theologians resolved to articulate God-talk in the polytonal register of Blackness, femininity, class, and sexuality.

Nearly forty years after Cone wrote his landmark works in Black liberation theology, Townes penned an equally pathbreaking text, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (2006). In it, she juxtaposes the cultural production of evil, represented by particular images at the intersection of racialized violence, gendered stereotypes, and capitalist exploitation, to the womanist “dancing mind,” a theoethical critical frame that contests such productions. The constructive genius of Townes’ work is to choreograph a theological imagination that promotes the wholeness of Black life in solidarity to dismantle the structures of heterosexism, racism, patriarchy, and capital.

Integral to Townes’ argument is her theorization of the narrative, mnemonic character of the cultural production of evil, which she articulates in a Gramscian and Foucauldian grammar as the fantastic hegemonic imagination. Townes prioritizes the particular experiences of Black women whose identities are commodified and demonized in this imaginary. This heteropatriarchal fantasy, like that in Mbembe’s Black reason, draws on a repository of symbols intended to bracket Black female being in the confines of a twisted white supremacist imaginary. Through the images of the Sapphire, Tragic Mulatta, and Mammy, the fantastic hegemonic imagination politicizes and twists historical memory in order to justify the status quo. Townes, like Cone, also recognizes that the surd of whiteness is not autonomous. She identifies white Christianity’s tendencies toward triumphalism, exceptionalism, and neoimperialism as willing harbingers of the fantastic hegemonic imagination.

Conclusion

Black reason is a nefarious irrationale plaguing the ruins of modernity. It is propelled by a fantastic imaginary, a changeling animus that aggregates and transmogrifies the desires and fears of whiteness. As I argued in conversation with Cone and Townes, this surd of anti-Blackness has been woven into the fabric of the Christian imaginary. But what of the critical-liberating potential of theology against necropolitical theology? Perhaps it might be found in the truth of Blackness as God’s intent for humankind revealed in Christ, as Cone argues. Or else it might be found in the countermemories of Townes’ womanist dancing mind, which imagines the fullness of divine life enfleshed in Black women’s experiences. So begins a theological critique of Black reason.


Annotated Bibliography

Achille Mbembe’s work is as enthralling as it is at times mystifying. His corpus, which spans nearly four decades, demonstrates a penchant for Africana decolonial studies, Francophone critical theory, postcolonial studies, postmodernist critique, political philosophy, critical race and Blackness studies, and psychoanalysis. The following selections in English provide a good introduction to his thought.

  • On the Postcolony. Berkley: University of California Press, 2001. An English translation and expansion of De la postcolonie: essai l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporanie (2000), which serves as a postcolonial commentary on African politics and introduces a number of Mbembe’s common interlocutors in Africana studies and political theory.
  • Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. A translation of Critique de la Raison Négre. Paris: La Découverte, 2013. A thorough analysis of race discourse, particularly of Blackness, as it has developed historically. Mbembe is here in conversation with Foucault and Fanon.
  • Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. A translation of Politique de l’inimitié. Paris: La Découverte, 2016. An expansion of the Foucauldian notions of biopower and biopolitics on the concrete level of life and death. Mbembe is here conversant with Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, modified by interventions from Hegel and Bataille.

The late James H. Cone (d. 2018), the father of Black liberation theology, was a prolific author. His works demonstrated an ability to respond seriously and carefully to the challenges of his peers and those of the times. The following are indispensible works for understanding his thought.

  • Black Theology and Black Power. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1969. Recently released in its 50th Anniversary Edition, this originary work by Cone laid the foundation for his thought and for the project of Black theology. It argues powerfully for the correlation of God’s decisive act for the liberation of the poor and oppressed of the land to the (then) contemporary Black power movement.
  • A Black Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1970. Following close on the heels of his previous work, this book produces a systematic Black theology of liberation, treating classical themes, like the doctrine of God, anthropology, revelation, Incarnation, and eschatology, from the perspective of the Black experience in America.
  • The Spirituals and the Blues. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1972. In response to critique from his fellow theologians and Black religionists that he was too reliant on white theological epistemes, Cone wrote this work with an eye toward prioritizing the subordinated histories, cultures, experiences, traditions, and artforms of Black life in the United States.
  • The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2010. After years of wrestling with the shortcomings of the white Christianity, in this work Cone laments the failure of the theological imagination to relate the crucifixion of Jesus to the lynchings of over 5,000 Black men, women, and children in America’s history. In conversation with Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., and womanist theologians, Cone grapples with the meaning of the Cross in light of this obscured part of American history.

Emilie M. Townes, Dean and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt Divinity School, is a peerless womanist theologian and ethicist. Her works focus on the intersectionality of Black womanhood with class and sexuality and engage the complications of Black life in the face of healthcare, economic, ecclesial, and social disparities. The following is a good sampling of her work.

  • In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995. In this text, Townes engages the African roots that inform Black women’s spirituality as it developed and grew alongside other African American religious communities in the social context of the United States. Her analysis of Black women’s religious lives as a social witness includes analyses of gender and sexuality, colorism, and racialized violence.
  • Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care. Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1998. Focusing on the particular health issues that face Black Americans from a womanist perspective, Townes argues in this work for a carefully crafted ethic of care with an emphasis on healing and wholeness for the greater community in the Church and in the world.
  • Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. In this work, Townes engages theorists like Foucault, Gramsci, Hardt and Negri, and Pierre Nora to theorize the fantastic hegemonic imagination and its part in the mnemonic distortion and historical oppression of Black women’s identities and lives. In response, Townes cultivates countermemories in the womanist dancing mind that seek to restore wholeness in solidarity with the Black community.

Survivance

Native survivance, in [Gerald] Vizenor’s parlance, is a combination of the words “survival” and “resistance,” and it “creates a sense of presence.” According to him, “The suffix -ance designates a condition, a nature, or a quality that is more than a mere description of survival.”

Relationality

Where relationality is most productive in critical projects is where it transcends its projects of critique and explores the possibilities—ethical, political, and theological—of its account of subjectivity and community.

Martyrdom

Facing the violence of contemporary terror, many intellectuals have spoken in our present times about a return of political theology and religion in its violent forms. Attention to the concept of martyrdom has reappeared due to an increasing interest in religious conflicts.

Autopoiesis

In autopoiesis, there is no separation between what we do and the particular way in which the world appears to us.

Sovereignty

Where state sovereignty as theology would have subjected groups accept their condition with its attending violence and suffering, the micro sovereignty I propose here – not merely as a futuristic idea, but more as a reflection on how subjected groups have dealt with subjection – invites us not to accept that violence and suffering, but to find creative ways out of it through the cracks of Empire.

Abolition

Abolition is a process of imagining alternatives to the settler colonial, carceral present; it requires modes of kinship and care to replace prisons and policing.

Gratuitous Violence

Signifying a critical homology between the fields of Black studies and political theology, gratuitous violence is an important keyword for interrogating how religio-political concepts can afford unique insights into issues of slavery, race, and the human which continue to inform our world today.  

Techno-Orientalism

Asian American literary criticism’s analysis of contemporary orientalisms centered around the figuration of Asian subjectivities reminds political theologians that unconscious (white) fear and fascination with the Orient still guides political and theoretical engagement with the Asian “other.”

Thing

Thing as concept can be helpful to elucidate the specific yet ambiguous interaction of the religious and the political. Using recent thingly theoretical work within these two spheres, with an emphasis on body and shape, I will suggest ways through which thing (and things and thingness) both clarifies and challenges that interaction.

Diaspora

Diaspora might be a problem for political progressives for the very reason that it is so alluring. Diaspora promises both freedom and connection: freedom from national borders or the essentialisms of race and language, connection between people who affirm shared memory and heritage.
But heritage is never really free.

Blackness

If there is one thing that can be said about blackness, it is this: blackness is unruly.

Black Reason

Black reason is propelled by a fantastic imaginary, a changeling animus that aggregates and transmogrifies the desires and fears of whiteness.

Racial Capitalism

The historical and theoretical relationships between race and capitalism are internally contested and in need of further exploration from theologians and scholars of religion.

Eugenics

Sometimes referred to as “population control,” other times “better breeding,” eugenics has been seen as a religious solution to social ills, and sometimes a new religion unto itself.

Humanism

Gilroy’s “planetary humanism” contributes to political theology by offering more than a critique: in his work, humanism is a starting point, a concept to guide multicultural political projects today.

Risk

Official responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have encouraged us to understand risk in individual terms. They’re wrong: risk is all about interdependence.

Food Sovereignty

Food sovereignty represents a refusal of a globally commodified food system in favor of systems and institutions that support self-sufficient communities.

Doxa

Doxa is a term used in sociology to contend with belief and orthodoxy without reducing either to behavior or cognition. It explores disposition and embodied belief—the gut sense of the world which is acquired through practice rather than discourse.

Settler Colonialism

I propose Decolonial Settler Theology as a contextual political theology that is uniquely the task of the settler, who must face their own complicity in narratives of ongoing colonization and aim at their undoing.

Police

In an era during which police institutions and ideology are so fundamental to our cultural common-sense, how can theologians and critical theorists challenge this form of power?

Taboo

This essay takes taboo as a critical term to trace the history of our modern present and as a conceptual companion with which to think through the complex entanglement of the ethical, the theological, and the political.

Affect

What is still nascent… is an explicit conversation between political theology and critical theories of affect, particularly in a way that might contribute to constructive projects. The sort of political theology that might emerge from such collaboration would consider how affective regimes intersect with theological constructions or religious performances.

Kinship

While kinship has traditionally held a vibrant conceptual life in anthropological inquiry, more recent studies on kinship as a form of spiritual relationality have opened up a new space of interdisciplinary exploration for political theology.

Command/Commandment

The modern state form itself is inextricable from the commandement, not just as an emblem for sovereignty in Schmitt’s sense, but also because the exemplary political form of modernity, the nation-state, has racist and exclusionary tendencies that can be understood as political-theological transfers of monotheistic principles.

Mourning

That structural violence is always also relational, proximate, and personal is, perhaps, one of the core insights that the concept of mourning brings to the fore for political theology.

Personhood

The conversation about nature’s personhood and rights is always political, often legal, and sometimes theological. Most importantly, it is a localized conversation about the boundaries of a given community – who is part of the community and who isn’t.

Sympathy

For political theology, we might find ourselves compelled by practices that seek to connect us with our ecologies, our communities, and our relations with ourselves – in ways that are more about humility and provisionality than finding cures or solutions.

Queer

Queer, I think, should remain different, differing, dissonant, and plural. It shouldn’t contract or calcify into anything singular or solid.

Care

If theorizations of care are to more directly address the current “crisis of care,” we need not only to prioritize the kinds of embodied, particularized care that care ethics has highlighted in the past, but to explore a wider range of caring relationships and their diverse structures.

Matter

A preliminary question for political theology is how to understand the meaning and significance of matter. The response to this question shapes how a political theology does or doesn’t engage political economy and theological tradition.

Money

The triangulation of money, sovereignty, and divinity is a good point of entry to study the mutual constitution of theological and political concepts and the questions about ultimate value and social form that they raise.

Refusal

Refusal is a strong current resisting the structure of settler colonialism. It crashes, churns, and erodes the death-dealing dams of settler knowing. Its path turns away from the settler’s gaze.

Seva

Seva lends itself to easy appropriation across political and religious contexts, while also furnishing mutually intelligible tropes of service, welfare, and social betterment.

Abstraction

Political theology intimately understands that given reality teems with forms of life that remain opaque to us.

Flesh

Spillers, Cheng, and Halberstam provide us with tools to approach the histories of violence, economics, relationships, desires, and contestation that infuse our experiences with flesh in its multiplicity. Flesh is never neutral.

Indigeneity

It is not always possible (or advisable) to separate the “political” from the “religious” or “cultural” in Indigenous contexts. Indeed, all of these are concepts developed by outsiders to describe Indigenous life. Instead, Indigeneity invites scholars of political theology and related fields to consider the relationships between these threads of cultural life.

Animal

As we watch the illusion that was Man fall apart, we also see these more-than-human worlds that Man called “animal” disrupting and revealing the cracks and fractures in his own divine intentions.

Temporality I: History

William Apess, like Walter Benjamin a century later, sought to shift the paradigms of society with history and theology as orienting poles for colonial critique. Anticipating Benjamin, Apess looked to those who had been wrecked by the advance of colonialism as the grounding site for historical and political theological inquiry.

Temporality II: Futurity

Both Benjamin and Apess discern that historical narratives are imbricated with notions of futurity, that is, which bodies and polities are allowed to inhabit and thrive within the temporality in which the “not yet” and the “always already” co-constitute each other.

Natality

In this short essay, written from my perspective as a Jewish feminist, I draw together a plurality of engagements with natality to engender new conversations in political theology.

Critical Race Theory

CRT is a framework or an approach to understanding the way racism is foundational to systems of judicial, political, social, cultural, religious, and theological power.

Demonology

[S]ituating demonology more fully in its religious and theological contexts furnishes resources that not only nuance understandings of movements for whom demonization is central, but also recontextualize discussions of core political theological concepts, including sovereignty, power, economy, subjectivity, and freedom.

Vulnerability

From Myanmar to Mariupol, from the streets of Memphis to the waves and winds of the Mediterranean Sea: resistance to violence takes many forms. So does political protest against precarity. At which point does the unavoidable vulnerability of the living condition come to expression as political agency? Can such precarious politics constitute or configure an alternative community?

Hunger Strike

“Instead of neatly separating the forms of resistance to biosovereignty into life-affirming struggles and necroresistance and mapping them (and life and death) onto the reform/revolt dichotomy, I suggest that we conceive life and death as relational rather than oppositional categories. For every differentiation and intensification of death creates new possibilities of life; and every differentiation and intensification of life entails experiences of “death” that cannot be reduced to the power of one’s death.”

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