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Category: Body Politics

The representation of political subjectivity entails fundamental assumptions about who has capacity and standing to be an agent. Who counts as a political agent? What commonalities can be political mobilized? Under what significations can such identities become legible? Here we examine the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality and they are mobilized to political and theological ends.

Resources

Bibliography:

  1. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (2000)
  2. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008)
  3. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
  4. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom (2010)
  5. Linn Tonstad, Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (2018)
  6. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
  7. Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (2007)
  8. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2011)

Relevant Journal Articles:

  • Timothy McGee, “Against (White) Redemption: James Cone and the Christological Disruption of Racial Discourse and White Solidarity,” Political Theology 18, no. 7 (2017): 542-559
  • Brandy Daniels, “On Ambivalence and (Anti-)Normativity (or, Theology as a Way of Life?),” Political Theology 19, no.8 (2018): 689-697
  • Bruno M. Shah, “Enfleshing Aesthetics: Theological Anthropology in M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom and Mayra Rivera’s Poetics of the Flesh,” Political Theology 20, no. 1 (2019): 48-65
The Author’s Response, Part 2

Racialized white identity no doubt exerts enormous power, but that power and its meaning are hardly unchanging and self-interpreting. In our desire to disabuse whites of power we should weary of reifying white racial identity as something that determines history without answering to it.

The Author’s Response, Part 1

I interpret the questions put to my political economic approach like this: While Tran’s racial capitalist emphasis on structures and systems seems mostly correct, rightly deflating individualists/personalist (“identarian” as I say in the book) accounts of racism and accordingly moving the conversation forward, it misses something crucial.

The Durability of Whiteness

Tran gifts his reader with the invitation to think generatively rather than prefiguratively about social and economic relations, setting aside that which cannot be refashioned for just use.

Dangerous Memories, Costly Faith, and a Faithful Future

How I understand Tran’s story is that the script for Asian American Christian resistances to racial capitalism needs to be formed by the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ’s witness. Otherwise, Asian American theologies end up resisting identarian essentializations of Asian America that do not always speak to concrete challenges and dynamics that Asian Americans experience.

Beyond the Binary

The reality into which we are called to participate, to embody, and to invite others is profound in that it promises to create the very sociality for which we long. It promises to establish the Kingdom of God that is not yet our everyday reality and, at the same time, is present to us in certain spaces and in moments of profound connection.

Attuning the Church, Debating What Lies Beyond Racial Capitalism

The true gift Tran has given us is a theologically provocative understanding of the church as a certain kind of deep economy. I will be thinking with it and learning from it for a long time.

Defending Racial Particularity within Tran’s “Deep Economy” of Grace

Racial identity as a source of cultural, political, and personal pride predates the North Atlantic slave trade; therefore, racial identity must be part of the calculus when articulating a theological anthropology.

Author’s Response

“Still game” is not the discourse of “trauma” and PTSD so often ascribed to populations as a form of diagnostic colonization, pace Frantz Fanon in his tremendous work on medicalization in A Dying Colonialism.  “Still game” is yet another temporal form akin to the “perpetual.” In this sense, histories of targeted injuring—maiming—are both histories of violence waiting to be written and projections of future violence of our pandemic worlds.

Editorial Response: Further Complicating the Binary

If there is one common thread which cuts through the essays in this symposium, it is the powerful testimony of the important role that religion plays in shaping the socio-political viewpoints of many conservative religious minorities.

Beyond Ontologizing Asian America

Even though Asian America is irreducibly diverse, the vast majority of Asian American theological voices are East Asian theological voices, with voices and concerns from Southeast Asian, Filipinx, Pacific Islander, South Asian, and Middle Eastern Christians being barely heard or simply dismissed. This raises questions about how helpful “Asian American” is as an identitarian category.

Latino Pentecostal Democrat: Oxymoron  or Prophetic Voice?

But how could Trump seduce a great majority of the Jesus-believing, Bible-thumping, church-attending evangelical conservative community when his values are so contrary to those of Jesus, the Bible and what the church should stand for?

The Binary is Black But Breakable

Simply put, Black men are the most loyal group of male voters for the Democratic candidate for president. Their slightly lower numbers for Hillary Clinton in 2016 rebounded for Joe Biden in 2020. Their loyalty to Democrats in this regard is surpassed only by Black women.