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In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion. Drawing on the black radical tradition and black feminism, Carter explores the modern invention of religion as central to settler colonial racial technologies wherein antiblackness is a founding and guiding religious principle of the modern world. He therefore sets black religion apart from modern religion, even as it tries to include and enclose it. Carter calls this approach the black study of religion. Black religion emerges not as doctrinal, confessional, or denominational but as a set of poetic and artistic strategies for improvisatory living and gathering. Potentiating non-exclusionary belonging, black religion is anarchic, mystical, and experimental: it reveals alternative relationalities and visions of matter that can counter capitalism’s extractive, individualistic, and imperialist ideology. By enacting a black study of religion, Carter elucidates the violence of religion as the violence of modern life while also opening an alternate praxis of the sacred.
Price: $25.95
Pages: 216
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Series: Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study
Publication Date:
08 August 2023
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781478025030
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
“J. Kameron Carter’s claim that the modern western formulations of racial capitalism and religion go hand in hand renders it impossible to think the one without the other. His interventions in this ambitious, rich, and imaginative book have the power to change the study of religion as a whole and in tremendously salutary, necessary ways.”—Amy Hollywood, author of, Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion
"In our racially segregated world, this diffunity is crucial to explore, especially as a Christian. As Carter describes it, Christianity helped create a religiopolitical regime of antiblack exclusion and racial capitalist extraction. But with Carter, I too am dreaming of an alternative social order—one that is not predicated on exclusion and instead chooses to embrace difference and learn from Indigenous ways of living in harmony with all creatures."—Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo, Sojourners
"The Anarchy of Black Religion is a provocative and thought-provoking text building upon the convergence of many discourses of blackness, and it is a necessary read for those whose interests lie at the intersection of black study, black religion, and theology and other texts which in some way take on the task of describing blackness in modernity and its relation to commodification, gender, sexuality, and religion/theology."
—Antavius Franklin, Reading Religion
"Carter ... doesn’t merely describe the kind of improvisation for which he argues in this book. He performs it. His creative word-play keeps the reader engaged as he poetically winds his work around themes of ancient European alchemy, mid-20th century gynecological practices, and even Euclidian geometry, weaving together an account of black religion that is at times inspiring, often personally challenging, and overall, totally mystifying."—Derek Ryan Kubilus, Doxology
"In our racially segregated world, this diffunity is crucial to explore, especially as a Christian. As Carter describes it, Christianity helped create a religiopolitical regime of antiblack exclusion and racial capitalist extraction. But with Carter, I too am dreaming of an alternative social order—one that is not predicated on exclusion and instead chooses to embrace difference and learn from Indigenous ways of living in harmony with all creatures."—Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo, Sojourners
"In many ways, [J. Kameron Carter's] book is a prayer that brings about a childlike sense of imagination. It becomes more than an intellectual work and something I view as deeply pastoral."
—Jordan Burton, Presbyterian Outlook"The Anarchy of Black Religion is a provocative and thought-provoking text building upon the convergence of many discourses of blackness, and it is a necessary read for those whose interests lie at the intersection of black study, black religion, and theology and other texts which in some way take on the task of describing blackness in modernity and its relation to commodification, gender, sexuality, and religion/theology."
—Antavius Franklin, Reading Religion
"Carter ... doesn’t merely describe the kind of improvisation for which he argues in this book. He performs it. His creative word-play keeps the reader engaged as he poetically winds his work around themes of ancient European alchemy, mid-20th century gynecological practices, and even Euclidian geometry, weaving together an account of black religion that is at times inspiring, often personally challenging, and overall, totally mystifying."—Derek Ryan Kubilus, Doxology
“The Anarchy of Black Religion is a timely and daring book that troubles the academic study of religion using an ‘an-archic’ study of blackness as religion. Both critical and visionary, Anarchy goes beyond lamentation of what Carter describes as the catastrophe of modernity and cuts a path through it.”
—Tim Rainey, Theology Today
J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and is codirector of IU’s Center for Religion and the Human. He is the author of Race: A Theological Account.
Acknowledgments xi
An Anarchic Introduction (Antiblackness as Religion) 1
1. Black (Feminist) Anarchy 27
2. The Matter of Anarchy 47
3. Anarchy and the Fetish 63
4. The Anarchy of Black Religion 75
5. Anarchy Is a Poem, Is a Song . . . 106
An Anarchic Coda (A Mystic Song) 132
Notes 139
Bibliography 171
Index
An Anarchic Introduction (Antiblackness as Religion) 1
1. Black (Feminist) Anarchy 27
2. The Matter of Anarchy 47
3. Anarchy and the Fetish 63
4. The Anarchy of Black Religion 75
5. Anarchy Is a Poem, Is a Song . . . 106
An Anarchic Coda (A Mystic Song) 132
Notes 139
Bibliography 171
Index