Description
Book SynopsisIn
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, individualis
Trade Review“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 *
"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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
