James Baldwin’s Decolonial Love: Uncovering the Revelation of the Beat

Abstract

James Baldwin worked out what decolonial love might mean from the experience of living within the center of the modern world-system as a result of colonialism in the Atlantic world. Within an orientation of decolonial love, Baldwin connects the categories of salvation and revelation. The task of revealing the reality that exists underneath the way Western modernity configures reality is itself an actualization of salvation. While Baldwin doesn’t use terms such as revelation and salvation in ways that are tied to religious discourse in the sense of being controlled by doctrines, creedal statements, or dogmatic theology, they do have religious—and this chapter argues theological—significance. Connecting Baldwin’s terms to a theological perspective demonstrates a connection between decolonial love and theology, and opens up decolonial love as a theologically pedagogic site.