Ontological Blackness Research Articles

Karl Barth and James Cone on Atonement: Ambiguity in Ontology and the Implications for Ethics

ABSTRACT This paper interrogates critical divergence in interpreting the cross and atonement between James Cone and Karl Barth – and their related ethics. Cone rejects atonement theories and embraces the cross as an interpretative symbol that speaks to the suffering of Black Americans. In contrast, Barth resists interpreting the cross as a symbol and refuses to interpret the cross separately from the atonement. These divergences lead to different conceptions of sin, salvation, and ethical response. Despite their dissimilarities, I argue that Cone and Barth demonstrate a surprisingly similar kind of ambiguity when it comes to ontology and ethics: Cone blurs ontological Blackness and symbolic Blackness while Barth emphasizes divine ontology in a manner that makes it difficult to address of the material, post-colonial world. I conclude, by demonstrating how these ambiguities in both thinkers create challenges to the concrete addressing of ethical concerns, such as reparations in today’s world.

Foreword: The Religious Situation of Black Studies Then and Now

ABSTRACT Published in 1995, Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness (Continuum Press) provocatively challenged the racial apologetics of Black scholars in Black Studies, whose arguments, he argued, are predicated on an “ontological Blackness” that perpetuates the very essentialist discourse that they rejected. Anderson’s work continues to trouble the waters of philosophical, political, and religious thought on race, culture, and identity. This essay introduces the special issue of Black Theology: An International Journal in honour of the near-thirtieth anniversary of Beyond Ontological Blackness.

A Black Feminist Study of Religion: Inheriting Victor Anderson’s Black Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT In this article, I outline what Kristie Dotson refers to as an “inheritance map” for the epistemological insights and critical moves in Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995). I establish that Beyond Ontological Blackness represents what Stuart Hall calls a significant break – “where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes” 1 1 Hall, “Cultural Studies." – and thusly, a new direction in the study of black 2 2 In my current writing projects (post 2019) I use Black (rather than black) and white for political reasons. Full stop. I deploy a “b” when engaging oppression, however. Still, making distinctions in this essay between what should have a “B” (for example, Black women, church, students, presence, subject, religion, experience, etc.) and what should have a “b” (for example, antiblack, ontological blackness, symbolic blackness, black heroic cultural genius, black crisis, etc.) proved extremely difficult. Most challenging was turning my powerful “B” into a “b” throughout for clarity and consistency. religion and theology 3 3 This is not slippage. I distinguish between black theology and the study of black religion at length in Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). : black religion and culture studies. The latter of which makes room for a black feminist study of religion.

Afterword: Beyond Opportunistic Blackness: Reclaiming Victor Anderson’s Religious Criticism Against the Spiritual Evacuation of Blackness

ABSTRACT After nearly thirty years, Beyond Ontological Blackness can and should be used to think about contemporary challenges and avoidable futures in which (racial) representations could further ensnare us due to its inherent entanglement with racial capitalism. In this afterword, I argue that Victor Anderson offers an ethics of representation/blackness through the figure of the religious critic. It reclaims Anderson’s religious critic and shows how such a critic models better forms of social criticism that can be both descriptive and constructive, enlightening and emancipatory, and iconoclastic and utopian, without sacrificing either identity or difference, the individual or the group to oppressive values, norms and structures.

Grey or Nothing: Blackness and the Perils of Ontology Without Ethics

ABSTRACT This article examines the enduring relevance of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in Religious and Cultural Criticism. Anderson rightly senses a close connection between the practice of African American cultural criticism and the ethical sensitivity required to do it well. He also recognizes the historical limits of ontological inquiry. I argue that these metaphilosophical assumptions afford more generative encounters with Black political and cultural life, especially its discursive ambiguities and practical incongruities. By engaging the writings of two contemporary critics, Tamura Lomax and Calvin Warren, I show the benefits of thinking alongside Anderson’s important text and the dangers of not doing so. Scholars of religion, African American studies, and cultural studies ignore Anderson’s work and the discourses it enjoins at their own peril.

Aside from Ontology, Toward Blackness

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness anticipates some of the key debates and concerns within contemporary black studies. Anderson’s groundbreaking text exposes tendencies within African American cultural thought to essentialise blackness, to ascribe totalising qualities to black life and limit possibilities for fulfilment and transcendence. He responds to these often-unexamined commitments to ontological blackness by turning to a postmodern conception of difference and plurality. I show how Anderson’s concerns resonate with authors like Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler, and Michelle Wright, thinkers who re-imagine blackness in a manner that circumvents pure beginnings (Chandler and Moten) and accounts of black experience that unduly prioritise slavery and the middle passage (Wright). My basic claim is that black studies and related fields should continue thinking about blackness, non-being, and differentiation, enduring problems that Anderson’s work provides a guide to confront.

Response: Remaining Committed to Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT Framed in the mode of an interview, this essay responds to questions surrounding the publication of Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995) in light of contemporary moves in Black studies, including Black religion and culture studies. The contemporary relevancy of the form of religious and cultural criticism presented in the book is the topic of the dialogue among contributors. My postmodern iconoclastic critique of Black essentialism—cultural, racial, or heroic—in favor of a grotesque aesthetic, which accents the comedic interplay of unresolved ambiguity and a Nietzschean robust pessimism filled with laughter, is rearticulated in light of the 21st century challenges and provocations of the religious situation discussed by the guest co-editors and contributors. Readers will discover a generous generational dialogue that models a commendable Black scholarly aesthetic.

BOB’s Blues: A Reflection on the Legacy of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness

ABSTRACT This essay celebrates Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (BOB) by considering how it reads blackness as an open possibility for human flourishing. Through critical engagement with Anderson’s notion of the “grotesquery of blackness,” it reads blues as a site for considering the implications of Anderson’s contention that black theology must move beyond essentialist constructions of blackness. The reflection also highlights how Anderson’s work anticipates contemporary critiques of modernity within decolonial studies, especially in the work of Sylvia Wynter. Finally, this essay uses the insights of BOB to assess the grotesque genius of the blues by offering a brief analysis of blues singer Muddy Waters’s performance of “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Review: The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought, by Roger A. Sneed

Review: <i>The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought</i>, by Roger A. Sneed

Black Hollyhock: Postmodernity in the Text of Black Theology

ABSTRACTAfter surveying Black theological treatments of postmodernity. This paper offers a reading of certain Derridean texts in a way that might be conducive to addressing the problem of racial aporetic logic in Black theology. Contextualized by this survey, my reading of Derrida will be governed by concerns pertinent to Black theology; mainly the concerns for the liberation of Black people. I do not want to offer Derrida as a corrective to Black theology. In this vein, the paper will conclude with a (re)turn to a Black theologian at home with postmodernism: Victor Anderson. Anderson's critique of ontological Blackness offers a postmodern Black theology that is both aligned with Derrida's philosophic concerns and enriches Derrida’s project insofar as it specifies racially Derrida's critique of aporia.

Between Activism, Religiosity, and the Public Sphere: the Intellectual Insurgency of bell hooks

In the collaborative project Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) with Cornel West, when interviewing West, bell hooks traces “the roots of (her) own critical consciousness” to her early experiences in the Black church and with religion in general, to the extent that her role as an intellectual is predicated on “spiritual practice.” It is through this practice that hooks perceives her role as an intellectual as one that “links religiosity to solidarity with the poor,” in a measured effort that avoids what she refers to as “the commodification of religion.” To be sure, this form of commodification limits what an intellectual can and should do, when she views that role within the intersectionality of meaningful activism, critical religiosity, and the engaging of the public sphere. For hooks, an intellectual must be deeply invested in “the kind of compassion, love, and openness” necessary for inclusiveness in the face of increasingly exclusive practices of the Black community, ultimately employed in how larger society devalues and degrades Black women and Black womanhood. Because of this, hooks ascribes to an insurgent intellectualism that, while recognizing her own situatedness between activism, religiosity, and the public sphere, is contingent on a kind of process thought: her intellectual insurgency is always “becoming” and contains a phenomenological intendedness with moving beyond her ontological blackness and epistemological womanhood towards a metaphysical intellectualism and a deontology fundamentally inherent in it. She presents a Black feminist/Womanist thinking into an insurgent Heideggerian-like question of the meaning of being, as both a Black woman and a Black intellectual. To do this, her insurgency in the role of the public intellectualism is grounded on both Frederick Douglass’ notion of “a heavy and cruel hand” (1853) and James Baldwin’s belief that being relatively conscious means “to be in rage almost all the time” (1969).

‘Black is my Home Country’: Re-Membering Race on Gospel Grounds

This essay presents partial findings from a study of historically black collegiate gospel choirs (HBCGCs) at predominantly white universities in northeastern United States. HBCGCs utilize the worship practices of the Black Church as resources for cultivating black communal racial identity in the context of racial difference. I theorize that HBCGCs practice a ‘narrative discipline’ that grounds their communal life together in corporate engagement with the faith stories that inspire their music. I interpret this practice in light of Walter Fluker’s proposal for reforming black ecclesiology. Fluker advances the reclamation of black identity as an existential ‘home,’ which avoids both the essentializing postures of ontological blackness and the equally dangerous narrative of post-racialism through the practice of ‘re-membering’ stories of black experience. I argue that the creative practice of narrative discipline by HBCGCs provides practical shape to Fluker’s ecclesiological hope.

Multiculturalism as Second Reconstruction: The Continuing Quest for Fraternal Membership in North American Liberal Democracies

Abstract:Even though, historically, the black population of Canada has been small, blackness has always been at the forefront of the Canadian imagination of who belongs. First, there was the ideal that Canada was to be a white man’s country, but that shattered in the wake of two major hemispheric developments. The first was the Haitian Revolution and the second was the American Civil War. To this day, the latter continues to cast a shadow over Canada’s ethno-racial relations and provincial affairs. I argue that official multiculturalism in Canada is neo-mythic blackness—the pragmatic realization that blacks and blackness are intrinsic to the Canadian imagination. I argue official multiculturalism results from a second “reconstruction” in North America, this time with Canada setting, as its ideal, the attainment of “a just society” marked by multicultural citizenship. Genuine multiculturalism as an ideal is the attempt by societies to incorporate ethnic and racial difference in a climate of freedom where no group is racialized as dominant and no group is positioned as inferior. Canadian multiculturalism is ethical and ontological blackness.

Victor Anderson's Beyond Ontological Blackness and James Cone's Black Theology: A Discussion

Thirty-seven years have passed since the publication of James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power in 1969, but it wasn't until 1998 that Cone received one of his strongest challenges from a fellow African American religious thinker: Victor Anderson and his book Beyond Ontological Blackness. This essay explores the contours of both Cone's theology and Anderson's critique and, in its latter half, discusses different strategies a Cone proponent might employ to respond to Anderson. The author argues that the best rejoinder to Anderson would be to develop a strategic, eschatological essentialist notion of blackness, drawing on the "parabolic" notion of blackness Cone advanced in his earlier works, rather than one fueled by a "hermeneutics of return."

Black Theatre's Closet Drama

Where do the early blackface plays collected in W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow belong in the genealogy of black performance?10 Nowhere, Shauneille Perry suggests.11 Contrasting blackface minstrelsy with black radicalism, Perry notes reprovingly, "Had there been a multitude of Nat Turners, Harriet Tubmans, Toussaint L'Ouvertures and Mary Princes in 19th-century America, there would have been no Jim Crow, then or now." Perry invokes these heroic names as talismans against Lhamon's restoration of Jim Crow as an icon of a circum-Atlantic, multiracial lumpenproletariat (literally, a proletariat in rags). In early Jim Crow he finds a performance effigy more subversive of white supremacy than abolitionism. Perry dismisses this argument along with the plays Lhamon has republished. Calling them "distorted remnants from a painful past," they do not represent identification across the color line for Perry, but rather a "soul-destroying force." In place of such grotesqueries, Perry substitutes prime symbols of what Victor Anderson calls "ontological blackness." Ontological blackness, Anderson writes, emphasizes "the heroic capacities of African Americans" and depicts black people "as surviving under unprecedented struggle by the development of a revolutionary consciousness that is itself representational of authentic black consciousness." But Anderson traces this racial ontology to the "Western aesthetic category of genius" and goes so far as to assert that "ontological blackness signifies the blackness that whiteness created." The rhetorical strategy Perry employs to reject the theft of black culture, Anderson might counter, is itself a "mirror" of Euro-American categories.12 This does not in itself invalidate Perry's reaction, but it does demonstrate the degree to which all attempts to specify pure origins inevitably reveal hybrid affiliations. The inverse relationship Perry posits between racial equality and blackface performance is a longstanding hypothesis in black letters. We hear an echo of it in an 1862 [End Page 590] article, "Jim Crow Exhibitions and Negro Extravaganzas," published in the black California newspaper, the Pacific Appeal. Terming minstrelsy "a moral ulcer" and calling for its "abolition," the Appeal made an early linkage between Jim Crow the performance and Jim Crow the segregation. "In the City of Boston," the Appeal wrote, "these Negro delineators cannot obtain permission of the city authorities to exhibit," while in San Francisco they are "of nightly occurrence." In Boston, "Colored and white children are educated at the public schools in common," while in San Francisco "Colored men are refused a seat in omnibuses." In places "where the rights of the Colored man are mostly respected," the Appeal concluded, "those burlesquing exhibitions are never tolerated," while in those "where their rights mostly are discarded, these exhibitions in ridicule are of common occurrence."13 With its twin emphasis on rights and respectability, the Appeal articulated the black uplift agenda, which values education, sobriety, and the upward mobility that lies at the heart of the myth of a classless democracy. Blackface performance yoked black people to the body and its disrespectable pursuits (dancing, sexuality, excretion). In its place, respectable black "performances"—attending school, riding in omnibuses, voting in elections—were propounded as the remedy for racial inequality. This eminently bourgeois agenda has much more in common with Perry's radical genealogy than is easily recognized. Both posit an inverse relationship between the spread of inauthentic "Negro delineators" and the flowering of authentic black culture. On this point, a generation of work on blackface minstrelsy, by scholars such as Eric Lott, Dale Cockrell, Annemarie Bean, and Lhamon himself, has been both revelatory and frustrating. This work—often loosely allied with the project of critical white studies—has not managed to unsettle a basic division of labor between the study of performance seen as "representational of authentic black consciousness" on the one hand and, on the other, of the "Negro delineators" whose persistent attraction to and co-optations of the styles and sounds of that authenticity have been prime movers in American culture. This division is replicated in the body scholastic, with black scholars working primarily on...

:Creative Conflict in African American Thought: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey

Since publication of The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (1978), Wilson Jeremiah Moses has defined the contours of black nationalism. In the last decade, however, a revisionist scholarship has begun to reshape the black nationalist landscape, questioning Moses's perspectives and no doubt provoking this response. In his new book, Moses addresses loopholes in his earlier studies. Focusing on five key black leaders—Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey—Moses offers a more balanced assessment of their contributions. In his view, admirers and detractors of these leaders have focused too narrowly on constructed images designed to advance ideologically skewed and misleading perceptions. Classical black nationalism combined cultural assimilation with political/geographical separation. Critically engaging this ambivalence, Moses portrays his subjects as nationalists whose ideas reflected those of mainstream society. These blacks embodied complex, multiple values and perspectives, reflecting the “essential paradox” of classical black nationalism. This is represented in Douglass's assimilationist integration of black militancy, his subscription to, and exploitation of, ontological blackness, his aversion to black pride/racial distinctiveness, and his inconsistent responses to black nationalist ideals. It can also be found in Crummell's blending of black nationalism, Victorian civilizationism, and anglophilism; in Washington's contradictory constructions of slavery and black religion, embodiment of liberal and conservative ideals, and his combination of materialism, idealism and economic determinism; in Du Bois's ambivalent response to black separatism, his elitism, and his distrust of democracy. These leaders were often in conflict with each other. Crummell shared Du Bois's political elitism and embraced an authoritarian view of government. Douglass, Crummell, and Du Bois all harbored condescending attitudes toward the black masses. Moses portrays Douglass as a representative black man who was often at odds with critical cultural and political demands of the black struggle.

Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African-American Religious and Cultural Criticism. Victor Anderson

<i>Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African-American Religious and Cultural Criticism</i>. Victor Anderson

Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism.

Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism.

Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism; By Victor Anderson New York, Continuum, 1995. 180 pp. $22.95

Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism; <i>By Victor Anderson</i> New York, Continuum, 1995. 180 pp. $22.95

Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-Modern Moment

When Robert Penn Warren wrote his highly ironic line Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical (321), he compressed into five deceptively economic feet nearly a half-millennium of hegemonic philosophy, both its rhetorical strategies and underlying presuppositions. Buzzard, carrier of the ostracizing power of discourse, the trope which declares the otherness of the (Nielsen 117), does not simply assert inferiority but reconstructs and reaffirms the mutually exclusive mythic realms white and black must inhabit in order to sustain five hundred years of radical inequity. As ametaphysical, (or, better yet, blackness) must exist beyond the aesthetic, beyond the redemptive possibilities central to the humanistic tradition of arts and letters. As fictive signifier of the nonwhite (Nielsen 10), blackness serves as a repository of reifying antitheses: anti-intellectual, illiterate, subhuman, and ahistorical. All in all, Warren constructs a blackness thoroughly banished to the margins of the human community, a blackness of radical absence proclaiming the final and ultimate abstraction of damning eternal sameness. Indeed Warren (and by extension what I will call hegemonic or conventional modernism) achieves much of his coherence through the assertion of objectified blackness, through a tropic vocabulary of necessarily reductive poses impervious to change over time (see Nielsen, North). Yet it is precisely the cultural force of these poses and the pervasive nature of the objectifying language which would drive James Weldon Johnson, William Pickens, Carter G. Woodson, and even W. E. B. Du Bois (in Conservation of Races) to advance a countering but often equally reductive discourse. Johnson's ragtime piano players, for example, are guided by their natural musical instinct and their extraordinary sense of rhythm; thus Johnson effectively reinscribes essentializing tropes in an attempt to assert a negro exceptionalism worthy of notice and, ultimately, of citizenship (20). The profound condensation of Warren's single line was not lost on Sterling A. Brown, whose famous retort some years later undermined entirely the conception of ahistorical blackness. His reply in a 1974 interview with Steven Jones, Cracker, your breed ain't exegetical, appropriates Warren's five-foot economy in order to parody both the sound and sense of his poetry. Through such signifying Brown points to a crucial blindness which makes possible an assertion of ametaphysicality. Signaling much more than a lack of specific exposition, Brown alludes to a profound illiteracy, a lack of attention to a broad corpus of texts and cultural idioms which assert African American complexity and change. So, too, Brown remained skeptical of these countering tropes on the part of New Negroes, tropes which could not account for the burgeoning complexities he found in Southern life. Positioning himself outside (or perhaps beyond) the two competing discourses, Brown questions the fundamental assumption (or acceptance) of ontological blackness, and so begins to formulate an Afromodernism (both a poetic vocabulary and a theory of folk culture) capable of exploring a more dynamic range in African American being. In short, Brown embarks upon an artistic and aesthetic project which fundamentally reconceives modernity. Appropriating contemporary notions concerning subjectivity and process, and applying them to a range of idiomatic expressions and rituals, Brown reworks the language and tropes he inherited in order to explore the inventive ways in which African Americans articulate their modernity; that is, express a presence, a historicity, an ongoing engagement with the contemporary moment. A reading of Odyssey of Big Boy, both within and beyond Southern Road, helps to illustrate Brown's larger concerns. Brown introduces Southern Road with an allusion to travel and experience, to independence, self-discovery, and the romantic possibilities of immortality. …