Description:

Property’s Fugitive Symptom (On Blackness and the Sacred)
J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and English
Duke University

This talk considers property not only as a settler colonial and antiblack formation; it analyzes it as a theological formation of “phallic sovereignty.” So understood, property proves to be a religio-secular practice of ecological-as-colonial-racial devastation, a practice of fencing-in the earth, a practice of the would-be enclosure of human and nonhuman life through calculations of value. Referencing Michael Brown’s body baking for over three hours in the middle of a Ferguson street, musician D’Angelo has called this “outlining in chalk,” while poet Ed Roberson has likened it to a violent world-making: the ge(n)ocidal imposition of a world on top of the earth. Such worlding is propertizing, that phallicizing production of form, representation, and figure.

I argue against property but do so by way of an account of property’s theologics, its functioning to ground an ongoing plantation-as-salvation complex. I show property’s origins in and as a colonial and racializing ordo salutis or “order of salvation.” But even more, I’m interested in what exceeds and disorders property's theologics. Blackness is property’s, which is to say theology’s, black maternal or “fugitive symptom.” Nullifying a world structured through relations of property and its ontotheological supports, blackness references an ecology of the opaque, a sociality of heretically fallen life, a life of black fallenness, that peculiar congregationality of black togetherness (etymologically, ”symptom” literally means “falling together”), that quantum communion of and in the hold, of the underlife. Blackness as out(doors) from or at the limit of the world, at the limit of property and propriety, is what I’m interested in in this talk, what I also think about as an alternative practice of the sacred, the sacred otherwise.

I make special reference to the following thinkers most centrally to aid me in making this argument: Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva and the 11th century, medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury.

J. Kameron Carter works in black studies (African American and African Diaspora studies), using theological and religious studies concepts, critical theory, and increasingly poetry in doing so. Driving his work are questions pertaining to the theory and practice of blackness, indeed, of blackness as an alternate "pedagogy of the sacred" that the black church (at its best) expresses.

In pursuing this research, Professor Carter on the one hand examines how Christian theological ideas, especially christological ideas (claims about the person and work of Jesus Christ) and notions of theological anthropology (the Christian construction of the human), have funded racial, gendered, sexual, colonial, and settler imaginaries, and how the secular only amplifies (not overcomes) modernity’s theological protocols. On the other hand, he studies those aesthetic, literary, and philosophical expressions that reveal blackness as nonexclusionary Otherwise Life -- Life that unsettles modernity’s theological constitution, Life that moves "paratheologically" both within modernity's theo-political constraints and yet wanders out from and fugitively to the side of those constraints, Life in its breaks, Life that is the outside within, the open. Churchical, ecumenical blackness is his object of study.

Professor Carter's book Race: A Theological Account appeared in 2008 (New York: Oxford UP). He is the editor of Religion and the Future of Blackness (a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013). He has two books near completion: God’s Property: Blackness and the Problem of Sovereignty and Postracial Blues: Religion and the Twenty-First Century Color Line.

Sylvester Johnson is currently writing a history of colonialism and African American religions. This book project examines the complicated relationship between black religions and colonialism as a historic and on-going American phenomenon both within and beyond US borders. Johnson's research for this book draws on archival and theoretical sources about black religions within the context of repressive American governmentality from the surveillance and suppression of African religions under white settler colonialism to the explicitly murderous Counter-Intelligence Program of the Department of Justice in the twentieth century, which targeted African American religions that opposed white racist rule. Johnson draws on the data about African American religions to inform an elaborate argument about the nature of freedom and democracy in their historical manifestation as pillars of an American empire. Because these religions emerged under the sign of freedom, they offer especially valuable insight into the linkages between brutality and the democratic freedom so integral to the modern American nation-state.

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This year the Colloquium on Ethnicity and Diaspora (CED) will focus on the theme of “States of Emergency: Temporality and Duration” to examine nation-state sovereignty in relationship to state power and the criminalization of racialized, gendered, queer, and classed bodies in extra-juridical spaces within and outside of the United States. The concepts of temporality and duration brings into question the material conditions of which bodies these “states of emergency” exists as a constant state or momentary crisis. This year’s theme attends to the complicated questions regarding archives of violence, the ways in which these violences are documented, the role of memory, and how those who are most vulnerable are responding to these violent conditions in our contemporary conjuncture. Ultimately, the CED seeks to place renewed analytic pressure on the concept of “freedom,” one that is informed by material conditions of state violence, to reveal its limitations and to think imaginatively about an alternative. The 2016-2017 CED will feature a series of events including lectures, roundtables, and panels to engage these issues through an interdisciplinary approach, bringing in scholars from the fields of African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latinx Studies, Performance Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Religious Studies, and American Studies.

The CED is co-coordinated by Patricia Nguyen (Performance Studies) and LaCharles Ward (Rhetoric and Public Culture).