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The Apocalyptic Theology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Culture at the End of the World
Abstract
This paper argues that W.E.B. Du Bois’ short stories are a rich source of apocalyptic theology. Reading them apocalyptically, I argue, illuminates how Du Bois employed Christian theological material in order to negate its White supremacist order. Reading Du Bois apocalyptically shows the significance of black cultural production in apocalyptic terms and illuminates the exilic character of black people in modern history, which has led to a unique imbrication of the theological and cultural in black writing. Through a close reading of 3 short stories by Du Bois, I show how his sense of apocalyptic draws the prophetic, messianic, and eschatological together in anticipation of a world ungoverned by White supremacy and free from anti-black violence. Finally, I argue that Du Bois sees the black apocalyptic event as both a failure and a glimpse of possibility in the fleeting moments of recognition and touch that occur in the stories.
I This chapter considers the history of Black liberation theology through the artistic and critical works of W. E. B. Du Bois and James Cone. Examining the "passion" stories of Du Bois in the 1920s and the academic studies of Cone in the 1970s, I explore how each turned to the figure of the Black Christ to reckon with anti-Black violence during the respective eras of lynching and mass incarceration. Both take part in a larger cultural lineage of African American religious thought and art, from the slave spirituals to Harlem Renaissance poetry (and beyond), in which Black intellectuals and artists have appropriated the Christian beliefs and practices of an oppressive society to reflect their own lived experiences and condemn the moral hypocrisy of American democracy. What makes Du Bois's and Cone's contributions to this cultural lineage distinctive are their appropriations of the biblical Christ for not only critiquing racial injustice but, more significantly , reimagining social justice beyond the racial binary of whiteness and Blackness itself. That is, the realm of the theological afforded Du Bois and Cone an avenue for both challenging the limits of and ultimately thinking beyond the realm of the political. Although scholars have often cast Du Bois as a progenitor of Black liberation theology for his various editorial and authorial representations of the biblical Christ as Black, their interpretations of Du Bois's Black Christ tend to delimit his theological expressions of social justice as just another form of political critique (whether secular or religious). Instead, I begin anachronistically with Cone's programmatic establishment of Black liberation theology in order to bring to sharp relief how both Du Bois and Cone articulate the problem of Black suffering and imagine the possibility of Black liberation as a central dialectic between political immanence and theological tran-scendence. Within the multifaceted dimensions of the Black Christ, this central dialectic manifests for Du Bois and Cone as one between Jewishness and Blackness, literal and symbolic Blackness, and history and eschatology. From the purview of these interrelated dialectics, Du Bois and Cone rethink the political ideal of social justice as being at once a theological ideal as well. Finally, this essay concludes by considering the legacy of Du Bois's and Cones's Black Christology amidst the racial reckoning of our contemporary moment. Interrogating recent critical debates over the political limits of Christian theology-indeed, of the "political" and "theological" altogether-for
This essay argues that critiques of redemption in contemporary black theory necessitate a rethinking of black theology in terms of loss so as to upend the political theological order of redemption and damnation that justifies antiblack governance of thought and existence. Through an immanent reading of political theology's appearance in ostensibly secular black feminist thought, the article shows how these wayward metabolizations of black theology's internal and external contradictions—specifically, those that illuminate a fundamental crisis of meaning at its heart—reveal black theology's abjection and alienation from its own stated desires for redemption. The article argues that this debasement of black theology opens onto its significance for black thought. As a form of black thought, black theology and its ongoing crisis of meaning crystallize the political theological crisis of illegitimacy and alienation generated by the failed announcement of redemption in racial slavery's wake. Through a reading of Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe's work, the article shows how a wayward form of black theology is immanent in the ostensibly secular work of these and other radical black theorists. Taking their critiques of the redemptive theology that undergirds antiblackness as instructive, the article argues that a wayward, rather than confessional, form of black theology is already operative in realms of black studies that might be called nontheological. Recasting black political and theological desire for the coherence of redemption as a failure, the article proposes a loss of salvation and heretical appropriation of Christian theological materials as a demand for black thought. By critically reoccupying the sense of damnation that marks blackness, radical black reproductions of theological knowledge can insist on a disinherited procedure of thought—a rebellious gnosis in blackness—that disfigures the romance of redemption.
In this essay, I briefly examine the prophetic rhetoric of W.E.B. Du Bois. By examining his editorials while editor of The Crisis and other writings, I argue that DuBois employed different types of prophetic discourse grounded primarily within the African American Prophetic Tradition (AAPT). For purposes of this essay, I specifically highlight Du Bois’ use of mission-oriented prophecy as a way to call African Americans to a divine mission of social uplift. In so doing, my aim is three-fold. First, I seek to build upon the fledgling rhetorical scholarship on Du Bois. Second, following Zuckerman and Blum, I seek to (re)introduce to readers and (re)claim Du Bois as a religious rhetor. Finally, I seek to add to the scholarship on prophetic rhetoric
Interest in political theology has surged in recent years, and this accessible volume provides a focused overview of the field. Many are asking serious questions about religious faith in secular societies, the origin and function of democratic polities, worldwide economic challenges, the shift of Christianity's center of gravity to the global south, and anxieties related to bold and even violent assertions of theologically determined political ideas. In fourteen original essays, authors examine Christian political theology in order to clarify the contemporary discourse and some of its most important themes and issues. These include up-to-date, critical engagements with historical figures like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant; discussions of how the Bible functions theopolitically; and introductions to key movements such as liberation theology, Catholic social teaching, and radical orthodoxy. An invaluable resource for students and scholars in theology, the Companion will also be beneficial to those in history, philosophy, and politics.
Against the normative view of W. E. B. Du Bois as hostile to and uninterested in religion, this book argues that religion furnishes Du Bois writings with their distinctive moral vocabulary. Du Bois's work is a rich world of sermonic essays, jeremiads, biblical rhetoric, and prayers all of which are devoted to the overarching goal of fighting for the spiritual, political, and social conditions of those who "live within the Veil." This book argues that Du Bois fashions his religious voice from two sources: African American religion and American pragmatism. Du Bois's religious voice draws on the natural piety of the slave spirituals, the protestations of the African American jeremiad, the language of sacrifice, and the preacher's facility with biblical rhetoric. From the American pragmatists, Du Bois finds a heterodox religious register that shuns metaphysical and supernatural realities for an earthly form of salvation rooted in human relations. By using pragmatist tools to embrace African American religious resources without their normative metaphysical commitments, Du Bois creates a new black faith: a radical version of pragmatic religious naturalism. This account of Du Bois's religious voice frees us from shoehorning Du Bois into ready-made Christian constructions; his religious heterodoxy runs too deep and throughout his life he chafed against the label, "Christian." It allows us to imagine Du Bois as practicing what might be understood as an original black American faith-one that pays homage to African American Christian pasts, but radically reconfigures them for a democratic and ecumenical future.
This article seeks to understand what Richard Iton means by “the Black fantastic.” It argues that the Black fantastic can be understood as a response to the problem of transmission in Black America: the problem of handing down wisdom from generation to generation. First, I explore Barack Obama's understanding of transmission and how it fuels his pragmatic politics. Then, I explore W. E. B. Du Bois's messianic response to the problem of transmission. Finally, I place Iton's Black fantastic in this context, suggesting it harnesses the radical energies of the messianic while remaining attentive to the hold the past has on us.
Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. x, 216. Index. Cloth, 16.00.) Even U. B. Phillips, who could be positively obtuse when it came to slave culture, understood the importance of the biblical saga of Exodus to the black community. But only Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a former student of Albeit Raboteau and Cornel West, has thought the subject worthy of an entire monograph. He was right; the result is an eloquent and thoughtful explication of the ways in which the ancient tale provided the African-- American community-South and North-with a metaphorical framework for understanding their enslavement and their flight into freedom. Black Americans recognized themselves in the Exodus story, and as they began to forge independent African congregations in the wake of the American Revolution, they situated their religious and political struggles within the sacred narrative, which gave their demands divine sanction. Some of what Glaude presents here will be familiar to readers of this journal, yet his insights into the topic are consistently fresh and original. He argues, as has John B. Boles, that black dreams of liberation were expressed as verbal reenactments of the Israelites' flight from Egypt. In the slave quarters, rhetorical comparisons to the legend of Moses kept hope alive that God would deliver his chosen people once again, especially if they behaved according to his will. "The Jews in Babylon were held against their will," Glaude quotes Daniel Coker as preaching to his Bethel Church congregation in Philadelphia. "So were our brethren" (29). Coker's somewhat confused metaphor (which in fact referred to the Book of Ezra) nonetheless helped former bondpeople in the Pennsylvania region to collapse the past into the present in a way that allowed them to imagine a brighter future. The God of the righteous promised African Americans freedom even in the land of the new pharaoh. Racist street action, such as New York City's "July Days" riots of 1834, provide a case in point for Glaude's analysis. As the promise of the revolutionary era collapsed into white mob activity directed against black churches and integrated patriotic celebrations, black ministers returned to the lessons of Exodus. Rhetorical reminders of God's covenant, the trials in Egypt, and the struggles in the wilderness as a prelude to the promised land became commonplace in northern oratory as the black community sought to make sense out of the habitual violence visited upon their homes, their businesses, and their bodies. The subsequent movement that Glaude dubs "Exodus politics" was "a form of common complaint against oppression," a faith in eventual deliverance, and the belief that democracy and justice in America ultimately "rested with the nation's darker sons and daughters" (111). …
What I learned about trying to reach an audience beyond the academy from the writing and reception of Lose Your Mother, my latest book.
A return to the idea of black culture must be considered today in a critical climate that is not hospitable to the topic, even though hospitality and accommodation have never been attributes of the context in which the idea was either engendered or understood. An aspect of the problematic for the investigator, then, is to get in sight a horizon of inquiry that will enable, if not necessarily vouch for, a project that is, by very definition, anachronistic from several points of view. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a powerful repertory of refusals that make the topic a virtual impossibility now blocks one's view: (1) the recession of the subject, historical and otherwise; (2) a dimensionless present, on an analogy with television; and so, (3) the impoverishment of history; (4) the decline of the concept and practices of the nation-state, except that current U.S. foreign policy, the dramatic rise of post-Soviet states, and China's sensational emergence on the contemporary world stage would all urge a serious rethinking of such claims; (5) the "exhaustion of difference"; (6) the new impulses of a globalization so complete, we are led to believe, that locality, or the "local" itself, apparently vanishes as a discrete moment of perception; and paradoxically, (7) an Afrocentric conceptual space that so collapses the distance between a putative African Diaspora and the cultures of the African Continent that little differentiation is interposed between them. Any coeval attempt, then, to revise the project of black culture as a conceptual object and as a practical devise toward the achievement of social transformation must confront these fully blown symptoms of impediment that appear to have surged up from the reactive forms of the post-1960s world.
One of the symptoms that I have identified here—"the exhaustion of difference"—along with the rest of the repertoire, might be taken as a feature of the critical framework that enables such a project as this one, at the same time that it significantly alters the topic away from the binaristic impulses that might have inspired the question in the first place. Published in 2001, Alberto Moreiras's The Exhaustion of Difference, the title that I have purloined here, inquires into the epistemic conditions that would make it possible to situate Latin-Americanist cultural studies (Moreiras 2001). We might linger here a moment because this text offers a brilliant synthesis of theoretical reflection on the new epistemes, among which I would locate the inquiry I am embarked on, and which runs parallel, as an instance of an emergent social formation in discourse, to the one that I have in my sights. Furthermore, it poses the kind of resistance that a project like "the idea of black culture" must answer. One of the crucial demonstrations that The Exhaustion of Difference carries out, in its exemplarity, is the dancing the value of dialectical engagement applied as a brake to closural motions along a trajectory of conceptual points: this interminable motion has its drawbacks, as well, not the least of which is its tedium, perhaps another rendering of "exhaustion," but the reward here is that the split between positions—that scissiparous effect that is false, in truth—is avoided as the case unfolds. The challenge, then, to mount the division and ride it, rather than repose in any particular nuance, can never be entirely won, but the effort is worth the expense and identifies precisely the kind of problematic that the new epistemes have wanted to tackle; the process of dialogic or dialectical movement between punctualities also suggests that analysis often proceeds from the position-taker driving her point against another that is, perhaps, only the reverse of her putative own, or its complement, or one peremptory side of a split that could possibly be sutured with an apparent other, if a dialogical rhythm or current could be created and sustained between the m. Dialogism in this instance might arrest the advance of the "straw man."
One of the other most persistent refusals of black cultural conceptualization is, ironically enough, Afrocentrism itself, which comes at the question from a very different angle than that of...
The cultural and political discourse on black pathology has been so pervasive that it could be said to constitute the background against which all representations of blacks, blackness, or (the color) black take place. Its manifestations have changed over the years, though it has always been poised between the realms of the pseudo-social scientific, the birth of new sciences, and the normative impulse that is at the heart of—but that strains against—the black radicalism that strains against it. From the origins of the critical philosophy in the assertion of its extra-rational foundations in teleological principle; to the advent and solidification of empiricist human biology that moves out of the convergence of phrenology, criminology, and eugenics; to the maturation of (American) sociology in the oscillation between good-and bad-faith attendance to "the negro problem"; to the analysis of and discourse on psychopathology and the deployment of these in both colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance; to the regulatory metaphysics that undergirds interlocking notions of sound and color in aesthetic theory: blackness has been associated with a certain sense of decay, even when that decay is invoked in the name of a certain (fetishization of) vitality.
Black radical discourse has often taken up, and held itself within, the stance of the pathologist. Going back to David Walker, at least, black radicalism is animated by the question, What's wrong with black folk? The extent to which radicalism (here understood as the performance of a general critique of the proper) is a fundamental and enduring force in the black public sphere—so much so that even black "conservatives" are always constrained to begin by defining themselves in relation to it—is all but self-evident. Less self-evident is the normative striving against the grain of the very radicalism from which the desire for norms is derived. Such striving is directed toward those lived experiences of blackness that are, on the one hand, aligned with what has been called radical and, on the other hand, aligned not so much with a kind of being-toward-death but with something that has been understood as a deathly or death-driven nonbeing. This strife between normativity and the deconstruction of norms is essential not only to contemporary black academic discourse but also to the discourses of the barbershop, the beauty shop, and the bookstore.
I'll begin with a thought that doesn't come from any of these zones, though it's felt in them, strangely, since it posits the being of, and being in, these zones as an ensemble of specific impossibilities:
As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of "being for others," of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough attention by those who have discussed the question. In the Weltanschauung of a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws [interdit] any ontological explanation. Someone may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely conceals a basic problem. Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.1
This passage, and the ontological (absence of) drama it represents, leads us to a set of fundamental questions. How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed, impossible things? And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing as lawless, and...
CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003) 257-337
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