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

Description

In this study, Victor Anderson traces instances of “ontological blackness” in African American theological, religious and cultural thought, arguing that African American critical thought has been trapped in a racial rhetoric that it did not create and which cannot serve it well. Drawing together 18th- and 19th-century accomodationism and its assimilationist heirs with the movements of Black Power and Afrocentrism, Anderson shows that all exhibit a similar structure of racial identity. He suggests that it is time to move beyond the confines of “the cult of black heroic genius” to what Bell Hooks has termed “postmodern blackness”: a racial discourse that leaves room to negotiate African American identities along lines of class, gender, sexuality, and age as well as race. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction One: The Religious Functions of Cultural Criticism Explicating Cultural Criticism Religious Aspects of Cultural Criticism Religious Criticism in a Racialized Culture Two: Categorical Racism and Racial Apologe Aesthetics and White Racial Ideology Racial Apologetics Beyond Categorical Racism and Racial Apologetics Three: Ontological Blackness in Theol The Black Theology Project The Challenge of Womanist Theology Four: Explicating and Displacing Ontological Blackness: The Heroic and Grotesque in African American Cultural and Religious Criticism Explicating the Heroic and Grotesque Genius New Literary Critiques of African American Expressive Culture The Grotesquery of African American Public Life Epilogue Further Reading Works Cited Index