Black Scholarly Aesthetics and the Religious Critic: Black Experience as Manifolds of Manifestations and Powers of Presentations

This working paper is about the politics of scholarship within black studies and black religion.¹ Much of the impetus for this paper is derived from my graduate seminars in “Black Religion and Culture Studies.” While teaching my seminars, I began to note that among students was a certain scholarly aesthetics, which was operating in their readings and questionings of texts. They were asking some very old questions, questions that I thought we, who have been dealing with deconstructing race and race theory in religion for some time, had put to rest. Their questions were not very different from those on black experience and culture that informed and circulated throughout my generation of black scholars in black studies and black religion. Our questions about blackness were derivative of three powerful movements in the 1960s and early 70s that certainly informed my understanding of black scholarship. They were the Black Power, the New Black Aesthetics, and the Black Studies movements.

I noticed the manner and urgency in which my students were struggling with old questions such as: What makes one black? Must black scholarship be political? Are black films, literature, and arts anything produced by a black person? To what extent may black scholars embrace multiculturalism as a mode of difference and remain distinctively black? Is not there something about being black that is shared with no other race? I heard them evoking W. E. B. DuBois’s double consciousness in new ways, within a new moment, as they both affirmed and condemned representations of blackness in music videos, gangsta rap, and hip hop in contemporary black popular culture.

The problem is this: after teaching race theory, black religion, and culture studies about twenty years, I kept asking myself: why do my students keep insisting on some articulation of black essentialism, when I keep telling them there is no such thing. I came to realize that their questions were not, to borrow from Peirce, just a matter of a cognitive itch or doubt, and despite the work that critical race theories, deconstruction, and so called postmodern deployments of language, signs, and discourse have done to dismantle the very idea that there is something there in race, they don’t buy it. Apparently, something more was going on than language switching and switching signs. In young minds were some very old questions, indeed, namely, the one and the many and the many and the one, or put in other terms, identity in difference or difference in identity. This led me to think about black experience as manifolds of manifestations and powers of presentations. This method of reading and thinking seemed to me to be missing in the scholarly aesthetics of my students. This paper is based on this experience.

First, I want to untangle what I mean by scholarly aesthetics, perhaps in a manner characteristic of Charles Sander Peirce’s theory of inquiry and signs, which takes seriously language not only in relation to signs but more importantly as acts, habits, and affective consequences. I next want to turn to the manner in which experience, which is so central in the naturalistic attitude of thinkers such as William James and John Dewey, is taken over and mimicked by culture; better put, the manner in which culture comes to stand in for experience in much of black studies. Finally, I want to disrupt this near equivocation between culture and experience by freeing experience up from strategic essentialism, canonized blackness, or an iconography of blackness. I do this by highlighting an iconoclastic aesthetics in religious criticism that grasps black experience within manifolds of manifestations and powers of presentations.²

I. The Pragmatics of the Scholarly Aesthetics

“The Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought, Inc., is a community of productive scholars with diverse theological and philosophical perspectives.”³ Reflecting on this description from the website and from what I know of the constituents of naturalists, neopragmatists, process, Peircians, Chicago School empiricists, and pragmatic naturalists, I understand myself to be a rather promiscuous pragmatist who takes in whatever philosophical and theological...