Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought

6. On the Redemption of Bodies

| 123 6 On the Redemption of Bodies Chapter 5 highlighted the tension involved in the theological construction of the self in relationship to competing and overlapping forces of normalization. It pointed out the various possibilities of lived experience when penetrated and shaped by these forces. The process of engagement, or surrender, to these forces was outlined, but questions remain: What is the desired or projected outcome of this construction, this engagement? What is gained (or what is lost)? These questions frame the possibility of redemption , the topic for this chapter. Rather than discussing redemption within the context of traditional discourses of new meaning ripped from the limited in number but overdetermined slave narratives and other commonly tapped sources, I find intriguing the notions of religious experience and redemption referenced in certain modalities of rap music, but which are seldom allowed to influence and affect the theologian’s work. Hip-hop culture and rap music in particular emerged during a period of discursive shifts; it took shape within the tensions and fissures of sociopolitical relations.1 Black consciousness and black aesthetics waned as dominant ideological orientations. Disillusionment with the limited impact of the civil rights movement increased. The religio-cultural dominance of the black church was called into question as an organizing life framework. And hip-hop offered a new discursive and aesthetic arrangement as well as new ways for bodies to defy time and space (think, for example, in terms of break dancing).2 Rap music provided the language for these new possibilities. As a late twentieth-century development, rap is important because it helps to frame some of the more pressing challenges confronting theological thinking. However, I am not concerned here with a general assessment of hip-hop culture or even rap music in particular.3 Nor am I providing an analysis of rap music and religiosity in a general way. The purpose of this chapter is more focused. By examining the religious rhetoric and practices of rapper Tupac Shakur (see 2Pac, chap. 5), I expose the troubled relationship between religious language and perceived religiously motivated activity. The 124 | On the Redemption of Bodies tensions and fissures present in the intersections of discourse and practice are brought to light, and in the process, this chapter offers an alternate means by which to access the framework of religious experience and redemption. Drawing on Foucault, by redemption I mean outcomes of self-care that involve comfortable modalities of identity either consistent with or in opposition to the strategies of normalization. Connected to this is the notion of conversion as the process of realization—the process by which one is confronted with oneself (the limits, shortcomings, and possibilities of oneself) within a context of asserted norms. Rap music is used here as a problematic by which to encourage attention to prevailing theories of black religious experience, particularly as related to notions of redemption marked as normative within black theological discourse. In this way, theoretical and methodological challenges are posed to the manner in which the authenticity of African American religious commitment and experience are gauged and verified often in opposition to the (stigmatized) material body. Rap music, in this instance, pushes for a different read, one in which the “salvific” is determined through the structuring, practices, and uses of the lived body. One might think of black religion as the quest for complex subjectivity, the urge toward a fuller sense of one’s meaning and importance within the context of community. In this regard it should have something to do with how bodies are constructed, and how they occupy time and space vis-à-vis strategies of domination.4 Thinking about religion and religious experience in this way allows for a tension between the two modes of the body—discursive and material—undergirding this book. Religion and religious experience so conceived involve response to dehumanizing forces (e.g., race-based discrimination , gender-based discrimination, and heterosexism) faced by African Americans across centuries of life in the Unites States. Over against what I suggest as intersections between the discursive and the material bodies in unstable ways, most theologically informed theories of conversion and black religious experience tend to highlight and privilege experience as explicitly marking a more stable (teleological) transformation that promotes new and firm postures toward the world. Black Christianity and the Saved Life Liberation approaches, which privilege the “stable,” also tend to see life postures as contributing to a refined sense of one’s ontological connections and resulting obligations. This is the...