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13 Scholarly Aesthetics and the Religious Critic Black Experience as Manifolds of Manifestations and Powers of Presentations Victor Anderson This short essay is about the black cultural politics of scholarship within Black Studies and Black Religion. Much of the impetus for this essay is derived from my graduate seminars in “Black Religion and Culture Studies I and II” at Vanderbilt University. In 2008, I initiated a graduate program in Black Religion and Culture Studies. While teaching my seminars, I began to note that among students was a certain scholarly aesthetics operating in their readings and questioning of texts. They were asking some very old questions, which 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 black culture that informed and circulated throughout my generation of black scholars. Our questions about blackness were derivative of three powerful movements in the 1960s and early 70s: 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? Isn’t there something about being black that is shared with no other race? I heard them evoking W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness in new ways, within a new moment, as they both affirmed and condemned representations of blackness in music videos, gangsta 201 rap, and hip hop in contemporary black popular culture. They had old questions in young minds. This led me to think about black experience as manifolds of manifestations and powers of presentations, which seemed missing in the scholarly aesthetics of my students. This short essay is based on this experience. When I talk about a scholarly aesthetics, I have a number of things in mind. I regard reading to be an act of gathering. It is literally taking up into one’s head the working out of people’s ideas, their own thinking about something, and laying those ideas or thoughts out on paper or screen. In this regard, film and visual media are also reading material. As I think about it, the screen best captures the “feelings” involved in reading the thoughts of another. I get involved emotionally, albeit in a slight and faint manner. Still, I get involved in what I am reading. The words strike my attention. I get pulled into the words that make up sentences, and the sentences convey and complete thoughts. Together, the flow of sentences provides for me a paragraph that offers complex relations of ideas, support for conclusions, evidences for accepting a thought, qualifying thoughts with examples and instances, and enhancing ideas qualitatively with adjectives and adverbs. Other words intimate actions: a question (a question mark, ?), stop (as in a period, .), partial stop (a semicolon, ;) emphasis (an exclamation point, !), hold in question (indexical marks, “ ”), or hide (ellipses, . . .). What I read conveys pictures to be grasped as I consciously take up the ideas represented in reading. In reading, I don’t just passively receive word pictures. I consciously attend to the words, sentences, paragraphs, the ideas and thoughts, which strike me in “such and such” a way. I take interest in them. I find myself sometimes bored and sometimes not; sometimes the word order of sentences, their complexity and constructions, strike me as perplexing and sometimes not; sometimes I am slowed down in my reading by a word that I have not encountered and sometimes not; and sometimes the picture of what is written strikes me as alarming, daunting, tragic, ironic, tearful; and sometimes I find myself empowered, enabled, and edified by what I have read. Sometimes what I read stirs in me acts of questioning things and ideas that I once took for granted. So, I keep on reading with questioning intent, as if to settle a problem raised by my reading or to complicate even more associated ideas taken for granted. In such moments, I want to offer different ways of seeing the problem or complicate ideas taken for granted. In all such acts, I am operating with and performing what I call a “scholarly aesthetics.” Scholarship proceeds by way of imitation. Originality is fiction, although fiction is not to...

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