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101 = 7 The Race for Faith Justice, Mercy, and the Sign of the Cross in African American Literature Katherine Clay Bassard To be inside and outside a position at the same time—to occupy a territory while loitering skeptically on the boundary—is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from. It is a resourceful place to be, if not always a painless one.1 —Terry Eagleton Race, Faith, Theory My primary title, “the Race for Faith,” revisits and revises the title of black feminist literary critic Barbara Christian’s 1987 essay, “The Race for Theory.” In it, Christian gave voice to the misgivings of many scholars of color about the political ramifications of the escalation of theoretical discourses marshaled in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a proliferation, I might add, that forever divided generations of scholars into “before theory” and “after theory.” It is within this framework that she coins the term “the race for theory,” intended to signify both the prior acts of African American theorizing within dynamic forms of narrative and literary representation (“the race for theory”) and the tendency of certain critical enterprises to enact the very oppressions they purport to solve (“the race for theory”). In the first use of the term, Christian notes that “people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.” Moreover, she 102 Katherine Clay Bassard voices a suspicion of Theory (capital “T”) as yet another attempt to divide into haves and have nots, insiders and outsiders, privileged and “others”: The race for theory, with its linguistic jargon, its emphasis on quoting its prophets, its tendency towards “Biblical” exegesis, its refusal even to mention specific works of creative writers, far less contemporary ones, its preoccupations with mechanical analyses of language, graphs, algebraic equations, its gross generalizations about culture, has silenced many of us to the extent that some of us feel we can no longer discuss our own literature, while others have developed intense writing blocks and are puzzled by the incomprehensibility of the language set adrift in literary circles. What interests me in this passage is that she couches the dominance of critical theory in religious terms: “emphasis on quoting its prophets,” “tendency towards ‘Biblical’ [capital “B”] exegesis,” and so on. Put simply, Christian feels that “the new emphasis on literary critical theory is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks.” Morever, this theoretical hegemony is created, authorized even, through sacred uses of language: I see the language it creates as one which mystifies rather than clarifies our condition, making it possible for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene—that language surfaced, interestingly enough, just when the literature of peoples of color, of black women, of Latin Americans, of Africans began to move to ‘the center.’ Such words as center and periphery are themselves instructive. . . . Because I went to a Catholic Mission school in the West Indies I must confess that I cannot hear the word “canon” without smelling incense, that the word “text” immediately brings back agonizing memories of Biblical exegesis, that “discourse” reeks for me of metaphysics forced down my throat. . . . “Periphery” too is a word I heard throughout my childhood, for if anything was seen as being in the periphery, it was those small Caribbean islands which had neither land mass nor military power.2 Barbara Christian sees a similarity in the positioning of the colonized subject as other to both the academic deployment of critical Theory and colonial Christianity. Similarly, in his review essay “Traces of God,” Bruce Ellis Benson remarks on the blindness of theorists to the type of critique that Barbara Christian puts forth; for example, Derrida’s equation of differance with justice reveals to Benson an inattentiveness to the oppressive uses of deconstruction. In his words, “at best I think we can say that deconstruction has the potential to be a powerful tool of justice but has just as great a potential to be used for injustice .” Moreover, Benson argues that the same holds true for religious discourse: “But, if it is difficult to act as a moral person...

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