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Notes
1 Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History, xi.
2 More specifically, Scott writes to what I am guessing is a white liberal audience for whom the recent gathering of Nazis and Klansmen in Charlottesville might have been surprising.
3 Tomoko Masuzawa explains the use of secularism as the most evolved stage after “major” world religions and so-called superstitions in The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, to demonstrate how Europeans maintain colonial discourse of mastery through their affirmation of pluralism.
4 Both church and state share investments in whiteness and masculinity. See Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History, xvii. However, it is significant that Townes returns to religion as a useful resource for dismantling the cultural production of evil in Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil.
5 Scott, On the Judgment of History, xxi.
6 Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 7. Townes explains, “The traditional paradigm of history and memory is that history is a discipline and memory is subjective. Memory is a personal activity corrupted by the teller’s choice of words and her or his sense of how to shape the story … History, however, is often viewed as closer to a “scientific” field where the historian plied profs and corroborating evidence as the twin guardians for an objective, balance analysis,” Ibid., 13.
7 Emilie Townes, Ibid., 18.
8 “Postmodern thought has raised various warnings in its critique of modernity’s excessive focus on individualism, universals, ahistorical reason, universal knowledge, the elevation of science and sheer objectivity, the social contract and morality organized around civil rights, and the liberties of the free individual … ” and, “postmodernisms have failed to show, until recently with the development of social postmodernism, concern for institutions, social classes, political organizations, political economic processes, and social movements … ” therefore, “it is crucial to remember that inclusion does not guarantee justice … ” Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 57–58. Her analysis offers insight into Scott’s observation that, “In South Africa, black citizens were now subjects of the law, effectively enfranchised by but also bound to the powers of the state,” On the Judgment of History, 38.
9 “Ultimately, countermemory is not a rejection of history, but a reconstitution of it,” Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 24.
10 For example, Henry Goldschmidt’s scholarship nuances the distinction between race and soul discrimination among Jewish and Black Americans in Crown Heights, Race and Religion Among the Chosen People of Crown Heights, (Chicago: Rutgers University Press, 2006) and “Religion, Reductionism, and the Godly Soul: Lubavitch Hasidic Jewishness and the Limits of Classificatory Thought,” The American Academy of Religion, Vol. 77, Is 3, (2009): 547–572. Townes defines race, ethnicity, whiteness in chapter 4, “Invisible Things Unspoken: Uninterrogated Coloredness,” Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 57–78.
11 Michelle Wolff, “Karl Barth’s Christology and Jan Christian Smuts’ Human Rights Rhetoric,” Stellenbosch Theological Journal 5, no 1, 2019: 141–161. Scott acknowledges, “The vision of a reunified nation did not include black people as primary citizens; indeed many proponents of emancipation—Lincoln included—thought black men and women should be given their own state or sent back to Africa,” On the Judgment of History, 56.
12 See Townes’ chapter 5 “Legends are Memories Greater than Memories: Black Reparations in the United States as a Subtext to Christian Triumphalism and Empire,” in Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 79–110.
13 Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History, 76–77.
14 Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” 1984.
15 The corpus that utilizes innovative imaginative methods beyond assimilation is large, so I will only briefly introduce a handful here: Hortense Spillers interrogates anthropocentric formulations of dignity as inherently unjust in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture; Saidiya Hartman coins the term “critical fabulation” to describe her method of integrating archival research with both critical theory and fictional narrative in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals; Antonio Viego analyzes the loss of loss among people of color in Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies; Joe Winters takes on progress narratives about racism by integrating traditional theorists with scholars in Black studies in Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress; José Muñoz analyzes artistic proposals for queer futurity in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
16 Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History, 73.
17 Joan Wallach Scott, Ibid., preface xxi. See also page 62.
18 Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 109.
19 Emilie Townes, Ibid., 110.
20 Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History, 71.
21 Joan Wallach Scott, Ibid., 79.
22 See Emilie Townes, “To Be Called Beloved: Womanist Ontology in PostModern Refraction,” pp. 93–115; Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, eds. Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, and Angela Sims, 2011; Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 2006.
23 “In this view, there is no guarantee that progress is the necessary condition (direction) of life, but there is evidence to be found in the archive of human endeavor that actions taken can bring about change, that there have been things worth fighting for even if success was not assured, that the refusal and resistance to domination are motivated as much by ethical notions of justice as by hope, and that messianic promises may offer inspiration but no reliable roadmap to the future,” Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History, 87.
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Michelle Wolff
Michelle Wolff is an assistant professor of religion at Augustana College where they teach courses on ethics, religion, race, gender, and sexuality. Wolff's book manuscript Intersex scholar–priest and activist Sally Gross (1953–2014) is in process. Their most recent article “Companion Sex Robots: Racialized Household Economics” in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion received the 2021 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award.