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Abstract
This article explores Afrofuturist critiques of contemporary (Black) American religion and the problematics of difference, dominance and deliverance envisioned by Black literary art in Ishmael Reed's play, The Preacher and the Rapper and Octavia Butler's novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Though Ishmael Reed and Octavia Butler deploy similar futuristic narrative strategies, they imagine radically different futures, present distinctive strategies of intervention, and imagine differing roles for Black religion in their respective futures. This article analyzes these futuristic theological themes in light of theorists of Afrofuturism, including Kodwo Eshun, literary critics such as Tuire Valkeakari, and contemporary black religious thinkers such as Monica A. Coleman, drawing out their respective insights and implications. Taken together, Reed's and Butler's Afrofuturistic critiques offer possibilities for imagining alternative, emancipatory forms of Black theological discourse and religious practice.
Notes
1 For an introduction to the discourse and literature on Afrofuturism, see Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013). For an edited volume of writings that have been collected around the theme, Afrofuturism and social justice activism, see Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Oakland: AK Press, 2015). See also Sherée Renee Thomas, ed., Dark Matter: 100 Years of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (New York: Warner Books, 2000). For an edited volume that takes up Afrofuturism in the visual arts, see The Shadows Took Shape, ed. Naima J. Keith and Zoe Whitley, et al. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013).
2 Gayraud S. Wilmore, “The New Context of Black Theology in the United States” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979), 606.
3 Monica A. Coleman has been one of the few scholars of religion to engage Black women's science fiction writing as a significant source for constructive, postmodern womanist religious thought. See her treatment of Octavia Butler's Parables in her work, Making a Way out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). See also her essay, “Invoking Oya: Practicing a Polydox Soteriology through a Postmodern Womanist Reading of Tananarive Due's Living Blood,” in Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation (New York: Routledge, 2010), 186–202.
4 Sheree Renée Thomas, “Foreward: Birth of a Revolution,” in Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, ed. Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 2.
5 Ibid., 1.
6 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0,” in Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New Wave Trajectory, ed. Marleen S. Barr (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 6.
7 Ibid., 11; emphasis added.
8 Ibid., 11.
9 Hortense J. Spillers, “Imaginative Encounters,” in Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New Wave Trajectory, ed. Marleen S. Barr (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 4.
10 Linda E. Thomas, ed., Living Stones in the Household of God: The Legacy and Future of Black Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), xiv.
11 See Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” South Atlantic Quarterly 92, no. 47 (Fall 1993): 735–778.
12 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0,” in Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New Wave Trajectory, ed. Marleen S. Barr (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 8.
13 Ibid., 8; emphasis added.
14 Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 294.
15 Samuel R. Delany, “The Necessity of Tomorrow(s),” in The Shadows Took Shape, ed. Naima J. Keith and Zoe Whitley, et al. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013), 115.
16 Spillers, “Imaginative Encounters,” 4.
17 Ibid., 4.
18 Thelma Golden, “Foreward,” in The Shadows Took Shape, ed. Naima J. Keith and Zoe Whitley, et al. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013), 8.
19 Ishmael Reed is perhaps an unlikely figure to be invoked in relation to Afrofuturism. In many academic circles, Reed is effectively relegated to a by-gone era and rarely invoked at all. While many critics and scholars have hailed Mumbo Jumbo as his greatest literary achievement, many have dismissed his later work, written in the decades since the 1970s. Some have dismissed Reed for his perceived literary failures, while others have argued that his work is irredeemably misogynistic. Yet others have contended that not only has Reed, the literary trickster, been misunderstood and perhaps mis-labeled, but also that his later work is actually more sophisticated and worthy of renewed attention. However one views the literary merits of Reed's writing, his attention to the ways that a particularly gendered racism targets young Black males as always already guilty seems worth revisiting in this historical moment.
20 For an introduction to the Nuyorican Poets Café and a collection of several plays from its Theater Festival, see Action: The Nuyorican Poets Café Theater Festival, ed. Miguel Algarin and Louis Griffith (New York: Touchstone, 1997).
21 In African American vernacular usage, the term “jack-leg” often refers to an unlicensed, unlettered, incompetent, and/or an immoral minister.
22 For a discussion of the ways that Black communal boundaries are constructed and policed, rendering some “in” and others “out,” see Cathy Cohen's, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For a more direct discussion of the ways that the construction and policing of these boundaries impact Black youth, see Cohen's Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
23 Mark Vogel, “Post-Modern Realism: Ishmael Reed and Japanese by Spring,” in The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed (Critical Responses in Arts and Letters), ed. Bruce Allen Dick and Pavel Zemliansky (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 208.
24 Ibid., 208.
25 Ibid., 210.
26 Bruce Dick, “A Conversation with Ishmael Reed,” in The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed (Critical Responses in Arts and Letters), ed. Bruce Allen Dick and Pavel Zemliansky (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 232.
27 Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” 294.
28 See Richard Iton's In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
29 Thelma Golden, “Foreward,” in The Shadows Took Shape, ed. Naima J. Keith and Zoe Whitley, et al. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013), 8.
30 Ishmael Reed, “The Preacher and the Rapper,” in Action: The Nuyorican Poets Café Theater Festival, ed. Miguel Algarin and Lois Griffith (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997), 264.
31 Reed, “The Preacher and the Rapper,” 274.
32 Of course, there is a certain irony here in 3 Strike's conversion to African religion in the future, given the historical arguments that such religious practices are anachronistic and represent an anti-technological, anti-modern disposition that hinders (Black) progress. Even among many Africans, African “traditional” religions may be dismissed as an embarrassing culture of the past, understood as “primitive” and hindering a more politically and economically viable future for African countries. Nevertheless, Reed contests such arguments, presenting Santeria as a potentially viable, even “progressive,” religious alternative for Black people in the diaspora.
33 Reed's literature consistently emphasizes the plight of Black males. His privileging of Black masculinity and critique of (White) feminism's perceived assault on Black male identity has received significant criticism throughout the years. It is perhaps ironic, then, that one of Reed's most stinging criticisms of Christianity in The Preacher and the Rapper is the Church's rampant misogyny. Nevertheless, this critique of Christian misogyny leaves unaddressed Michelle Wallace's damning critique of Reed's views concerning feminism, and more significantly, her critique of Reed's neo-Hoodoo aesthetic as a “myopic philosophy … [that is] structurally unable to acknowledge the rise of sexism as an essential chapter in the story of all religious development in the West, in Africa, in the New World.” See Michelle Wallace, “Female Troubles: Ishmael Reed's Tunnel Vision,” in The Critical Response to Ishmael Reed (Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 183–91.
34 Ogun Jagun Jagun and the Santeria Party's eventual collaboration with the Asian American President, Barbara Sung and her Wiccan Party, can be read as signaling the future possibilities and perils of not only interreligious dialogue, but also a multi-racial political coalition – especially among marginalized minority groups.
35 Reed, “The Preacher and the Rapper,” 274.
36 Ibid., 274.
37 Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure argues that in Mumbo Jumbo, Reed is, “interested in humbling Christianity by creating a multicultural space where African cultures coexist with other cultures from the world over.” I would argue that Reed pursues a similar strategy in The Preacher and the Rapper. See Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure, “From Legba to Papa Labas: New World Metaphysical Self/Re-Fashioning in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo,” in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 354.
38 Conseula Francis, Conversations with Octavia Butler (Literary Conversations Series) (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2010), 174–75.
39 Ibid., 6.
40 Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” 299.
41 See Octavia Butler, Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (Updated Edition) (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000); see also Bloodchild and Other Stories (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).
42 Tuire Valkeakari, Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952–1998 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007), 10.
43 Francis, Conversations with Octavia Butler, 9.
44 Ibid., 224.
45 Ibid., 41.
46 Valkeakari, Religious Idiom, 10.
47 Francis, Conversations with Octavia Butler, 131.
48 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007), 16.
49 Ibid., 7.
50 Ibid., 77.
51 Ibid., 77.
52 Francis, Conversations with Octavia Butler, 215.
53 Butler, Parable of the Sower, 57.
54 Ibid., 79.
55 Valkeakari, Religious Idiom, 158.
56 Ibid., 158.
57 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 119.
58 Valkeakari, Religious Idiom, 182.
59 Butler, Parable of the Talents, 88.
60 Ibid., 88.
61 Ibid., 120.
62 Ibid., 359.
63 Ibid., 46.
64 Francis, Conversations with Octavia Butler, 215.
65 Alondra Nelson, “Out of the Shadows, Into the Stars,” in The Shadows Took Shape, ed. Naima J. Keith and Zoe Whitley, et al. (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2013), 42.
66 Ibid., 42.
67 Serene Jones and Margaret A. Farley, Liberating Eschatology: Essays in Honor of Letty M. Russell, ed. Serene Jones and Margaret A. Farley (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), xiv.
68 Butler, Parable of the Talents, 405.
69 Ibid., 405.
70 Reed's (re)turn to Santeria should not be seen as a simplistic, or nostalgic, retrieval of the past, but rather an appeal to African religious improvisation and innovation. African diasporic religions not only retain, but also change the religious cultural material that they make use of. Paul Christopher Johnson's theorization of diasporic religion illumines the significance of Reed's use of Santeria for discussions of the role of Black religion in securing futurity. Johnson writes, “diasporic religion operates not just as a form of historical consciousness, but as a creative process directed toward the future, presenting chances for new identifications and social alliances by projecting present experience against previously unseen horizons.” See Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 98.
71 Butler, Parable of the Talents, 376.
72 Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” 289.
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Michael Brandon McCormack
Michael Brandon McCormack, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville. He also holds a secondary appointment as Assistant Professor (Religious Studies) in the Department of Comparative Humanities. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Louisville, he was a Lilly Faculty Fellow in Theological Education at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, where he continues to work with the Program in Black Church Studies. He received his PhD in Religion (Homiletics and Liturgics/Black Religion and Cultural Studies) in 2013, from Vanderbilt University, where he was also a Fellow in the Program in Theology and Practice. Professor McCormack has presented his research at numerous conferences, including the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race at the University of London-Birkbeck and subsequently at the Ghana Institute of Public Management (GIMPA) in Accra. At the University of Louisville, he teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate level courses, including Introduction to Pan-African Studies, African American Religion, Religions of the African Diaspora, and Religion and Hip-Hop.