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ABSTRACT
This essay interrogates the Christian concept of incarnation as a salvific device through an womanist/feminist, ethical analysis of the gender/sexuality/race bending storyline and romance of Ruby Baptiste and Christine Braithwaite, in HBO’s cinematic speculative fiction Lovecraft Country. Pressing at the meanings of salvation and ontology, it considers how Lovecraft Country’s queering of incarnational power, gender/sexuality and race critiques, complicates and reimagines the religious, socio-material and erotic significance of “the flesh” and its implications on redemption.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 “Strange Case,” Episode 5, Lovecraft Country. Created by Misha Green, Jonathan I. Kidd, and Sonya Winton for HBO, 2020.
2 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 43–44.
3 The ecclesia or the “called out” is the Greek term used when referring to the primitive church in the book of Acts. It exceeds the walls and space of church services. I deploy the term to underscore “The Church” as an identity of individuals called out to do the work of God. For more, see Karl Barth, Disruptive Grace.
4 Athanasius, On the Incarnation (Las Vegas: Loki's Publishing, 2021), 38–50.
5 Athanasius, 49.
6 Athanasius, 50.
7 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 8.
8 Ibid.
9 Vincent Lloyd and AndrewiPrevot, “Sources of the Black Self,” in Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2017), Ebook, 136.
10 Ibid.
11 Shaun M. Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 19.
12 Copeland, 13.
13 Lloyd and Prevot, 282.
14 Lloyd and Prevot, 283–5.
15 Lloyd and Prevot, 284.
16 Ibid.
17 Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 18–22.
18 Melissa Harris Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame Stereotypes and Black Women in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 35–6.
19 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkley: Crossing Press, 2007), 53.
20 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic”; Fletcher, Dancing with the Spirit; and Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism. My definition of the erotic is a synthesis of Feminist and womanist definitions of the erotic as they show up in feminist and womanist discourse.
21 Lorde, 54–8.
22 Copeland, 62–5.
23 Kari Elizabeth Borresen, Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Women in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995), 21.
24 Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe: An American Grammarbook,” Culture and Countermemory: The "American" Connection, Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 67.
25 Ibid.
26 Lorde, 58.
27 Perry, 35–36.
28 Perry, 35–42.
29 Perry, 38.
30 Perry, 40 via Arendt, Human Condition?.
31 Perry, 41 via Markell, Bound by Recognition, 3, 18, 154., 41.
32 Lorde, 59.
33 Ibid.
34 Copeland, 65.
35 Copeland, 62.
36 Paul Tillich, The Essential Tillich: An Anthology of the Writings of Paul Tillich, ed. F. Forrester Church (New York: Collier Books, 1987), 196–7.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Courtney Bryant
Courtney Bryant is a scholar, preacher and practitioner. She received her doctorate of Religion: Ethics and Society, with an emphasis in Womanist Ethics and Christian Social Ethics, from Vanderbilt University. Focusing on the erotic as a divine resource for moral agency, Bryant explores how erotic practices facilitate individual and social transformation. Bryant is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Womanist Ethics at Manhattan College and currently completing her first Monograph Erotic Defiance: A Womanist Ethic of Freedom and Resistance.