Critical conversations have emerged within the concepts of Afropessimism and Afrofuturism, particularly, the future and/or non-future of Blackness and Black people in the twenty-first century. Moreover, where does Blackness and Black people situate themselves within these framed concepts as it relates to Black Religious faith tradition and Black Religious Thought? How and where does religion and theology take up these matters in relation to Blackness and Black people within their faith traditions and experiences? Scholars, mainly within Black Studies, have taken up these ideologies in an effort to locate Blackness and Black people in a white racist patriarchal system that anchors itself within white right, and white nihilism. Yet, where does the Black faith tradition situate itself in religious discourses centered in white theology, and how can it permeate the discourse on redemption and hope, or failure and the unsalvageable? It is why this special issue journal, Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and Black Religious Thought: Conceptualizing Ideologies of Race, Religion, Gender and Sexuality in the 21st Century, takes up these matters, whereas Black religion scholars consider these concepts within the study of religion and theology. One key question for consideration, where does the recovery work begin, and where does it end in relation to Black person's race, gender and sexuality, and religious ideologies in Black Religious Thought?”
Key voices within Afropessimissm scholarship, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson have made a critical juncture toward naming Blackness and Black people’s lives and experiences a unique distinction within Black suffering. Essentially, Black persons experiences within the concept of liberation or liberatory means is bound to the historied notion of slavery, which has become systemic and structural against Black life progress and liberation. Afropessimism, according to Frank Wilderson, makes the following claims, and it is worth quoting in length,
Afropessimism, then, is less of a theory and more of a metatheory: a critical project that, by deploying Blackness as a lens of interpretation, interrogates the unspoken, assumptive logic of Marxism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism through rigorous theoretical consideration of their properties and assumptive logic, such as their foundations, methods, form, and utility; and it does so, again, on a higher level of abstraction that the discourse and methods of the theories it interrogates. Again, Afropessimism is, in the main, more of a metatheory than a theory. It is pessimistic about the claims theories of liberation make when these theories try to explain Black suffering or when they analogize Black suffering with the suffering of other oppressed beings. It does this by unearthing an exposing the meta-aporias, strewn like land mines in what these theories of so-called universal liberation hold to be true.Footnote1
If, as Afropessimism argues, Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochists pleasures, then this also means that, at a higher level of abstraction, the claims of universal humanity that the above theories all subscribe to are hobbled by a meta-aporia: a contradiction that manifests whenever one looks seriously at the structure of Black suffering in comparison to the presumed universal structure of all sentient beings. Again, Black people embody a meta-aporia for political thought and action – Black people are the wrench in the works.Footnote2
The framing of this text is to take up the consideration of Black humanness and the lives of Black people in the twenty-first century and to strategically place them within the larger context of society as beings with autonomies, identities, genders, and sexualities. Considering the ways in which scholars address Afropessimism, on the other spectrum is the concept of Black hope, Black life and its technologies, or Afrofuturism. Scholars, thinkers and writers Alondra Nelson, Nettrice Gaskins, Reynaldo Anderson, Ytasha Womack, Kodwo Eshun, Mark Dery, Alex Weheliye, Marlene Barr, and Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody have reimagined Black life in the future, moreover, the ways in which it propels Black life into notions of hope, freedom and liberation. Black persons see themselves within society as free agents within the expressions of human and technological identity, as such, they are contributors to themselves in recognition of themselves without necessitating their autonomy and identity within whiteness, or in spaces which whiteness permeates.
According to Reynaldo Anderson, Afrofuturism and Afrofuturism 2.0, serves two unique, yet critical points of departure within science, technology, metaphysics and Black life. He argues,
Afrofuturism was primarily concerned with twentieth century techno-culture, the digital divide, technology, music and literature in the West; Afrofuturism 2.0 is the early twenty-first century technogenesis of Black identity reflecting counter histories, hacking and or appropriating the influence of network software, database logic, cultural analytics, deep remixability, neurosciences, enhancement, and augmentation, gender fluidity, posthuman possibility, the speculative sphere, with transdisciplinary applications and has grown into an important Diasporic techno-cultural “Pan-African” movement.Footnote3
It is for these reasons that the assemblage of these Black religious scholars and thinkers consider how Black Religious Thought interprets, considers, and meditates on Afropessimism and Afrofuturism within race, gender and sexuality, and religion. These scholars consider the ways in which race, religion, gender and sexuality becomes possible or impossible futures within Black Religious Thought. The ways in which race, gender and sexuality reimagines itself within these concepts, and the possible post-race and post-gender and sexuality discourse that emerges. In the first essay, Afterlives of Slavery: Afrofuturism and Afropessimism as Parallax Views, William David Hart explores the afterlife of slavery as the parallax between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism. He maintains that the angles of vision on the afterlife of slavery—the parallax object, Afrofuturism and Afropessimism inhabit forms of spacetime that are both congruent and incongruent. He calls the triangular relations among the afterlife of slavery, Afrofuturism, and Afropessimism, as “black mood.” While this mood certainly has psychological meaning for individuals, he points toward a sociological phenomenon that shapes the collective mood long term. This black mood is an intellectual disposition with emotional resonance. Though it is hardly the only black mood, this one is influential in sectors of the black intelligentsia both within and beyond the academy. Hart raises the critical the question, how does black religion look and what might it become under a mood defined by Afrofuturism and Afropessimism?
Following Hart is Courtney Bryant, and her essay, Incarnational Power: The Queering of The Flesh and Redemption in Lovecraft Country. Bryant notes that the concepts of incarnation and redemption are central to the Christian tradition for both the individual and the community. She maintains that facilitating the salvation of adherents to the faith, the incarnation of Christ offers terrestrial weight to the biblical concept of the saving love of God. Complicating this idea, Bryant notes that the concepts of gender/sexuality/race bending of the storyline and romance of the characters Ruby Baptiste and Christine Braithwaite in HBO’s cinematic speculative fiction Lovecraft Country. Bryant posits that they offer a reinvention of incarnation as a salvific device within the confines of an anti-black, sexist and homophobic society. Bryant takes up Womanist moral theologian M. Shawn Copeland’s and black feminist, literary critic Hortense Spillers concepts of theo-ethical and discursive constructions of “the flesh” in an effort to illustrate 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.
Next, Michael Brandon McCormack’s essay, “We Ain’t Dead Said the Children, Don’t Believe It”: Black Death and the Fugitivity of Black Digital Sacred Space in the Amer(ykah)s, takes the afrofuturistic poetics and aesthetics of Erykah Badu’s “The Healer” (and the New Amerykah Part One and Part Two albums) as a muse for critically and creatively engaging afropessimistic theorizations of blackness and/as social death. Drawing upon Fred Moten’s notions of “fugitivity” and “the undercommons,” the essay considers the significance of Badu’s lyrical articulation and performance of alternative modes of Black sociality. McCormack argues that the critical and creative exchange between Afropessimism, Afrofuturism, and the artistic vision of the New Amerykahs opens to an exploration of recent theories and practices of creating Black digital (and diasporic) sacred spaces of healing and thriving (read: living) in an anti-Black world that demands Black death.
Then, in the essay, Mermaids and Journeymen: Revival Zion and Africana Religious Futures, Khytie K. Brown situates Jamaican Revival Zion religion—a contested form of Afro-Protestantism situated precariously between Christianity and indigenous African spiritual practices—as a nexus of Africana religious futurity which she terms it as an “afro-queer” ontological position. Brown defines Afro-queer as an articulation of non-normative, multi-sensual, and multidimensional modes of being and doing in the world grounded in Africana spiritual and cultural traditions. Brown argues that while Revivalists self-identify as Christians, they also acknowledge a world of spirits and practices that are primarily African, but also multi-ethnic and transcontinental. Brown centres the Revival “journeyman,” who crosses realms and defies space-time limits, as well as their mermaid spirit, River Mumma, as key figures that embody highly textured subjectivities that upend gender, racial, and sexual demarcations in service of soul retrieval and Africana religiously-informed future-making.
From Black Religious Ethicist Christophe D. Ringer, his essay, Afrofuturism & the Failure of Afropessimism’s Political Myth, argues that Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism as a metatheory contains philosophical contradictions that can be resolved through Black religious and theological discourse that engage contemporary currents in Afrofuturism. Ringer critiques Wilderson’s ontologizing of scholar Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death” which he says disavows its dialectical relationship with slavery as a historical phenomena. Ringer also considers the ways in which Wilderson’s project recapitulates key themes in the historical debates over the demythologization of Christianity in order to secure relevance and legitimacy in modernity. Ringer critically examines the eschatological and utopian themes in the Marvel series Luke Cage, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and The Underground Railroad as well as Achille Mbembe’s concept of the Afropolitan. He maintains that together these religious and cultural resources constitute the forms of Black subjectivity and agency in the midst of multiple forms of the politics of death that Wilderson’s Afropessimism ultimately hopes for.
And, finally, Black Religious Critic, Terrance Dean, examines the afterlife of slavery in his essay, A Queer Homiletic Futurity: The Radical Sexuality of James Baldwin. Dean interrogates the futurity of black sexuality and contemptuous black queer bodies as possible identities of radical futurism in a queer homiletic. Considering a framework of a futuristic queer homiletic, Dean pushes that its uses proffer black queer identity to reimagine itself within the plane of Afrofuturism disrupting the continuum of heterosexuality, and black respectability. The futurity of Black queerness re-turns itself into a living bound subject. Dean makes use of James Baldwin and his gender sexual politics as a black gay man drawing upon his semi-autobiographical essay, Here Be Dragons. In it, Baldwin illustrates being eliminated from his family, primarily by his step-father, who was disgusted by Baldwin’s ugliness and dark skin, and moreover, his effeminate and queer mannerisms. Baldwin, feeling “dumped” by not only his family, was also displaced, or, “removed” from his black community of Harlem. Baldwin, in public view, renders as a site of failure, in that, he is unacknowledged because of his Black gay identity and is rendered, or read as disgust. Baldwin reimagines himself, a living subject, bound for life. As such, a futuristic queer homiletic enables Black queerness to the centre of black sexuality and black identity.
This special issue of the journal offers an insightful critical lens that peers into the many nuances and cultural critiques that pose creative possibilities, and impossibilities within Afropessimism and Afrofuturism. What does Black life and Blackness mean in an impossible future, where Black life is bound to slavery. Or, what hope is there for a future of Black life in a technological space which aims to see what’s next and possible for Black persons in a posthumanistic world? Does the digital age render Blackness unbound and liberated through science fiction, literature, music, and the arts? If we consider either Afropessimism and Afrofuturism on their terms and meanings within Black Religious Thought and religious ideologies particular to Black faith traditions, does it allow for a disruption of white theology, or does it work within the concepts of white theology and white religiosity? This issue enters into the foray as Black religious and theological scholars consider radical and reimagined aspects of Black people’s lives which furthers the discourse of Black people and Blackness being possible futures, or bound to a subjective positionality within a white supremist patriarchal system. The future, or what may be, is only imaginable in what can be seen, or made possible.
Disclosure statement
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Notes
1 Frank Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2020), 14.
2 Ibid., 15.
3 Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), xi–x.