Anne Margaret Castro

This article comparatively analyzes the printed (1987) and audiobook (2007) versions of Baby Suggs’s preaching scene in Toni Morrison’s Belovedagainst the backdrop of performance and ritual within the Black homiletic tradition specifically, and Afro-diasporic religious practice and belief more broadly. I consider how the impetus towards performance evident in Morrison’s novel, as well as in the traditions of Black homiletics and Afro-diasporic ritual, is flipped on its head in the audiobook, where Morrison explicitly refuses to “perform” for her listening audience. By using a method of interpretation attuned to issues of dramatic action and effectiveness, I show how Morrison’s visual and sonic presentational maneuvers mirror the homiletics and spiritual tenets of her novel’s preacher character, Baby Suggs. More specifically, I contend that both character and author encourage audience engagement to call forth collective experiences of embodied love and imagination. In the novel’s plot and presentation, these experiences of collaborative meaning-making counter theological and political anthropologies founded in colonialism and racist oppression, and present formulations of complex subjectivity embedded within spiritual and physical networks of collective being. I argue that Baby Suggs’s homiletics and theology focused on love, grace, and imagination are key to better understanding why and how Morrison chose to tell the story of Beloved.

From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas. By engaging with spiritual traditions such as Vodou, Kumina, and Protestant Christianity while drawing on canonical Eurocentric literary theory, Anne Margaret Castro presents a novel, nuanced reading of power through the physical and metaphysical relationships portrayed in these great works of New World black literature. Castro examines prophecy in the dramas of Derek Walcott, preaching in the ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, and liturgy in the novels of Toni Morrison, offering comparative readings alongside the works of Afro-Colombian anthropologist Manuel Zapata Olivella, Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber, and Canadian fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. The Sacred Act of Reading is the first book to bring together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for thinking within, against, and beyond structures of political dominance, dependence, and power.

Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion, the recent collection edited by An Yountae and Eleanor Craig, expands the typical archive and methods for scholarship within philosophy of religion. The book’s contributors draw on an array of source materials, ranging from medieval legal discourse to contemporary photographic technology, in order to study coloniality—defined here as “the epistemic dominance of western and European modernity” (3) —within current religious and philosophical studies. In their skillful and cogent introduction, An and Craig explain that they intend for this collection to serve as both an intervention and an experiment for philosophy of religion under the guiding assumption that “it is possible and valuable to apply the categorical designation philosophy of religion to decolonial and anticolonial projects that rearrange the epistemological assumptions of much of the work carried out under that heading” (1). In accordance with this assumption, An, Craig, and the book’s contributors use a decolonial framework to approach critical debates and core concepts in philosophy of religion, such as violence, theodicy, the human and human rights, the sacred, modernity, capitalism, and the Eucharist. Across the collection’s introduction, nine chapters, and concluding essay, the collection shifts the grounds for argument within philosophy of religion by expanding the canon, re-interpreting canonical texts in new ways, and re-historicizing key ideas in the field. This volume expands the canon by treating 20th-century anti-colonial thinkers, particularly the Afro-Caribbean intellectuals Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and C.L.R. James, as philosophers of religion. For example, Mayra Rivera lucidly maps out several epistemes regarding modern “Man” in Wynter’s oeuvre before suggesting that readers can locate a site of “embodied counterpoetics” within the performance practices detailed in the author’s fiction, and J. Kameron Carter provocatively riffs on Aimé Césaire’s simile connecting the Eucharist to excrement to explain how colonialism operates via rituals of sacramentalization. Like Rivera and Carter, Filipe Maia looks to the body as a site for philosophy and action in his chapter theorizing the cannibalistic encounter between a Caeté warrior and a Portuguese Bishop in colonial Brazil. In a different vein, Vincent Lloyd uses autobiography as a tool for critically analyzing the sense of “tragedy” in James’ political and aesthetic thought. More specifically, Lloyd foregrounds James’ late-in-life confession that he had committed sexual assault when sixteen to explicate James’ “puritan” take on middle-class positionality within liberationist politics. By putting decolonial writers in conversation with thinkers like Augustine and Michel Foucault, who are more often encountered in philosophy and religion survey courses, Beyond Man illuminates how epistemological assumptions regarding logic, universality, and order have served to elide philosophy of religion’s normative, Eurocentric parameters. An, for example, contrasts Job’s epiphanic encounter with the sovereign God with Frantz Fanon’s “decolonial epiphany,” and Joseph Winters uses Wynter and Fanon to deconstruct the colonial epistemes present in Mircea Eliade’s concept of the sacred. By examining those often-elided assumptions within philosophy of religion, Beyond Man contends, we can identify the traces of hierarchical, ontological valuations that promoted and legitimized the material and conceptual regimes underlying racist and colonial violence. Because the book often invokes concepts of embodiment and incarnation, prioritizes Afro-diasporic thinkers, and seeks to illuminate and unsettle colonial modernity’s oppressive ontologies of the human, it is in direct conversation with Joseph Drexler-Dreis and Kristien Justaert’s 2019 edited collection Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human (Fordham University Press), which was itself inspired by Wynter’s writings. In fact, more than half of the volume’s essays focus on the ideas of Afro-Caribbean philosophers, inviting connections to the works of Lewis Gordon, Henry Paget, Noel Erskine, and Reiland Rabaka. An and Craig’s introduction also recognizes the importance of previous essay collections that influenced their volume. Beyond Man presents as both a study of anti-Blackness within colonial Christianity and as a broader study of coloniality, race, and religion across several centuries. For example, Ellen Armour’s thought-provoking inquiry into the tension between seeing and believing in early Christianity and decolonizing photographic engagement shifts the reader’s focus from the Caribbean and Latin America to contemporary Syria, the Abu Ghraib prison, and the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Because the geographic, political, and religious scope of the collection can be unclear at times, the tensions between Afro-diasporic, Indigenous Latin American, and Middle Eastern approaches to decolonial practice and thought can feel slightly under-analyzed. What holds the work together, however, is its enduring commitment to the shared task of “seeking a philosophy that actively decolonizes thought” (25). In her short essay closing out the book, Amy Hollywood uses the thematic of loss and mourning (drawing on Sigmund Freud) to link the disparate legacies of religion, race, capitalism, and coloniality discussed in the volume. At the same time, Hollywood wisely refuses to try to reconcile the intractable role that positionality plays in shaping how different people—including the volume’s contributors and sources—imagine, think, and mourn. For me, the book most excels when the authors are using the religious and political past to explain how we arrived in the present. By historicizing fundamental concepts from across the humanities from a decolonial vantage point, the contributors show how colonial modes of thinking, believing, and behaving are inextricably entangled with modern religious, philosophical, political, social, and aesthetic life. This is what Devin Singh does in the volume’s first chapter, using a decolonial perspective to link modern secularization with the beginning of capitalism in late medieval Europe and, in turn, he locates the narrative origins of modern “indebted subjects” (34). Later, in a similar way, Eleanor Craig turns to the early colonial period in Latin America to track the colonial, theo-political invention of “human rights” by reading the Laws of Burgos as a work of moral philosophy. I found Singh’s and Craig’s analyses compelling, smart, and wholly convincing. Such in-depth analyses of political and religious discourse over time is paramount for research outside of religion, including my own field of modern and contemporary postcolonial literature. The volume’s trenchant insights about philosophy of religion’s complicity with the colonial project, alongside the contributors’ innovative examples of how to do this type of critique differently, make Beyond Man a thought-provoking and valuable collection for anybody working in religion, history, Caribbean studies, and all subjects related to postcolonial and decolonial thought. Anne Margaret Castro is an associate professor at Florida International University. Date Of Review: July 29, 2023.