Paratheological Blackness

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4440253
AutoresJ Kameron Carter (autor de correspondencia)
Año2013
Volumen112
Número4
Páginas589-611
Fecha de publicación2013-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSouth Atlantic Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0038-2876 • E-ISSN: 1527-8026
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00382876-2345189
OpenAlexW4246228103
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas20
Referencias citadas18

I argue in this essay that blackness can and should be thought of as a paratheological ghosting of modernity, where modernity is to be understood as a practice of sovereignty or political theology. As paratheological, blackness has an appositional-and not merely an oppositional-relationship to modernity's theological protocols, whose scripts are often hidden under the veil of what has come to be called the secular. Thus, blackness names an ecumenical mode of existence, a spirituality, an imagination that is always already in flight. This is to say, paratheologically understood blackness is oceanic, of the Middle Passage, and in the future tense or the not-yet as a trace within the now. I situate and elaborate this claim in relationship to Nahum Chandler's investigation of modernity as a project of purity, Hortense Spillers's reflections on the pornotroping of the flesh, and Richard Wright's unpublished story "When the World Was Red

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Politics · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Wright · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies