Download PDF: RV Jefferson, Black Religion
By James A. Noel
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. 256 pages. $85.00.
A foundational text in black religious studies, James A. Noel’s Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World skillfully engages Charles Long’s demand for excavations of black religious landscapes that methodologically move beyond theological apologetics and the social sciences. Noel develops his argument through a cross-disciplinary assessment that privileges phenomenological analysis and historical interrogation. Yet going beyond these, he engages other disciplinary methodologies including hermeneutics, philosophy, and aesthetic theory. Extensively expanding Long’s assessment of materiality as created through dual processes of imagining—both that of the oppressors and the oppressed—Noel engages black religion and black peoples as phenomenological appearances within the Atlantic World. In this context, he demonstrates that black materiality—black bodies, religions, aesthetic expressions, experiences, etc.—was constantly constituted and reconstituted both through Western discursive manipulations and through black people’s own practices of imagining their New World existence.
Approaching materiality as newly constituted and imagined within the modern Atlantic World, he explores the contours of this novel philosophy of matter through the Middle Passage experiences, New World re-creations, moans, shouts, divine revelations, and religio-artistic expressions of black peoples. Rather than presuming that a black identity developed prior to the black (Christian) religious experience, as understood by various black theologians, Noel argues that black peoples and black religion were simultaneous phenomena. For Noel, black religion emerges out of new modes of materiality that black peoples live out through their bodies and their concrete engagements in this Atlantic World.
In nine engaging chapters, Noel thematically illustrates his thesis through documenting, analyzing, and re-membering concrete manifestations of blackness in the New World. He scrutinizes the Atlantic World, revealing the historical processes by which it became a religious, cultural, economic, and social arena of contact and exchange. In this new Atlantic World, modern epistemologies and orientations were formed and legitimatized in ways that signified some peoples as empirically other—such as, the Irish, in its earlier disseminations, and then later on black bodies and black religion. Noel thus illuminates the Western imagination as a sort of theology of economics, if you will, that created black subjects as commodity fetishes to be objectified, utilized, and consumed.
Thereafter Noel explores the Middle Passage as an encounter with nothingness and non-being. He attempts to make sense of what he sees as the cultural and epistemological continuity-discontinuity between the black experience and black people’s new Atlantic World, on the one hand, and their seemingly distant African homelands, on the other. He draws attention to Western epistemological erasures that render black peoples and their hermeneutical lenses—their means of interpreting divine revelation—opaque and unsound. Noel specifically highlights this problem through a re-reading of Nat Turner’s biblical hermeneutics. Subsequently, he highlights the reconstitution of the materiality of black bodies through the historical manifestation of the mulatto and the legal contingencies that occurred from the presence of a new categorical subject who was neither entirely black nor exclusively white.
Attempting to re-signify the silences around black culture and black religion, Noel explores the silence of art as a new archival “site” through which religious and theological meanings can be recovered. For instance, by analyzing Romare Bearden’s collages as a hermeneutic for exploring the complexities of blackness, Noel uncovers how black peoples and black religion emerge as parallel realities in which the everyday material environments of black peoples are not independent of the sacred and the religious. He contends, “In [Bearden’s] collages, past and present, South and North, sacred and profane, inside and outside overlap, interpenetrate, and intersect to form the context of human rituals: bathing, blues singing, dancing, eating, worshiping, loving, an so on” (138).
In the final two chapter, he deepens his analysis of the embodied materiality of black peoples and religion, exploring, first, the aesthetics of the moan and the shout as primal modalities of black cultural experience and as another means of delving into opaque black religious/theological symbols and codes. Lastly, he explores the historical emergence of salsa as a means of conceptualizing black subjects, their identities, their culture, and their religion beyond strict dichotomies and polarizations, emphasizing creolization as an alternative theory for understanding the multivalent character of black subjectivities.
Within each of these chapters, Noel poignantly highlights materiality as a new theoretical lens through which black peoples and black religion can be understood. He analyzes how black bodies and black religion are signified as commodity “objects” of the Atlantic World. However, even better, he demonstrates how black peoples re-signified their bodies and religion to establish themselves as subjects “making a way out of no way” through their divine revelations, art, moans, and shouts—their creolized New World selves. With this said, however, Noel assumes an African epistemological rupture in which neither ethnic African nor pan-Africanized means of knowing and being were sustainable in the Atlantic World. Hence his metaphorical use of the Atlantic World creates a space in which the history of contacts and exchanges is a nearly bi-vocal rather than multivocal process. Western means of knowing and being and ambiguously black (non-ethnic, non-pan-African) subjects become the primary means of contending with experiences of nothingness, silence, and opacity. While acknowledging that Africans had their own ontologies prior to their contacts with Europeans, Noel ultimately concludes, “the Non-Being that menaced the captives in the Middle Passage was totalizing in its discontinuity with anything previously known or imagined. Nothing in the cultural memory provided coping mechanisms for dealing with this Nothingness” (65, emphasis added). Noel leaves the reader to conclude that ethnic and pan-African epistemologies were insufficient and essentially irrelevant to human captives wrestling with nothingness and non-being throughout the Middle Passage.
Constrained by the twentieth-century debate between Edward Frazier and Melville Herskovits over the extent of creolization among African peoples in the United States, scholars have struggled either to affirm one side of the debate or reconcile the two positions. As a result, in black religious studies scholarship, the project of excavating black U.S. religion and, in particular, that of the early black church, is often polarized against the recovery of African religious continuities. Noel, in this sense, demonstrates little difference. In discussing the U.S. context, he notes that “in areas where Protestantism was the dominant religion conditions for [African] survivals were less favorable.” Importantly, however, he contends, “We can conjecture that African divinities became identified, initially, with Old Testament figures in the United States, and finally, with Jesus” (13). He acknowledges the presence of African cosmologies and divine figures, but they are only permitted presence under the auspices of black Christianity. There is no space for conceptualizing African religious expressions outside of either overt African spirit manifestation—as seen throughout the Caribbean and South America—or the personification of Old Testament figures. In the United States, ethnic African and Pan-Africanized religions cannot exist.
Ultimately, Noel’s theoretical leanings and presumptions are revealed in his rendering of African bodies and religions opaque, even if for the beneficial purpose of stressing the racialized, material construction and phenomenological appearance of black bodies and black religion in the New World. Through rendering African bodies and religions invisible, or even inconsequential, the “image of Africa”—meaning the material reality of African landless bodies and their ancestral homelands and legacies, as identified by Long—remains opaque, invisible, and unintelligible. Yet, scholars do not have to erase or overshadow the former to highlight the latter. If we reconsider W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of “double-consciousness,” perhaps in those early years—and even for some time thereafter since the “Great Awakening” did not occur until the 1730s, more than one hundred years after the first Africans landed on American shores—we can understand this new black African subject as a converging and, at times, clashing of two if not more selves. Negro peoples’ two-ness reflected their struggle between their first creation—their pre-Atlantic, ethnic and pan-African selves—and their second creation—their newly racialized and commodified fetish existence—in which they strove to reconcile two souls in “one dark body.” In this sense, their subjectivity is not about either/or—recognizing either blackness or Africanness—but about both-and, in the words of Du Bois, “this longing to attain self-conscious [person]hood, to merge his [or her] double self into a better and truer self. In this merging [s]he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.”1
Notes
- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 8-9.
