Department of Religious Studies

Black performance, poetics, and experimental practice, in short, black social life, is unintelligible apart from black religion. But what is black religion? This class takes up this question by engaging the thought of historian of religion Charles H. Long. We will consider Long’s (re)figuring of matter, myth, and religion in elaborating the otherness of Blackness precisely as an otherness beyond racial category and that operates in the interest of other ways of being and knowing, other ways of being with the earth and with each other. In summary, we will consider Charles Long as theorist of black religion or of black radical socialities of the sacred.