AbstractIn this article, I use the concept of decolonial love to synthesize the religious and theological dimensions of James Baldwin’s work. I argue that Baldwin’s decolonial love functions as an ultimate orientation within his work, and that decolonial love is an orientation and a praxis that is a form of revelation. The revelatory capacity of decolo-nial love, which particularly comes out of the lived experiences on the underside of Western modernity, catalyzes what Baldwin refers to as salvation. I show this, first, by engaging Baldwin’s decolonial love as a response to the way coloniality manifests itself in the United States and, second, by engaging Baldwin’s response to coloniality—that is, decolonial love—as a religious response.
Keywords: decolonial love, James Baldwin, revelation, salvation
If I am part of the American house, and I am, it is because my ancestors paid—striving to make it my home—so unimaginable a price: and I have seen some of the effects of that passion everywhere I have been, all over this world. The music is everywhere, resounds, no sounds: and tells me that now is the moment, for me, to return to the eye of the hurricane.—james baldwin 1
The challenge before America is not so much eschatological as it is reflective.—charles h. long 2
James Baldwin’s Decolonial Love as Religious Orientation
joseph drexler-dreis Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
James Baldwin’s three-act tragedy, Blues for Mister Charlie, elucidates an experience that remains commonplace in the contemporary U.S. American context: an “innocent” person constructed as white kills another who has been racialized, and the white killer remains innocent.3 In Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin implores the reader to grasp how the elucidation of this experience, or the way this experience gets constructed within the U.S. American social imaginary, pertains to the ultimate reality of what he calls “salvation” or “redemption.” To encounter salvation, Baldwin argues, requires comprehend-ing history, creating the capacity to embrace the tensions within our material existence in history as they really exist. This reflective process of revealing the historical situation is eschatological insofar as it inaugurates the end of a domi-nant U.S. American social imaginary, yet not the destruction of the “American house” to which Baldwin makes reference in the epigraph.
The central issue in Baldwin’s play, which surfaces at its end, is the ability of its white characters to refuse the revelation present within the reality they inhabit. Despite glimpsing the more sinister side of the reality of “Whitetown” during the trial in which the white murderer of a Black man is exonerated, “Whitetown” continues to prefer seeing a masked reflection of itself. This inability to confront reality is why the blues are ultimately sung for Mister Charlie, a term Baldwin uses to refer to the generic white man.
One of the ways we can read the situation that Baldwin presents in Blues for Mister Charlie is through the framework of what decolonial theory calls “coloniality.” Grounded in the work of Aníbal Quijano and others, I use colonial-ity in this article to shed light on the concealed underside of Western modernity.4 Coloniality refers to the cultural and epistemological frameworks— including the ontological (for example, gender and racial), theological, and social imaginaries—generated during the political process of colonialism, which have yet to disappear after political decolonization. Coloniality includes the colonial-ism that took place on the political and economic levels between nation-states, but its reference is broader than this, as it also extends to the frameworks that legitimize processes of domination. Analogously, decoloniality differs from decolonization because it remains a vision even after the political process of decolonization on the level of nation-states has taken place. While this political process is necessary within decoloniality, decoloniality indicates a more com-prehensive response. Postcolonial thinkers have developed this sort of broader response in their own way. While not opposed to postcolonial thought, deco-lonial thought takes a different approach. Taking on a decolonial perspective means attempting to understand and expand intellectual and artistic expressions
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that emerge within the underside of Western modernity rather than attempting to put problems in the postcolonial world in relationship to theoretical concepts originating in dominant intellectual trajectories in Europe and North America.5
As Blues for Mister Charlie makes clear, Baldwin is concerned with problems that dominant perspectives tend to further conceal. Baldwin addresses these problems from a decolonial perspective. He understands his historical situation from the perspectives that those on its underside have developed to make sense of their lived experience, which is also his own experience. While there have been a number of important publications on Baldwin’s understanding of reli-gion, several of which have focused on the centrality of love, I use the notion of decolonial love to unify the ultimate orientation I find throughout Baldwin’s work and as the central category to interpret Baldwin’s religiosity.6 In interpret-ing Baldwin’s religiosity, I understand religion in the broad way that Charles H. Long develops. Long defines religion as “orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”7 Understanding decolonial love not only as Baldwin’s ultimate orienta-tion but also as a religious reality can allow decolonial love to ground ways of understanding the divine that respond to the lived experience of coloniality, particularly in a U.S. context.
Making this connection between Baldwin’s ultimate orientation of deco-lonial love and his religiosity allows me to frame Baldwin’s intuitions from a theological perspective. Subsequently, drawing out this orientation in Baldwin’s work provides one way for theologians and theorists of religion to think the divine reality outside of the way Christian theology has been “disciplined.”8 Against this background, I argue that Baldwin’s orientation of decolonial love is a form of revelation. Baldwin draws attention to the revelatory capacity of the lived experience of coloniality, and the revelation that comes out of the lived experience of coloniality catalyzes what Baldwin refers to as salvation. I show this by first engaging Baldwin’s decolonial love as a response to the way coloniality manifests itself in the United States. I claim that Baldwin’s decolo-nial love confronts injustice from a recognition that decolonial love already exists within the “American house,” despite “America.” Baldwin argues that the theater reveals the potential of what I am calling decolonial love, and he pushes the church to also become a site of decolonial love. Second, I show that Baldwin’s response to coloniality in the United States is a religious response. Baldwin’s understanding of revelatory experience, the redemptive capacity of suffering, and redemptive praxis are all aspects of his orientation of decolonial love, which is also a religious orientation.
Baldwin’s Revelatory Decolonial Love as a Response to Coloniality
I particularly focus on (de)coloniality as an interpretive tool in order to set up a response of decolonial love within Baldwin’s work, an orientation I situ-ate within the vision of decoloniality. Chela Sandoval uses the term decolo-nial love to refer to both a “category of social analysis” and a “technology for social transformation.”9 She sees love as a hermeneutic that can catalyze “all citizen-subjects, regardless of social class,” toward a mode of conscious-ness that motivates “technologies of method and social movement.”10 Crucial for Sandoval’s understanding of love is that the desire for liberation—that is, decolonial love—holds more weight than the normativity of a particular tactic, ideology, or theoretical framework. As such, decolonial love “can access and guide our theoretical and political ‘movidas’—revolutionary maneuvers toward decolonized being.”11 In this sense, decolonial love establishes a functional relationship between interpreting and acting within a social-historical context: decolonial love is both a hermeneutic and a political tool. Engaging Sandoval’s understanding of decolonial love, I develop the concept as a way to explain the ultimate orientation that runs through Baldwin’s work.
Decolonial Love
Baldwin’s decolonial love is a different sort of category than the classical Greek concepts of love, eros and agape, even as it shares aspects of the ways phi-losophers and theologians have developed these terms. The traditional dis-tinction between eros and agape within Christian theological understandings of love is largely incapable of grasping the complexity of the decolonial love that Baldwin articulates. In his classic Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont takes over a distinction that Anders Nygren developed in Agape and Eros.12 De Rougemont refers to the “glorification of passion,” or the love of being in love, in the romantic era in Europe as an example of eros.13 Referring to eros, de Rougemont explains what European culture has preserved of Plato’s understanding of love: “Love is the way that ascends by degrees of ecstasy to the one source of all that exists, remote from bodies and matter, remote from what divides and distinguishes, and beyond the misfortune of being a self and even in love itself a pair.”14 In this understanding, eros is separated from materiality. The absolute unity that eros aims toward “must be the negation of the present human being in his suffering and multiplicity. . . . It is infinite transcendence, man’s rise into his god. And this rise is without return.”15 Like Nygren, de Rougemont sees the Christian understanding of the Incarnation
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to overcome this dualistic understanding of love in European pagan religions that separates the ultimate good from the materiality of human existence. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation initiates a new valuation of life in which agapic love, the type of self-giving and self-sacrificial love God has for humans, also becomes possible within the created realm.16
In employing the concept of decolonial love to bring out the orienta-tion within Baldwin’s work, I distance myself from this sharp distinction. Decolonial love encompasses a more complex understanding of both eros and agape. Baldwin’s decolonial love begins with a moment of cathexis: a physical and affective incarnation into the world of suffering that is erotic in its connec-tion to concrete bodies. Baldwin’s love is also agapic, if we are still speaking in the terms delineated by Nygren and de Rougemont, insofar as it is centered on something beyond the human—namely, justice—that takes precedence over the self. As I synthesize the religious and theological dimensions of Baldwin’s work, justice takes form as a decolonial vision, a vision that reveals coloniality and constructs alternative futures.
Like Sandoval’s description of decolonial love, the orientation of decolo-nial love that I garner from Baldwin’s work refers to both a hermeneutic and a political tool because of the capacity for revelation in loving relationships. The relational basis of decolonial love reveals, on the hermeneutical level, the mutual and universal implication in coloniality—that is, the profound con-nection between living within the benefits of Western modernity, on the one hand, and the lived experience of coloniality, on the other. At the same time, decolonial love is a political tool because this process of revelation is itself a political praxis. The affective entrance into the lived experience and cosmology of communities that suffer on the underside of modernity is already a method of resistance, as is the relationality that exists within these communities.
By interpreting an orientation of decolonial love as the motivation behind his writing, I position Baldwin within a tradition that actualizes an epistemic change in the way social reality is theorized. Rather than theorizing lived expe-rience in reference to questions formulated within dominant philosophical and literary canons, Baldwin formulates and responds to questions with recourse to the lived experience on the exteriority of modernity—that is, the lived experi-ence of coloniality.17
Some decolonial thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, focus on a praxis of oblit-eration within an orientation of decolonial love. Decolonial love requires the reconstruction of a world that allows for a new way of being human, eclipsing current hierarchies within a modern/colonial world: it requires “the end of the world, of course.”18 Baldwin’s decolonial love materializes into a praxis
of unveiling rather than obliteration. As the epigraph to this article indicates, Baldwin sees himself as part of the “American house,” which his ancestors have worked to construct in creative ways. The “American house” is for Baldwin a place of intimate bodily connection and mixture,19 including the U.S. American history of forced mixture through rape, and within this house there is a constant making and remaking of worlds. As an act of decolonial love, Baldwin attempts to unveil the creative articulations of the U.S. experience that modern thought structures have concealed. This process of unveiling catalyzes what Baldwin describes as a universal salvation, as it brings to the fore decolonial love that exists within a modern/colonial nation-state, yet beyond its imaginary.
In turning to the creative worlds Black communities have made in the United States and in seeing the salvation located within these worlds as extending beyond themselves, Baldwin responds to a problem similar to one W. E. B. Du Bois indicated more than a half century earlier.20 Du Bois describes a “divine theft” by the white power structure in the United States: white U.S. Americans have appropriated divinity for themselves.21 Baldwin frames the problem by arguing that the absoluteness whiteness appropriates for itself conceals the complexity of the social world within the United States. He responds to this situation through decolonial love.
Imagining Decoloniality through Theater and Church
Baldwin responds to this divine theft in The Devil Finds Work, an essay in which he reflects on the critical potential of cinema and theater, which he often puts in relation to the church, in the United States. Baldwin refers to the charac-ter of Uncle Tom from the film Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Baldwin says that he never considered Uncle Tom a hero because he “would not take vengeance into his own hands.” Baldwin continues: “I despised and feared those heroes (which were always white) because they did take vengeance into their own hands. They thought that vengeance was theirs to take.”22 Baldwin gestures toward an onto-logical separation here. White heroes are endowed with a divine power, namely, the power of vengeance, whereas Black heroes—at least those who are con-structed by whites or for white consumption—are disconnected from this source of power. Baldwin addresses this separation with recourse to an interpretation of the theater, both of the capacity of the performers and of the impact of theater on the audience. The theater is one of the conceptual anchors, along with church and music, that Baldwin will employ to articulate what I am calling decolonial love. These are the contiguous sites from which Baldwin sees a possibility to unveil the “divine theft” and offers an alternative imaginary.
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Koritha Mitchell argues for the centrality of Baldwin’s theater theory in his project of helping U.S. citizens “to rediscover our connection to each other.”23 Baldwin’s attempt to overcome a perception of ontological difference among peoples is not based on an abstract humanism; it pertains to the literal fact of race-mixing, sometimes forced.24 In The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin articulates a tension within the theater that he then uses as a metaphor for both his critique of religion and his creative articulation of love. Baldwin describes the tension in two ways: in terms of the relationship between the real and imagined, on the one hand, and between the self and other, on the other. The tension in the theater between the real and the imagined helps Baldwin argue that our cre-ative capacity always has to be inflected by lived experience. He then draws on the self-other tension to show that we can only enter into the other’s reality through an authentic existence within our own selves. This tension serves for Baldwin as a revelatory site that already exists embedded within lived experi-ence, which the writer has to work to uncover.
A performer can creatively navigate the tension between the real and the imagined when she portrays someone else, or “recreates another,” with-out eliminating her own lived experience. The theater allows the viewer, in Baldwin’s interpretation, to experience the tension between a performer’s own identity and the role she plays. Baldwin describes this phenomenon in the first play he saw, Orson Welles’s production of Macbeth with an all-Black cast. Real, concrete people recreate themselves as someone else, such as Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, or the witches, without losing themselves when taking on those roles, and Baldwin is able to recognize the “torment” within this connection on the part of the actors.25 Commenting on Baldwin’s analysis of the Orson Welles production of Macbeth, Mitchell says that, for Baldwin, “they became ‘those people’ (the characters) because they had done the work to connect their own humanity to the humanity of those whom Shakespeare had described.”26
This connection that plays with the overlapping character of the real and imaginary already indicates the second way Baldwin articulates the tension within the theater—that is, between self and other. Baldwin shows that when the tension between the self and other disappears, it ceases to be possible to live into the reality that “we are all each other’s flesh and blood.” In fact, Baldwin narrates his flight to the church, another site he uses to explain his orientation of decolonial love, as a flight from this tension: “It is not acci-dental that I was carrying around the plot of a play in my head, and looking, with a new wonder (and a new terror) at everyone around me, when I sud-denly found myself on the floor of the church, one Sunday, crying holy unto the Lord. Flesh and blood had proved to be too much for flesh and blood.”27
In the theater, the audience can witness this tension between the real and imagined or the self and other. But in the cinema or church, the camera or religious structures dictate what the audience can perceive, thereby obscur-ing the tension.28 The cinema or church, in other words, can obscure the flesh-and-blood reality.
Almost as a side note running throughout The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin challenges the church to inhabit the tension between the real and imagined. When the church loses this tension—and for Baldwin the church is often in danger of losing “the real” in light of an imagined salvation—it becomes irrel-evant.29 This loss stands in opposition to salvation and thus falls outside deco-lonial love. Baldwin uses the image of the devil, that which is diametrically opposed to Christ, in whom Christians conceptualize salvation, to show the negation of this tension:
For I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presi-dents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in the mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. This devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention.30
An orientation of decolonial love requires maintaining the tension between the real and imagined. This tension prohibits the “devilish” invention of history that is not at least mediated by the real. The persistence of this tension, as I will show, is a crucial part of what Baldwin describes as salvation. The way in which Baldwin develops the creative potential of the theater, and his contrast between this potential of the theater and the reality of the church, is crucial to the way he thinks about the divine reality.
Mitchell argues that Baldwin conceptualizes the potentials of the theater through what she terms “flesh-centered imaginative work.” She defines this as “the intellectual labor that allows one to push past the categories that soci-ety encourages but that occurs in embodied ways; it is intellectual work that enables transcendent movement even as it takes place through the body.”31 Here, Mitchell captures how the theater can function for Baldwin as a site of decoloniality. The stage is the locus of this work when the performer realizes the link between self and other by representing another without giving up her
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own lived experience. The physical presence of the performer onstage allows the audience to experience this tension, unlike in cinema, where the distance between performer and audience “is an absolute: a paradoxical absolute, mas-querading as intimacy.”32 Baldwin’s decolonial love motivates a praxis that pushes past his experience of church, which is too closely tied to cinema. His praxis attempts, via flesh-centered imaginative work, to bring in the tension he finds so crucial to the theater.
Loving within the “American House”
As his embrace of the tension within the theater shows, for Baldwin love involves the violence of forcibly divesting white U.S. Americans of their “system of real-ity,” yet not the violence of obliterating history itself.33 In addition to the destruc-tive consequences of modern/colonial ways of naming the world, Baldwin sees that “a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mir-ror.”34 This harkens back to the blues that have to be sung for Mister Charlie. Love is the violent process of forcing this release: “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”35 In taking off the masks necessary to sustain the signification of history that allows for the perpetua-tion of Western modernity, and thus coloniality, Baldwin’s love provokes the tension between the real and imagined. It reveals and unmasks the historical situation beyond the signifying mechanisms of modernity and its contemporary trajectories.
Baldwin’s decolonial love takes shape in his affirmation of what John Drabinski has called “vernacular worlds,” the creative worlds that Black U.S. Americans have made within the United States that exist beyond the U.S. imaginary.36 In his 1977 essay “Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone,” Baldwin makes the importance of these worlds clear. He shows that redemption exists within the “hurricane” of existence in the United States. Creative worlds have already been made, and are being made, out of decolonial love. The Black community has created worlds in response to “the relentless tension of the black condi-tion,” and these worlds contain a significance beyond white supremacy that is already a decolonial response.37 In Baldwin’s response to the tensions within the Black condition in the United States, he actualizes a “menaced love,” a process of moving, within his life, toward revelation.38 Menaced love involves
the violence of unmasking, yet not the destruction of the “American house” in which Baldwin recognizes himself.39
More than a decolonial thinker such as Fanon, who articulated a vision of decolonial love within the context of an armed revolution, Baldwin sees Black U.S. Americans as having a stake in the modern/colonial world. Drabinksi puts Baldwin’s insight in the form of a question: “If we take in the pleasure of sound produced by Satch Armstrong, Bessie Smith, or Miles Davis, do we hear a world? If we hear a world, then do we not hear the revolution and resistance that has long since been made, re-made, and made again? Is this not the power of the word tradition?”40 When we see decolonial love already actualized in tradition, when we recognize the already existent and long-standing revolution emerging from decolonial love, redemption becomes something that we need to unveil and enter into, not always and necessarily something to be created anew. The “creation” for Baldwin involves the act of revelation.
Baldwin’s Religiosity as a Response to Coloniality
In living out an orientation of decolonial love, Baldwin draws on salvation as an already-present reality within daily life. The manifestation of salvation is not, as in a decolonial vision such as Fanon’s, limited to revolutionary strug-gle.41 I interpret “salvation” to be the primary conceptual anchor Baldwin uses to express ultimate reality, which for Baldwin I describe in terms of decolonial love. In this light, I consider Baldwin’s religiosity via the window through which I see Baldwin himself enter into it: the connection between the experi-ences of suffering and revelation. Within his consideration of this connection, Baldwin describes the revelatory process in immanent terms. Rather than a turn toward a transcendent truth lying outside historical experience, the expe-rience of suffering—when this experience is not concealed—can catalyze a deepened fidelity to history. Importantly, suffering and salvation do not have a causal relationship for Baldwin. Suffering is not a vehicle by which salvation is attained, nor does salvation represent something “more real” than suffering.
Baldwin’s Understanding of Revelatory Experience
An early theme in Baldwin’s work is the need to go behind the signification or myth of reality. Baldwin shows that neither appreciating the ambiguities and complexities of Black existence in the United States nor valuing the intimate relationship between Black communities and the larger U.S. American society
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should be opposed to radical political force. Baldwin’s protest includes a politi-cal protest against signification or, to put it in positive terms, a struggle for revelation. The religious historian Charles H. Long is clear that signification is a political process. He describes it as a process of naming the other without regard to the concepts through which an “other” people know themselves. For Long, it arbitrarily designates meaning from a hegemonic position, which he considers to have occurred particularly in the period of conquest beginning in the fifteenth century. In this signification, naming the other was wrapped up with political and economic objectives.42 This leads to Long’s notion of myth, which refers to the product of signification. Relative to the processes of moder-nity/coloniality, Long argues that the European myth relies on the designation of meaning to particular “silent” realities. In 1492, the silent reality was the New World.43 The “linguistic conquest” of ascribing meaning to realities per-ceived as silent, as not having the capacity to name themselves, creates a new form of orientation within the world.44
For Long, religion has a unique capacity, as it provides a locus for chang-ing the experience of signification.45 Black communities within the United States experience signification in relationship to Western modernity. However, as Long makes clear (and as Baldwin will also emphasize), the colonial other that affords the possibility of Western modernity also exists as more than what Western modernity ascribes to its other:
One must also take account of those peoples who had to undergo the “creativity” of the Western world—those peoples and cultures who became during this period the “pawns” of Western cultural creativity. They were present not as voices speaking but as the silence which is necessary to all speech. They existed as the pauses between words—those pauses which are necessary if speech is to be possible—and in their silence they spoke. As opposed to the existential and historical presumptions of human beings making their world, those who lived as the material prima (raw material, I think, is the economic way of expressing this) kept the ontological dimension open through their silence. This silence was as necessary as it was forced.46
At the beginning of modernity, the West had to confront what it held to be the massive silence of the New World, which it did by using its creativity to signify this silence.47 The recognition of the incompleteness of Western creativity—and here I mean the inherent incompleteness, not an incompleteness needing to be brought to completion, in the Habermasian understanding of Western
modernity—and its inability to signify the silence of its other indicate the ontology that exists outside Western creativity. The “primitives” occupy a fun-damentally ontological position that the Western imagination cannot recog-nize, as this recognition would be self-destructive. This is why, as Fanon points out, the modern/colonial situation demands that the colonized “lack ontologi-cal resistance.”48
Like Baldwin, Long offers a constructive response to the lack of ontologi-cal resistance among the colonized that transcends this signification. Silence, for Long, “does not mean absence; rather, it refers to the manner in which a reality has its existence. . . . It means that silence is a fundamentally ontologi-cal position, a position which though involved in language and speech exposes us to a new kind of reality and existence.”49 At this point, Long moves past a purely constructive and hermeneutical understanding of reality. He opens up the possibility—which Baldwin affirms—of a passive moment in understand-ing reality. The “fundamentally ontological position” indicates a passive or receptive process of connecting to meaning that already exists.
In Long’s understanding of the signification of Western modernity’s other, the recognition of the ontological position within silence can move us beyond this signification when silence does not immediately imply a need to signify it through Western creativity. He thus focuses on the opaqueness of the Black community, which always transcends signification: even in the signification and silencing of the Black community, “there remained the inexhaustibility of the opaqueness of this symbol for those who constituted the ‘things’ upon which the signi-fications of the West deployed its meanings. This doubleness of consciousness, this existence in half-lights and within the quasi fields of human infection, is the context for the communities of color, the opaque ones of the modern world.”50 Long suggests that theologies among the oppressed feed on the opaque qual-ity of the communities signified by Western creativity. Baldwin draws on the opacity of the Black community to transcend the mechanisms signification serves. This is an iconoclastic move that paves the way for his constructive understanding of salvation as revelation.
Baldwin particularly focuses on how dominant discourses signify Black U.S. Americans and mythologize their position within the United States. He develops an understanding of revelation in response to this. The process of signification sacrifices the real in the real-imagined tension necessary to Baldwin’s decolonial vision of love. This process of myth creation conceals and distorts experiences of historical suffering, as well as the worlds of meaning Black U.S. Americans have created as grounds from which to know themselves. This concealment serves to justify modernity. Baldwin’s response holds that
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the experience of revelation is made concrete when subjects go behind these significations, and he demands that the writer take up the task of actualizing revelatory experience.
In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin describes truth as something the writer has to work to uncover.51 The process of uncovering is different than the process of signification as an invention of meaning. As a writer, Baldwin does not have to invent all meaning. There is meaning that already exists and to which he can connect. “It is this power of revelation,” Baldwin writes, “which is the business of the novelist, this journey towards a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims.”52 Baldwin not only recommends this task but also enacts it in his own work.
Baldwin rejects two “theologies” that inhibit the process of revelation, and thus salvation.53 In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe envisions African Americans’ salvation in their assimilation. Uncle Tom can only be saved through humility and suffering, through a fear of damnation, and thus through a need to address human sin by entering into a European–North American framework.54 Baldwin interprets Stowe as attempting to “purify” African Americans, “rob[ing] them in white, the garments of salvation.”55
Baldwin also rejects a more complex “theology” that he finds in Richard Wright’s work. Referring to Wright’s novel Native Son, Baldwin writes, “Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a comple-ment of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy.”56 The continuation comes from a refusal to see the possibility of transcending the signification Western creativity puts upon its other. In Native Son, Wright fails to disclose the Black subject outside of being a product or signification of the white gaze.57 Bigger Thomas lives outside of life. Baldwin argues in “Many Thousands Gone” that the idea that the monstrous sort of being that Bigger represents functions as a representative of the larger reality of Black existence in fact incarnates a myth that U.S. Americans hold: “Bigger has no discernible relationship to him-self, to his own life, to his own people, nor to any other people—in this respect, perhaps, he is most American—and his force comes, not from his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his significance as the incarnation of a myth.”58 Bigger is “American” insofar as he is a creation that emerges from a denial of sociality. He is a creation that furthers a myth rather than a creation that emerges from the existential reality, the lived experience. This is where Native Son fails as a novel, according to Baldwin: it is not devoted to truth, and, moreover, it actively conceals truth. The denial of any tradition from which Bigger comes leads to the further prohibition of liberation emerging from within the social web. By disassociating Bigger from the social reality, Wright
risks denying the reality of the Black existential condition. He merely rein-forces the narrative of a fallen Black existence that then needs the “American” narrative. By focusing on the Black social tradition and framework, Wright could have forced U.S. Americans to reckon with a social reality for which its theology could not account—that is, a presence of salvation outside the stan-dard “American” narrative.
This position is further clarified in a similar critique that fellow writer Ralph Ellison levels in response to Irving Howe, whom he sees defending Richard Wright from a white liberal position that maintains the signification of Black U.S. Americans.59 Ellison argues that “Wright could imagine Bigger, but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright. Wright saw to that.”60 By not being able to see this limitation in Wright’s work, or by hanging onto a reductive understanding of Black humanity, Howe participates in the prob-lematic theology that Wright allows for. Ellison strongly opposes the process that Long refers to as signification by opening up the complexity of Black expe-rience, and, in a manner similar to Baldwin, he sees his work as “a guerilla action in a larger war” in which those posing as sympathizers use concepts from a hegemonic position that distort the lived reality from which Ellison writes.61
Along with these two problematic “theologies,” which both interpret sal-vation as a liberation from Blackness, Baldwin—from a deeper loyalty to the task of revelation—rejects the Christian tradition he participated in as an ado-lescent. Clarence Hardy points out Baldwin’s narration of the crucial moment of the shift in his religiosity in Go Tell It on the Mountain. In the beginning of the semiautobiographical novel, the main character, John, stands on top of a hill in Central Park and gazes out over the city, remembering “his father and his mother, and all the arms stretched out to hold him back, to save him from this city where, they said, his soul would find perdition.” Before John runs down the hill toward the city, he ponders the glories of eternity that reli-gion promised. He concludes: “These glories were unimaginable—but the city was real.”62 The choice is unequivocal. As Hardy argues: “Although Baldwin seems continually caught throughout his career between intensely religious and secular worlds, he squarely faces the secular—he always faces the city.”63 The Christianity Baldwin inhabits in his adolescence does not have the capacity to reveal the complexities of the material world. It merely becomes part of the false attempt to signify the Black experience of suffering in order to fit into an anti-Black world.
Baldwin later levels this critique beyond the Black evangelical Christian tradition of his adolescence, criticizing all religious expressions that construct
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identity in such a way that they fail to contribute toward the task of revela-tion. In a debate with Malcolm X, and in the context of the possibility of the Nation of Islam as a counterreligiosity, for example, Baldwin declares: “I am not religious and therefore . . . all theologies for me are suspect. . . . I would like to think of myself as not needing to be supported by a myth. I would like to see myself as being able to face whatever it is I have to face as me . . . without having my identity dependent on something, finally, which has to be believed.”64 Baldwin searches for a world in which theology, which he under-stands as a mythical underpinning to our confrontation with reality, becomes unnecessary, or, in a more positive reading that allows for a more nuanced understanding of theology, he searches for a theology that emerges out of the confrontation with reality. This theology is grounded in decolonial love, which maintains the tension Baldwin finds so crucial in the theater and that he hopes for in the church.
Baldwin follows up on the task he sets for the novelist of contributing toward revelation by enacting something similar to Long’s method of “archaic critique.” He brings out the covered-over and silenced experiences in the U.S. American reality, which is in fact the process of forcing revelation. In Baldwin’s “crawling back,” he uncovers the political process embedded within the iden-tity formation of the United States. The United States “becomes white” by taking on the principle (even if, publicly, such a principle is denounced) that whiteness contains an ontology that determines the nonontology of those silent to the West.65 This entails the signification of the nonwhite subject, destroy-ing or concealing any cosmovision that threatens the legitimacy of the United States. The enforced “lack of ontological resistance” of the signified, to use Fanon’s phrase, constitutes “America.” Baldwin’s decolonial love destroys this “American” identity by bringing forth the ontological resistance that exists in the worlds Black U.S. Americans have made. This sets the stage for Baldwin to argue that revelatory experience in the U.S. context cannot but go through the lived experience of the Black condition. Before focusing on the praxis of redemption, however, I consider the redemptive capacity of the experience of suffering within Baldwin’s religiosity.
The Redemptive Capacity of the Experience of Suffering
The Christian concept of redemptive suffering has a problematic history, especially as Christianity has functioned vis-à-vis Black communities in the United States. Delores S. Williams has given one of the best theological artic-ulations of the painful historical manifestations of the Christian notion of
redemptive suffering. Williams shows how an emphasis on Jesus’s suffering on the cross, while empowering for Black (male) theology, has been oppres-sive for Black women. Historically, Black women have been pushed into sur-rogacy roles, “roles that ordinarily would have been filled by someone else.”66 While forced roles changed after slavery, the fundamental experience of surro-gacy remained. Seeing Jesus as the ultimate surrogate—varieties of atonement theology understand Jesus to stand in humans’ place for our salvation—gives divine legitimacy to social-historical roles of surrogacy. This historical experi-ence prompts Williams to focus on Jesus’s life-affirming praxis rather than Jesus’s experience on the cross. Because there is nothing redemptive in the experience of surrogacy, which is an experience of suffering, Williams argues that in the encounter between divine and human in the wilderness, and par-ticularly with the divine who is always for life and for survival, sin begins to be conquered and the nature of redemption is clarified. In other words, Williams finds Jesus’s resistance to the antikingdom in light of his affirmation of life, not in light of his surrogacy, to be salvific.67 When Williams ultimately argues that we are “redeemed through Jesus’ ministerial vision of life and not through his death,” the lived experiences of Black women motivate her argument, not an apologetic impulse to find meaning in Jesus’s redemptive suffering on the cross.68 In this way, Williams maintains Christian faith claims while avoiding the oppressive symbol of redemptive suffering.
Keeping Williams’s critique of redemptive suffering in mind, Victor Anderson carefully develops a constructive theological position that values suf-fering. Suffering plays a similar role in both Anderson’s model and Baldwin’s orientation of decolonial love, or his religiosity. Anderson argues that in the experience of suffering, creative capacities come to fruition: “These virtues are not sequential effects of suffering. Rather, they are copresent or emergent potentialities in the creative exchange of human beings themselves with suf-fering and evil.”69 He sees a creative capacity copresent in the suffering of a people that suffering can occasion but that is not derivative of suffering. As such, suffering does not cause or determine salvation, but can occasion it.70
In his attempt to actualize a process of revelation in his work, Baldwin appreciates the redemptive value of suffering in a manner similar to that of Anderson. He does not see suffering as inherently redemptive or productive but does recognize that suffering can provide a common basis out of which a response that transcends suffering can be formulated. In other words, suffering does not cause redemption, yet people’s responses to suffering can be revela-tory and thus salvific. Suffering, when not concealed through signification, can ground an evaluation of reality and an evaluation of relationships within
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reality. Suffering is productive insofar as it occasions creative meaning-making within Western modernity, yet underneath the logic of Western modernity.
Baldwin describes such a context of suffering in his early short story “Sonny’s Blues” (1957). The narrator is a schoolteacher disappointed in his brother, Sonny, who is in jail after a heroin bust. He finally decides to write Sonny after the death of his own daughter. The narrator’s suffering as a result of his daughter’s death establishes a context within which he can understand Sonny’s relationship to the world. “My trouble made his real,” he says.71 After Sonny returns from jail, the narrator and Sonny discuss the inevitability of the experience of suffering, which leads the narrator to ask, “Isn’t it better, then, just to—take it?” Sonny responds: “But nobody just takes it . . . that’s what I’m telling you! Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the ways some people try—it’s not your way!”72 At this point, the central problem of the story becomes the narrator’s attempt to understand jazz and blues as a way Sonny deals with his experience of suffering.
Only at the end of the story, when he goes to hear his brother play, does the narrator recognizes how music provides a context for a response to suffer-ing. In watching Sonny play, the narrator finally understands Sonny’s attempt to makes sense of his experience.73 Sonny creates some sort of order through connecting his own experience and “that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy.”74 Yet the redemption found in this act of giving a sound, or an order, to the experience of suffering, while profoundly real, is also ephem-eral, as the narrator comments: “And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that the trou-ble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”75 This ability to touch something universal that lies underneath signification, even if ephemeral, points toward the religiosity that emerges from Baldwin’s struggle with his relationship to an oppressive world that cannot be named in the symbols he gets from the church.76 Baldwin’s religiosity emerges as he makes sense of an experience of suffering. The creative capacity that the experience of suffering can occasion is redemptive because it is revelatory.
In “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin shows that suffering provides a context for the process of designification, or, perhaps more accurately, alter-signification. Baldwin alter-signifies in that he puts forth a different way of signifying, not just a different signification. Alter-signification creates meaning by uncover-ing what is already present in the opaqueness of communities. Suffering occa-sions this alter-signification. It occasions creativity, as Anderson phrases it, that allows for a repositioning within the “American house.” In this respect, as I indicate in the second epigraph from Charles H. Long, alter-signification
implies a reflective rather than eschatological task. Whereas for Fanon a deco-lonial vision entails “the end of the world,” for Baldwin a decolonial vision does not sever the Black community from the “American house.” A line of ancestors, Baldwin acknowledges, have paid “so imaginable a price” and have “made it my home.” The alter-signification contained within the process of mak-ing the American house a home carries a trace of the oppressive signification that Baldwin attempts to subvert through revelation. Thus, designification is never total. Through the contiguous sites of theater and church, and now the music that emerges from a context of suffering, Baldwin locates the emergence of alter-signification. These sites offer a decolonial imaginary that goes behind the way Black U.S. Americans have been signified in relation to the United States and, in doing so, plays within the historical configurations of signifying to reveal and thus transcend the myths that signification creates.
Baldwin makes his reflection on the explanatory and alter-signifying power of jazz and the blues more explicit in a 1979 essay in which he puts forth jazz as a possibility for redemption within the U.S. context.77 Baldwin argues that jazz represents a universal capacity to name the world out of an experience of suffering. Jazz can realize a connection prohibited by the myths originating in fifteenth-century conquests. Jazz provides such a possibility because it allows the United States to come to terms with, or “conquer,” its history.
In this essay, Baldwin takes James Lincoln Collier’s attempt to define jazz in The Making of Jazz (1979) as an attempt to define his own history, his own life.78 Collier presents a “comprehensive history” of jazz without much recourse to jazz scholarship. He rather relies on a personal approach in which he, for example, focuses on the personal inadequacies of jazz musicians with-out describing the musicians in their contexts.79 Baldwin feels obligated to respond to Collier because of the fear that his nephew “or, for that matter, my Swiss godson or my Italian godson,” will believe it.80 In other words, Baldwin’s response does not only apply to Black U.S. Americans; a distor-tion of the Black U.S. American condition implies a distortion of the human condition.
Baldwin is clear that jazz arose, in part, in response to Europe’s nam-ing of history. It comes forth “not only to redeem a history unwritten and despised, but to checkmate the European notion of the world.”81 Jazz affords the musician a possibility to name the world in a way that the European cannot, and she or he does so from a context of suffering. Suffering becomes the reality from which to interpret the historical situation, and, within the situation of suffering, jazz musicians make a world within Western modernity
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from an experience that transcends the modern imaginary. In this sense, jazz is a transmodern act that has universal implications. Jazz “creates, as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that absolutely universal question: Who am I? What am I doing here?”82 For those who “survive” Black existence in the United States, something needs to be created—a cosmology, a notion of truth or meaning—on which survivors can depend.83 Baldwin holds this creative act, which is at the same time an act of uncovering, as the possibility for redemption. Jazz is salvific because it actualizes revelation.
Baldwin brings out “the beat” in music as a decolonial world within modernity, or, to use Leanne Simpson’s phrase, the beat is that which creates “islands of decolonial love.”84
Now, whoever is unable to face this—the auction block; whoever can-not see that the auction block is the demolition, by Europe, of all human standards: a demolition accomplished, furthermore, at that hour of the world’s history, in the name of “civilization”; whoever pretends that the slave mother does not weep, until this hour, for her slaughtered son, that the son does not weep for his slaughtered father; or whoever pretends that the white father did not, literally, and know-ing what he was doing, hang, and burn, and castrate, his black son—whoever cannot face this can never pay the price for the beat which is the key to music, and the key to life. Music is our witness, and our ally. The beat is the confession which recognizes, changes, and con-quers time. Then, history becomes a garment we can wear, and share, and not a cloak in which to hide; and time becomes a friend.85
The beat is the foundation of historical experience, part of which is the hardness of life that Baldwin refers to within the condition of Black existence in the United States, and it cannot be concealed. The beat allows for the redemption of history insofar as worlds have been constantly made from this experience. Concealing the beat prevents the fundamental religiosity that Baldwin brings forth.
Baldwin’s turn to the beat is certainly iconoclastic, as he attempts to destroy the false signification of his community and its creativity. But with recourse to the beat, Baldwin also positively affirms the content of redemption through the process of alter-signification. He ties redemption to living into the pulse of life, manifest in “vernacular worlds,” that modern/colonial hierar-chies conceal. In putting forth the beat as a principle of redemption, Baldwin
articulates redemption as a conquering of history that principally comes from the praxis of those signified without ontological resistance.
Redemption as a Praxis of Liberation: The Black Subject as Agent of Redemption
For Baldwin, the Black subject catalyzes redemption because she takes away the system of reality on which “America,” as a modern/colonial reality, depends. In this sense, Baldwin grounds salvation in an iconoclastic moment. A destruc-tion of the structure of orientation within the U.S. context catalyzes salvation. But the creative capacity of love, the positive force of redemption that has always existed within the concealed underside of “America,” motivates this iconoclasm. Thus, Baldwin sees Black U.S. Americans as indispensable for lib-eration because of the alter-signification they offer. Through theater, church, and music (and, of course, for Baldwin, also literature), Black U.S. Americans have created worlds and representations that fundamentally challenge the ulti-mate orientation within “America.”
Grounding one’s identity in the politics and economics of a fabricated history, or the religious/ideological articulations within this history, results in a fragile identity. In this case, a massive lie, a false definition that can be dismantled because it is reducible to a refusal to see the critical and creative potential of the tensions within U.S. American existence, delineates identity: “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.”86 Baldwin sums up the iconoclasm of which he sees the Black community to be capable in the advice he gives his nephew, “If the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”87
Baldwin’s decolonial love, which indicates the positive potential of the redemptive process of alter-signification, involves entering into reality with love, which is anything but passive. Decolonial love breaks down the possibil-ity of “becoming white.” Through the violence of participating in love—violent because it privileges forms of relationality on the underside of Western moder-nity that undermine this social world—a religiosity is made manifest. Love forces revelation by “conquering” history and liberating it from its own concealment of suffering. It is thus precisely the process of forcing revelation itself, despite its character of always being ephemeral, that is iconoclastic and redemptive.
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Conclusion
Baldwin’s understanding of decolonial love, I have argued, grounds his religious orientation, which exists beyond the confines of the church in the United States. Decolonial love, at its basis, is a revelatory praxis, and, insofar as it is revelatory, it is salvific. In his play Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin dem-onstrates a failure to embrace the revelatory capacity of historical experience, which is indicative of the larger U.S. social situation. When signifying practices from positions of power are left unquestioned in light of material existence, there is a need to sing the blues.
As a hermeneutic and political tool, decolonial love allows for the possibil-ity of recognizing realizations of decoloniality within the U.S. context. Theater, church, and music, as sites where decolonial love is made manifest, are all possible locations for decolonial futures. The creativity that the materiality of suffering occasions allows for the possibility of salvation. Baldwin shows this concretely by indicating how theater, church, and music can be contigu-ous sites for revelation—that is, for a different form of signification that takes account of the suffering within Western modernity. When alter-signification takes place from the experience of suffering—and Baldwin is particularly focused on the suffering produced by white supremacy in the United States—African Americans can effect redemption within, yet also beyond, their own community. Decolonial love violently shatters the false sense of reality that U.S. Americans are allowed to cling to as long as dominant forms of significa-tion remain unchallenged.
I am convinced that if theologians are to understand the divine in a way that confronts coloniality, they have to theologize from such intellectual spaces as those that Baldwin opens up. That is, if theologians are to break from thinking within a closed Eurocentric current within Western modernity—that is, one in which innovation is typically seen in a return to the early church or a movement toward postmodern thought—they must begin to theologize from the revelatory capacity of the ways of thinking Baldwin develops. Baldwin forcefully shows that these perspectives emerge from the lived experience of coloniality.
Notes
1. James Baldwin, “Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 647.
2. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 1999), 160.
3. James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie (London: Michael Joseph, 1965).
4. Aníbal Quijano originally developed the concept of coloniality in order to make sense of a historical situation in Latin America. See “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 181–224. Walter Mignolo defines coloniality, taking into account much of the subsequent development of the term, as such: “Coloniality names the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today of which historical colonialisms have been a constitutive, although downplayed, dimension. The concept . . . is not intended to be a totalitarian concept, but rather one that specifies a particular proj-ect: that of the idea of modernity and its constitutive and darker side, coloniality, that emerged with the history of European invasions of Anya Yala, Tawantinsuyu, and Anahuac; the formation of the Americas and the Caribbean; and the massive trade of enslaved Africans. ‘Coloniality’ is already a decolonial concept, and deco-lonial projects can be traced back to the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. And, last but not least, ‘coloniality’ . . . is unapologetically the specific response to globalization and global linear thinking that emerged within the histories and sensibilities of South American and the Caribbean.” Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.
5. See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Interview,” Newsletter of the Centre for Liberation Theologies (Leuven) 9 (October 2014): 10; Ramón Gosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” Transmodernity 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–37.
6. The two most substantial treatments of the theme of religion and God in James Baldwin’s work come from Clarence E. Hardy III and Josiah Ulysses Young III. In James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), Hardy argues that there is both an appre-ciation and critique of Black holiness culture in Baldwin’s work: “while black evangelicalism embodies a posture of resistance against a hostile white world, its redemptive value ultimately fails to overcome the extent to which Christianity has contributed to African disfigurement” (xi). In James Baldwin’s Understanding of God: Overwhelming Desire and Joy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Young argues that “God” for Baldwin refers to that energy or “overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which [we] cannot control, which controls [us]” (196). This “God” connects the self to all that is life. God is the creative element of love. In an article that appeared between these two important publications, Douglas Field, “Pentecostalism and All That Jazz: Tracing James Baldwin’s Religion,” Literature and Theology 22, no. 4 (December 2008): 436–57, argues that Baldwin’s Pentecostal background is central to his work, particularly the connection between music and church that permeates his fiction and nonfiction. Field considers Baldwin’s concept of love to be crucial to his exploration of religion and his understanding of salvation.
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8. In this respect, I recognize what Lewis R. Gordon calls “disciplinary decadence” within Christian theology: “This is the phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognizes its own limitations, to a deon-tologized or absolute conception of disciplinary life. The discipline becomes, in solipsistic fashion, the world. And in that world, the main concern is the proper administering of its rules, regulations, or, as Frantz Fanon argued, (self-devouring) methods.” Gordon, “Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence,” Transmodernity 1, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 98.
9. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2, 10.
10. Ibid., 140.11. Ibid., 141.12. See Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgioin
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). Nygren is clear that eros and agape confront each other as oppositional forces: “Of all the other views that have confronted the Christian idea of love, or agape, and have forced it to a decision—whether to the decision of a life-and-death struggle or of a settlement by compromise—by far the most important is that view of love which finds its most complete and classical expression in the Platonic conception of eros” (30).
13. De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 60. The myth of Tristan and Isolde epito-mizes this for de Rougemont.
14. Ibid., 61.15. Ibid., 61–62, emphasis in original.16. Ibid., 67–69.17. Nelson Maldonado-Torres delineates four moments of the decolonial turn. First, there
is “an explicit engagement with the dilemmas of emancipated peoples of the African Diaspora at the end of the nineteenth century.” Second comes “the disenchantment with Europe that occurred throughout the two world wars.” In a third stage Maldonado-Torres positions the emergence of liberation theology, social sciences, and liberation philosophy in Latin America, as well as subaltern studies in India and Black theol-ogy in the United States. And fourth is the current stage of transmodernity,which indicates a concrete epistemic change. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 226. I can recognize Baldwin as pushing the third stage toward the fourth.
18. The current of decolonial love, a passionate connection to the colonized outside the way modernity/coloniality structures desire, emerges as a claim about the human person when Fanon responds to an anthropological configuration in which the Black subject has no “ontological resistance.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008), 89–90. To create onto-logical resistance, or the possibility of not being named and overdetermined by the white world, conflict is necessary: it requires “the end of the world” (191, translation modified). The world of the colonized has to push into being a new
world. In speaking of “the end of the world,” Fanon remains strongly in line with another decolonial thinker, his teacher Aimé Césaire. Césaire in fact used the same phrase in his “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”: “What can I do? / One must begin somewhere. / Begin what? / The only thing in the world / worth beginning: / The End of the world of course.” (The phrase they both use is “La Fin du monde parbleu.”) See Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, ed. Clayton Eshlemen and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 54.
19. Baldwin particularly focuses on this erotic love in Another Country (New York: Dell Books, 1963).
20. John Drabinski put this idea forth in his talk, “Baldwin, Memory, History,” at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s eleventh annual meeting, “Diverse Lineages of Existentialism,” St. Louis, Missouri, June 19–21, 2014.
21. “Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,—this modern Prometheus,—hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, ‘I am white!’ Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief!” W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1999), 29. On the notion of “divine theft,” also see J. Kameron Carter, “An Unlikely Convergence: W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Barth, and the Problem of the Imperial God-Man,” CR: New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (Winter 2011): 167–224.
22. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work: An Essay (New York: Dial, 1976), 18.23. Koritha Mitchell, “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister
Charlie,” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (March 2012): 35.24. See ibid., 36.25. “I knew enough to know that the actress (the colored lady!) who played Lady
Macbeth might very well be a janitor. . . . Macbeth was a nigger, just like me, and I saw the witches in church, every Sunday, and all up and down the block, all week long, and Banquo’s face was a familiar face. At the same time, the majesty and torment on that stage were real. . . . They were those people and that torment was a torment I recognized” (Baldwin, Devil, 34).
26. Mitchell, “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist,” 41.27. Baldwin, Devil, 34.28. Ibid.29. That we are each other’s flesh and blood “is a truth which it is very difficult for the
theater to deny, and when it attempts to do so the same thing happens to the theater as happens to the church: it becomes sterile and irrelevant, a blasphemy, and the true believer goes elsewhere—carrying, as it happens, the church and the theater with him, and leaving the form behind” (Baldwin, Devil, 30).
30. Ibid., 121, my emphasis; also quoted in Mitchell, “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist,” 39.
31. Mitchell, “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist,” 39.32. Baldwin, Devil, 29.33. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 86.
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34. Ibid., 95.35. Ibid.36. Drabinski, “Baldwin, Memory, History.”37. Baldwin, “Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone,” 643–44.38. Ibid., 646.39. Ibid., 647.40. Drabinski, “Baldwin, Memory, History.”41. For Fanon, salvation is present in the revolutionary decision of the colonized to come
forth as human, grounded in a rationality and cosmology different from Europe’s. Fanon makes this clear when he writes in the midst of the Algerian Revolution: “We want to show in this first study that on the Algerian soil a new society has come to birth. The men and women of Algeria today resemble neither those of 1930 nor those of 1954, nor yet those of 1957. The old Algeria is dead. All the innocent blood that has flowed onto the national soil has produced a new humanity and no one must fail to recognize this fact.” Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1965), 27–28, my emphasis.
42. See Long, Significations, 4–5.43. Ibid., 114.44. Ibid., 116. Fanon also describes the normalization of a metaphysical world imposed
through the conquest of the Americas and Africa that is also a linguistic conquest. Fanon’s description of the metaphysics of Blackness and whiteness is, in Long’s understanding of the term, a description of a religious situation. In attempting to force the obliteration of the metaphysical world established by Europe (“the end of the world”), Fanon’s decolonial love attempts to disallow the possibility of the continuity of the European myth.
45. “The religious experience forces us to come to terms with these modalities [those embedded within ‘the rise of the West’], affirmative and critical. My project on the critical level is a form of the archaic critique, or, if you will, a kind of crawling back through the history that evoked these experiences. . . . The languages and experi-ences of signification can be seen for what they are and were, and one might also be able to see a new and counter-creative signification and expressive deployment of new meanings expressed in styles and rhythms of dissimulation. The religious experience is the locus for this resource” (Long, Significations, 9).
46. Ibid., 65–66, my emphasis.47. Aníbal Quijano focuses on a new model of power that was brought into being in
1492 in two processes: First, the category of race was used to separate conquer-ors from the conquered, which established a new identity for Europe that led to the Eurocentric constitution of knowledge and a new way of legitimizing colonial relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. Second, capitalism and slavery provided a new structure of labor. These processes, Quijano argues, are constitutive of modernity, and thus Quijano and other decolonial theorists place the beginning of modernity in 1492. See Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” trans. Michael Ennis, in Moraña, Dussel and Jáuregui,
Coloniality at Large, 181–224. Nelson Maldonado-Torres describes the silence of the New Word in terms of the colonizers encountering peoples in the New World they assumed to lack religion and thus to lack humanity. See Maldonado-Torres, “AAR Centennial Roundtable: Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 3 (September 2014): 636–65; and Maldonado-Torres, “Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World,” Journal of Religious Ethics 42, no. 4 (2014): 691–711.
48. Fanon, Black Skin, 89–90.49. Long, Significations, 69.50. Ibid., my emphasis.51. See James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Boston:
Beacon, 2012), 14–15.52. Ibid., 15–16.53. See Young, James Baldwin’s Understanding of God, 16–17.54. Although not in reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jawanza Clark offers a construc-
tive response to this problem in Indigenous Black Theology: Toward an African-Centered Theology of the African American Religious Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
55. Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 17–18.56. Ibid., 22. Victor Anderson levels a remarkably similar critique against Black theol-
ogy. He delineates ontological Blackness, a category too freely used in Black theol-ogy, as signifying “the blackness that whiteness created.” Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1999), 13.
57. “Thus has the cage betrayed us all, this moment, our life, turned to nothing through our terrible attempts to insure it. For Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended” (Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” 23).
58. James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son, 35.59. See Irving Howe, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” Dissent (Autumn 1963): 353–68;
and Howe, “A Rejoinder,” New Leader, February 3, 1964, 15–22.60. Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random
House, 1964), 114.61. Ibid., 122.62. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Random House, 1981 [1952]),
66. Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993), 60.
67. Williams argues that womanist theologians draw on Black women’s experience to show that surrogacy is not sacred. “Rather their salvation is assured by Jesus’ life of resistance and by the survival strategies he used to help people survive the death of identity caused by their exchange of inherited cultural meanings for a new identity shaped by the gospel ethics and world view” (Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 164). Williams wants to “free redemption from the cross” and instead put it in Jesus’s ministerial vision (164–65). “It seems more intelligent [in light of the con-temporary situation of suffering] and more scriptural to understand that redemp-tion had to do with God, through Jesus, giving humankind new vision to see the resources for positive, abundant relational life” (165).
68. Ibid., 167.69. Victor Anderson, Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American
Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 99.70. Ibid., 108.71. Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” in Going to Meet the Man (New York: Penguin Books,
1991), 129. In this sense, although I do not follow Douglas Field’s reading of Baldwin as effecting a return to the early church because of his Pentecostalism, I do agree with Field’s interpretation of the significance of suffering in Baldwin’s work: “Baldwin’s most radical rewriting of Christian—or at least spiritual identity—is to place emphasis on salvation and redemption, not through God, but through a love that is founded on the sharing of pain. . . . Baldwin offers salvation through support and love of another” (Field, “Pentecostalism and All That Jazz,” 450).
72. Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” 134, emphasis in original.73. “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then,
on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and tri-umphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours” (ibid., 139).
74. Ibid., 142.75. Ibid.76. Baldwin clarifies this further in The Devil Finds Work: “The blacks did not so much
use Christian symbols as recognize them—recognize them for what they were
before the Christians came along—and, thus, re-invested these symbols with their original energy. The proof of this, simply, is the continued existence and author-ity of the blacks: it is through the creation of the black church that an unwritten, dispersed, and violated inheritance has been handed down. The word ‘revelation’ has very little meaning in the recognized languages: yet, it is the only word for the moment I am attempting to approach. This moment changes one forever. One is confronted with the agony and the nakedness and the beauty of a power which has no beginning and no end, which contains you, and which you contain, and which will be using you when your bones are dust. One thus confronts a self both limited and boundless, born to die and born to live. The creature is, also, the creation, and responsible, endlessly, for that perpetual act of creation which is both the self and more than the self. One is set free, then, to live among one’s terrors, hour by hour and day by day, alone, and yet never alone. My soul is a witness!—so one’s ancestor’s proclaim, and in the deadliest of the midnight hours” (114–15).
77. James Baldwin, “Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption,” in Kenan, Cross of Redemption, 145–53.
78. See James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (New York: Dell, 1979).
79. See Tom Hennessey, review of The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History, by James Lincoln Collier, Ethnomusicology 25, no. 2 (May 1981): 335–36.
80. Baldwin, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” 146.81. Ibid., 147.82. Ibid., 150–51.83. “And not only is he (the innocent criminal) trying to kill you. He would also like you
to be his accomplice—discreet and noiseless accomplice—in this friendly, demo-cratic, and, alas, absolutely indispensable action. ‘I didn’t,’ he will tell you, ‘make the world.’ You think, but you don’t say, to your friendly murderer, who, sincerely, means you no harm: ‘Well, baby, somebody better. And, in a great big hurry’” (Ibid., 152).
84. See Leanne Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love (Winnepeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2013).85. Baldwin, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” 152–53.86. “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s
sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations” (Baldwin, Fire, 9).
