How Blackness Thinks: Religion and Black Feminism
RELIGION767
Will read black feminist theory as a window onto modernity understood as a politico-theological arrangement or as a mythic assemblage, drawing on H. Spillers’ deployment of myth in relation to R. Barthes and Ralph Ellison and her thinking about black culture as “counter-power” and “countermyth” in the “flesh.” In its own varied registers black studies is an intervention into sovereignty, a discursive formation and political praxis of racialization predicated on certain God-terms and structures of belief. The course consists of readings by four black feminist thinkers—H. Spillers, S. Wynter, and Denise F. da Silva, and pieces of M. NourbeSe Philips Zong. 3 units.
Message from the Department:
The faculty of the Department of Religious Studies laments and strongly objects to the racist comments and symbols that have appeared on campus at Duke, repugnant expressions of White supremacy groups and others expressing racial and religious hatred that have no place whatsoever in our community or anywhere else. We sincerely hope that students, staff and faculty across the university will publicly convey their staunch rejection of such hatred in order to champion the values of tolerance and equality that are the true basis of our intellectual and ethical community.