African Americans and the Bible [Reprint ed.] 1610979648, 9781610979641

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
l=Jight: Ot Cultunlf DQ-fottnation and Di~covQty of
Fanny
Sacred
Experience
Art
Bones
"It's Not Just a
Index of Scripture References

Citation preview

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Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 W 8th Ave, Suite 3 Eugene, OR 97401 African Americans and The Bible Sacred Texts and Social Textures By Wimbush, Vincent L. Copyright©2000 by Wimbush, Vincent L. ISBN 13: 978-1-61097-964-1 Publication date 3/1/2012 Previously published by Continuum, 2000

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Contents ~

Preface xv

Acknowledgments Contributors

XVll

1

Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures Vincent L. Wimbush

PattOnB PR~-T~XT~ (What comes before, leads to, the weaving together [trxtus, textura]) (Hermeneutical Frameworks and Historical-Comparative Contexts and Backgrounds)

and ~thttology The ~tudy of thg BibJg8!:~th11ogn1phy 1. The Bible and Contemporary African American Culture I: Hermeneutical Forays, Observations, and Impressions ¼lmaLove

49

2. The Bible and Contemporary African American Culture II: Report on a Preliminary Ethnographic Project James M. Shopshire, Ida Rousseau Mukenge, Victoria Erickson, and Hans A. Baer

66

The ~tudy of thg Bibfga!:~ocio-Cultutal1-fottngMutics 3. "I Don't Read Such Small Stuff as Letters": Phenomenology of African American Engagement Theophus Smith

83 with the Bible

4. The Role of the Bible and Other Sacred Texts in African American Denominations and Sects: Historical and Social Scientific Observations Hans A. Baer

92

Contents

Vlll

5. African Americans and American Biblical Hermeneutics Charles Mabee

103

6. African American Social Cultural Formation, the Bible, and Depth Psychology David Asomaning

111

7. The Bible as Informant and Reflector in Social-Structural Relationships of African Americans James M. Shopshire

123

8. Beyond the Guild: Liberating Biblical Studies Barbara A. Holdrege

138

The .s!tudyof the Bible~u:the ~tudy of Modetn~ociocultutal1-fo:tory 9. Sacred Cosmos: An Ethnography of African Indigenous Religious Traditions Jacob K. Olupona

163

10. Afro-Latinos and the Bible: The Formative Years in Mexico, Brazil, and Peru Colin Palmer

179

11. Casting A~ide the Ballast of History and Tradition: White Protestants and the Bible in the Antebellum Period Randall Balmer

193

PattTwo CON-T~XT~ (The weaving together [con-texere] of worlds [textura, textus] into a History)

"YouBetter Run ••. f:light:Ot CultutalDe-fottnation and the Di!:covetyof the ~elf-in-Mattonage 0

:

12. The Bible and African American Poetry Keith Gilyard

205

13. The ''.Joseph Story" as Slave Narrative: On Genesis and Exodus as Prototypes for Early Black Anglophone Writing Phillip Richards

221

14. Origins of African American Biblical Hermeneutics in Eighteenth-Century Black Opposition to the. Slave Trade and Slavery john Saillant

236

ix

Contents

15. "My Burden Lightened": Frederick Douglass, the Bible, and Slave Culture Sterling Stuckey

251

16. Christianity as a Theater of Interiority: Emma Dunham Kelley's Fiction of the 1890s Carla L. Peterson

266

17. Biblical Themes in the R. Nathaniel Dett Collection: ReligiousFolk-Songsof the Negro (1927) James Abbington

281

18. African Muslim Slaves, the Nation of Islam, and the Bible: Identity, Resistance, and Transatlantic Spiritual Struggles llichard Brent Turner

297

"('rnBuildin'Maa l-lorna... ": ~attlarnant: Otl=otrnation of~alf-andWotldi:-in-Mattonaga 19. The Meanings of Scripture in Gullah Concepts of Liberation and Group Identity Margaret Washington

321

20. Conjuring Canes and Bible Quilts: Through the Prism of Nineteenth-Century African American Spirituality RichardJ Powell

342

21. Prophesying Daughters: Nineteenth-Century the Bible, and Black Literary History Chanta M. Haywood

355

Black Religious Women,

22. Biblical and Historical Imperatives: Toward a History of Ideas about the Political Role of Black Churches Barbara Dianne Savage

367

23. The Virtues of Brotherhood and Sisterhood: African American Fraternal Organizations and Their Bibles Cheryl Townsend Gilkes

389

24. The Bible in the Educational Philosophies of Fanny Jackson Coppin and Nannie Helen Burroughs Linda M. Perkins and Traki Taylor

404

25. "Behold the Dreamer Cometh": Orishatukeh Faduma and Pan-African Biblical Hermeneutics Moses Moore

418

Contents

X

26. The Bible and the Aesthetics of Sacred Space in Twentieth-Century African American Experience l,eslie King-Hammond

433

27. Re-Readings: The Great Migration and the Bible Milton Sernett

448

28. African American Gospel Music Horace Clarence Boyer

464

29. The Fire This Time: Apocalypse and the African American Novel Tradition Maxine Montgomery

489

'.W. The Preacher-Kings: W. E. 8. Du Bois Revisited

501

Michael A. Gomez

31. My God Is a Time-God: How African American Folk Oratory Speaks ( of) Time Cecile Coquet

514

32. The Anointed Ones: Hamer, King, and the Bible in the Southern Freedom Movement Vincent Harding

537

33. City Called Freedom: Biblical Metaphor in Spirituals, Gospel Lyrics, and the Civil Rights Movement Keith D. Miller

546

34. Wresting the Message from the Messenger: The Rastafari as a Case Study in the Caribbean Indigenization of the Bible Nathaniel S. Murrell

558

35. Life-Giving Stories: The Bible in a Congregation N. Lynne Westfield

577

:)fi. African Americans, the Bible, and Spiritual Formation Cheryl J Sanders

588

37. Biblical Inspiration, Cultural Affirmation: The African American Gift of Song Mellonee Burnirn

603

38. The African American Catholic Community and the Bible Cyprian Davis, OSB

616

39. Sacred World and Sacred Text: The Mehu Healing and Retreat Centre in Ghana Kofi Asa re OjJoku and Kathleen O'Brien Wicker

625

xi

Contents

40. "A Way Out of No Way": The Bible and Catholic Evangelization among African Americans in the United States V. P. Franklin

650

41. When Mighty Waters Rise: African American Folk Healing and the Bible

661

Fayth M. Parks 1 "Mumbo Talkin Jurnboh andl=ollowing the "Neo-1-looDooh Way: Negotiation: OtRe-fotrn[ul]ation ftornthe~ite of Mattonage

673

42. The Bible and African American Folklore Yvonne Chireau

43. Aaron Douglas, the Harlem Renaissance, and Biblical Art: Toward a Radical Politics of Identity

682

Abraham Smith

44. Academic Biblical Interpretation in the United States Randall C. Bailey

among African Americans

45. The Construction of a Black Fundamentalist The Role of Bible Schools Alhert G. Miller

Worldview:

46. "For the Cause of Mankind": The Bible, Racial Uplift, and Early Race Movies

696

712

728

Judith Weisenfeld

47. Dry Bones: Spiritual Apprehension

in August Wilson's

743

Joe Turner's Come and Gone Sandra L. Richards

48. The Bible as and at a Threshold: Reading, Performance, and Blessed Space

754

Grey Gundaker

49. Adventures of a Black Child in Search of Her God The Bible in the Works of Me'Shell N'Degeocello

773

Farah J Griffin

50. Hot Buttered Soulful Tunes and Cold Icy Passionate Truths: The Hermeneutics of Biblical Interpolation in R & B (Rhythm & Blues)

782

Cheryl Kirk-Duggan

51. Representin'

God: Masculinity and the Use of the Bible in Rap Music

Charise Cheney

804

Contents

XU

Patt ThtBB

S!UB-TE:XT~ (Getting under [sub-], viewing from different perspectives the implications of, the thing woven [ textus]) "It Should Be a Black and a Church Thing" 52. Lenton Gunn, Jr.

819

"It's Not Just a Black Thing" 53. Marie Case 54. Efrain Agosto 55. Hal Taussig

820 823 824

"It's Not.Just a Christian Thing" 56. Alfred Muhammed

828

"It's Not Just an American Thing" 57. Gosnell Yorke

830

"It's an Orientation and a Political Thing" 58. R. Drew Smith

832

"Some Things about It Are Disturbing" 59. Leonard Harris 60. Roderick Belin

835 838

"It's How Women 'Read' Their 'Titles Clear'" 61.James Ella James 62. Barbara Austin-Lucas

840 843

"Ultimately, It's Not a Change of Color, but a Whole Change-of-Subjecl-Kind-of-Thing" 63. Elizabeth A. Castelli

849

Selected Bibliography

853

Index of Scripture References

857

Index of Names

861

Index of Subjects

870

Preface

The origins of this book lie in an international conference convened at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, April 8-11, 1999. The conference theme was "African Americans and the Bible: Social-Cultural Formation and Sacred Texts." But the conference aimed to be - and was - more than a schedule of papers read. And this book aims to be more than a collection of papers on various topics looking for covers. Attended by more than three hundred persons, the conference was a historic and fascinating experience and event. It was the first multidisciplinary and multiracial conference of scholars and other interested parties on the complex topic African Americans and the Bible. And this book, far beyond the usual proceedings of the academic conference, can be argued to be not only the most comprehensive critical treatment of the subject, but a story and an argument. It is a story about- an interpretive history of -African Americans. And it is an argumentif not necessarily on a universal scale, at least on a scale that includes the modern North Atlantic world, far beyond African America - about social textures and formation. It is about social texturing and social formation in connection with the Bible (and other sacred texts). It is an argument not about the meaning of the Bible, but about the Bible and meaning(-making). And it is about African Americans as the provocative wedge or case-study, as the people "to think with," to think about, the phenomena and issues, not as the exotic other. As such, the book can be claimed to present a challenge to the study of African Americans and to the study of the Bible. Academic African American studies should find it more difficult to ignore the historical and contemporary functions of the Bible and of religious symbolizations and language in general in the formation and orientation of African America. The academic study of the Bible is in this book confronted with a very different construal of its agenda-with the focus not upon the study of texts but upon the study of society and culture and of the ways in which "texts" function within them. The most charitable reading of the pertinent disciplinary politics that hold sway and that provoked this book is as follows: Perhaps both areas of studies have always been aware of the emphases and challenges that this book represents. Perhaps the multifield and multidisciplinary area of African American studies has always been generally aware that African Americans have left the most poignant, ironic, and dramatic clues about their self-understandings and understandings of the world in their engagements of the Bible as a language world, but for some odd reasons - poli-

Preface

XIV

tics? fear? anxiety about practitioners' relationships to the phenomena? - it has not been able to sustain serious and disciplined attention to the areas of study. Given its offices in obfuscating its agenda and identity as European-(white )American studies, perhaps modern academic biblical studies has always understood that it was society and culture that was its true focus, that "the text" was an invention designed for the purposes that academic rigors were supposed to mask, namely, to provide ideological support for the world as constructed by dominants. Perhaps what was needed for both areas of study was the modeling of a way out of their respective politicaldisciplinary holes. This book makes a claim to be for persons so involved one way out. And for all thoughtful, inquiring persons, somewhat confused, discouraged, and disoriented by the sub-rational but loud noises in our times that claim to communicate otherworldly mysteries and mandates, this book may provide compelling (re-) orientation. VINCENT

At the Mouth of Harkm, New York City June 2000

L. WIMBUSH

Acknowledgments ~

The making of the book has been an enormous and complex undertaking. Sixtyeight contributors representing a wide range of academic disciplines and fields and other professions and their different forms of expressions, orientations, and expectations made the project not only historic, but also exciting and exacting. And as is always the case with such a complex project, there are many persons and institutions to thank. I should like to thank: The Lilly Endowment, Inc., for the financial support and encouragement that made possible the launching of the Americans and the Bible Research Project, including the international conference held in April 1999 and my research leave during the academic year 1999-2000. The Ford Foundation, for its financial support of the international conference, especially the contemporary inventory project. Millie Ehrlich, Gloria Arnold, and Marcia Brown, for their assistance with correspondence and the typing of essays. Union Accounting Oflice and mailroom and Front desk Staff, for their assistance and support. Burke Library staff Betty Bolden, Andrew Kadel, and Seth Kasten for their assistance. Ph.D. students Robin Owens, Marie Case, Velma Love, and Margaret Aymer for their general research assistance and proofreading work. Professors Elizabeth Castelli, Leslie King-Hammond, Richard J. Powell, Judith Weisenfeld, Jacob Olupona, James Shopshire, Ida Rousseau Mukenge, and James Abbington, for their friendships and professional advice and criticisms on various topics, issues, and problems, and especially Elizabeth Castelli, for her careful and critical reading of the introduction. Students who took the fall 1998 African Americans and the Bible seminar, for their criticisms, engagement, and encouragement. Ph.D. student Davina Lopez, for her creative work on the Project website and for the diagram included in the introduction. Union graduate Jennifer Battaglioli, for her sensitive and creative work on the book cover. To the sixty-eight contributors, for their patience, support, sensitivity, and professionalism. The women I live with, Linda and Lauren, for making home and family a joy to retreat to, and for making all my work projects possible and my life meaningful.

xvi

Acknowkdgments

Frank Oveis, my editor at Continuum, for being persistent and acting on his faith in this project. And for his professionalism, his willingness always to communicate, his sensitivities. Ph.D. student Rosamond Rodman, for staying the course all the way through! For the incredible energy she gave to all aspects and levels of the work of the projectresearch and conceptualization, design, communications, problem-solving, typing, bibliography, indexing, proofreading, general editorial work. For the initiatives she took to get things done. For her commitment and devotion to, her respect for, pride in, and sensitivity and professionalism about, the book and the issues involved. Most importantfor her modeling of the possibilities and hopes for the ongoing project upon which the book is based. The artwork, poems, and lyrics reproduced in this volume appear by permission: Extended quotations from Robert Penn Warren's poem, "Pondy Woods" reprinted permission of William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author.

by

An extended quotation oflshmael Reed's "Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto" reproduced by generous permission of the author.

Extended quotations from Langston Hughes poem "Ballad of the Seven Songs" is from CollectedPoems by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House, Inc. Extended quotation from Langston Hughes poem "Goodbye Christ" is from CollectedPoems by Langston Hughes. Copyright© 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Haki R. Madhubuti, GroundWorlt:New and SelectedPoems. Don L. Lee/Haki R Madhubuti from 1966-1996. Chicago, Ill.: Third World Press, Inc., 1996 reprinted by permission of Third World Press. Extended quotation from "It Is Deep," ''.JesusWas Crucified, or, It Must Be Deep," from How I Got Ovah, by Carolyn M. Rodgers, copyright© 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975 by Carolyn M. Rodgers. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. An extended quotation from DJ Renegade's song "Rap 23" from the 4,000 Shades of Blue CD reproduced by perml.ssion of Simba Sana, Karibu Books, Hyattsville, Maryland.

Lyrics of "He's an On-Time God" reprinted by permission of Atlanta International Company.

Record

Photos of the Mehu Healing and Retreat Centre in Ghana appear courtesy of Kofi Asare Opoku and Kathleen O'Brien Wicker. Lyrics from "The Way," "Mary Magdalene," "Leviticus: Faggot," and "Deuteronomy: Niggerman," from Michelle N'Degeocello's PeaceBeyondPassion CD, reproduced by permission of Warner Bros. Publications, Inc. Lyrics from "Ain't No Way," "Chain of Fools," "Dr. Feelgood," and "People Get Ready" reproduced by permission of Warner Bros. Publications, Inc. All other permissions for photographs and the reproduction of art work will be found in the captions accompanying the art.

Contributors

JAMESABBINGTONis assistant professor of Music, Shaw University, Raleigh, North Carolina. EFRAINAGOSTOis professor of New Testament and director, Programa Ministerios Hispanos, Hartford Seminary, Connecticut.

de

DAVIDAsOMANINGis a practicing psychotherapist and is a Ph.D. candidate in Psychiatry and Religion, Union Theological Seminary, New York. BARBARA AUSTIN-LUCAS is associate dean, New York Theological Seminary, and assistant minister, Bridge Street AME Church, Brooklyn, New York. HANSA. BAERis professor, department of Arkansas, Little Rock.

of Sociology and Anthropology, University

RANDALLC. BAILEYis Andrew Mellon Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Interdenominational Theological Center, Atlanta. RANDALL BALMERis Ann Whitney Olin professor of Religion at Barnard College, NewYork. RODERICKBELINis a Master of Divinity graduate of Union Theological Seminary and an ordained AME minister, Queens, New York. HORACEBOYERis professor of Music Theory and African American Music, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, retired. MELLONEEBURNIMis associate professor of Afro-American Studies, Indiana University at Bloomington. MARIECAsE is a Ph.D. student in New Testament and Christian Origins, Union Theological Seminary, New York. ELIZABETH A. CAsTELLIis assistant professor of Religion, Barnard College. CHARISECHENEYis assistant professor of Ethnic Studies, California State University, San Luis Obispo. YvoNNE CHIREAUis assistant professor of Religion, Swarthmore Pennsylvania.

College,

xviii

Contributors

CECILECOQUETis assistant professor, American History and Literature, University of Provence (Aix-Marseille 1), France. CYPRIAN DAVIS,OSB, is professor of Church History, St. Meinrad School of Theology and Archabbey, Indiana. VICTORIAERICKSONis associate professor of Sociology of religion and chaplain, Drew University. V. P. FRANKLIN is the Rosa and Charles Keller Professor of Arts and Humanities at Xavier University of Louisiana. CHERYLTOWNSENDGILKESis John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur associate professor of sociology and professor of African American studies, Colby College. KEITHGILYARD is professor of English, Pennsylvania State University MICHAELGoMEz is professor of History, New York University.

FARAH]. GRIFFINis assistant professor of English, University of Pennsylvania. GREYGUNDAKERis assistant professor of Anthropology, College of William and Mary. LENTONGuNN,JR., is senior minister, St.James Presbyterian Church, Harlem, New York. VINCENTHARDINGis professor of Religion and Social Transformation, of Theology, Denver.

Iliff School

LEONARDHARRISis professor of Philosophy and director, African American Studies and Research Center, Purdue University. CHANTAM. HAYWOODis assistant professor of English, Florida State University, Tallahassee. BARBARA HOLDREGEis associate professor of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. JAMESELLAJAMESis executive committeewoman and California state convener of the board of the National Council of Negro Women, and an ordained deacon, McGee Avenue Baptist Church, Berkeley, California. LESLIEKING-HAMMOND is dean of Graduate Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art. CHERYLKIRK-DUGGAN is assistant professor and director, Center for Women and Religion, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. VELMALOVEis a Ph.D. student in Bible and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, NewYork.

xix

Contributors

CHARLESMABEEis professor of Old Testament, Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit. ALBERTG. MILLERis associate professor of Religion, Oberlin College, Ohio. KEITHD. MILLERis associate professor of English, Arizona State University. MAxINEL. MONTGOMERY is associate professor of English, Florida State University, Tallahassee. MOSESN. MOORE is associate professor of American and African-American Religions, Arizona State University. ALFREDMUHAMMED is .a graduate student in Islamic studies and Muslim-Christian relations, Hartford Seminary, and Imam in the Muslim American Society, New York City. NATHANIELS. MURRELLis assistant professor, department Philosophy, North Carolina State University at Wilmington.

of Religion and

JACOBOLUPONAis professor of African American and African Studies and director, Religious studies Program, University of California, Davis. KOFI As.AREOPOKU is visiting professor of Religion, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania. COLINPALMERis Distinguished professor of History, CUNY Graduate Center, New York City. FAYfH M. PARKSis stafr' therapist, Counseling and Human Development University of South Carolina, Columbia. LINDAM. PERKINSis associate professor, Educational Foundations,

Center,

Hunter College.

CAR.LAL. PETERSONis professor of English and Comparative Literature, of Maryland, College Park.

University

RICHARDJ. POWELLis John Spencer Bassett professor of Art History, Duke University. PHILLIPRICHARDSis associate professor of English, Colgate University. SANDRARICHARDSis professor of African American studies and theater, Northwestern University. IDA ROUSSEAUMUKENGEis professor of Sociology, Morehouse College. JOHN D. SAILLANTis associate professor, English and American Studies, Western Michigan State University, Kalamazoo. CHERYL]. SANDERSis professor of Christian Ethics, Howard University School of Divinity. BARBARA SAVAGE is assistant professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.

xx

Contributors

MILTONSEl{l'\IETIis professor of African American Studies, Syracuse University. JAMESSnoPSHIRE is professor of Sociology of Religion and Urban Ministry, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C. Newton

ABRAHAMSMITH is associate professor of New Testament, Andover Theological School, Massachusetts. R. DREWSMITHis scholar-in-residence,

Center.

Morehouse College Leadership

THEOPHUS SMITH is associate professor, Religious Studies, Emory University, Atlanta. STERLINGSTt:CKEYis professor of History, University of California, Riverside. HAL 1~\USSIGis professor of Biblical Studies at Chestnut Hill College and Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and pastor of Chestnut Hill United Methodist Church, Philadelphia. ThAKI TAYLORis assistant professor, School of Education, University of Michigan at Flint.

RICHARDB. TuRNER is associate professor, Religious Studies, DePaul University, Chicago. WASHINGTONis professor of History, Cornell University. MARGARET is associate professor of Religious Studies, Vassar College. JUDITH WEISENFELD LYNNEWESTFIELDis assistant professor of Religious Education, Drew University. KATHLEENO'BRIEN WICKERis Mary W. Johnson in the Humanities, Scripps College, California.

and

J. Stanley Johnson

professor

GOSNELLYORKEis Translation consultant, United Bible Societies (Africa Region), South Africa. VINCENTL. WIMBUSHis professor of New Testament and Christian Origins, Union Theological Seminary, and adjunct professor, Religion department, Columbia University. ROSAMONDC. RODMANis a Ph.D. candidate, University.

Religion department,

Columbia

-

Introduction -

Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures VINCENT

L. WIMBUSH

African Americans and the Bible: A Disturbing Conjunction and a Defiant Question In a review essay of Toni Morrison's Paradise entitled "The Scripture of Utopia" 1 author and poet Patricia Storace made the argument that Morrison like few other writers had always in her literary work challenged readers to see the full complexity of human emotions, perspectives and orientations through African Americans. She has always understood the black presence to be central to any understanding of "our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination. "2 Paradise,in particular, Storace went on to argue, draws that black presence forward from the margins of imagination to the center of American literature and history .... [Morrison) tells a story of an African-American community in the Vietnam era which is also a story about colonial America ... about pioneers laying claim to a country, and less explicitly, about the ways in which possession of this country has been extended and justified through stories ... kneaded strongly into image of the country itself, so that the story of its claiming almost irresistibly evokes images of white founding fathers. Morrison does not waste her novelist's energies criticizing or protesting that story or attempting to replace it with new myth. She does the work of art, not argument and ... she uses the juxtaposition of founding stories to disorient the reader: Are we in the nation itself or an illusion of it? In Paradise, the story of America's white founding fathers is moved from foreground to background - in the community of Ruby, Oklahoma, founded by African-Americans, the official national founding myth is a shadow of their own, in a community where shadows are not dark, but white ... in laying frank and adventurous claim to a classic subject of American literature, Paradisesubverts a kind of unspoken literary class distinction, the assumption that a story told with African-Americans or women in the foreground will necessarily be a story of impenetrably special experience and concerns, its subject somehow provincial, confined exclusively to itself, or to its response as a community

2

Vincent L. Wimbush

to the power of the dominant community, a shadowy adjunct normative story of national life. 3

to the "real"

I was so struck by Storace's arguments about Morrison's complex, nuanced centering-foregrounding of African American experience in the literary imagination, and the corresponding back-grounding of the dominant white American story line, that I completely lost sight of her general criticism of Paradise as a novel. In the same way that Mary Helen Washington, in her 1997 presidential address before the American Studies Association entitled "Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?" 4 raised an intriguing question for Americanists to consider about the positioning of African Americans, I have questions I want scholars of the Bible, among others, to consider: How might putting African Americans at the center of the study of the Bible affect the study of the Bible? What impact might it have on the politics of the conceptualization and the structuring of academic guild study of the Bible? How might the academic guild of biblical scholarship in North America and beyond be influenced? What then would be the profile, the carriage, the orientation of the biblical scholar? Would or should the agenda of the study of the Bible then necessarily be focused around the identification of Africans as biblical characters? Upon the African origins of biblical traditions? What might be the implications and ramifications of construing the study of the Bible - its impetus, methods, orientations, approaches, politics, goals, communications, and so forthon bases other than European cultural presumptions and power, interests and templates? How would the historical-interpretive, social-scientific, philosophical and theological, comparative religio-critical, cultural-critical, studv of African Americans be affected? With the engagement of the Bible as intentional focus what might an interpretive history of African Americans look like? What would such a focus do to long-standing historical schemas of and presuppositions about the development and dynamics of African American life? How might popular and academic study of culture in general be differently construed and affected? How might studies of American and African American life he affected? With the interaction of the Bible and African Americans as case-study, how might a multidisciplinary study in the construction and re-constructions of societies and cultures in complex relationship to sacred texts be shaped? With sacred texts and African Americans in mind, how then might the cornplexities, the differences as well as patterns, in cultural formation in general be understood and explained? With the complexity of African Americans as a social formation in particular in mind, how might the (phenomenological) origins and functions of the Bible and other sacred texts be understood and explained? How might the Bible and other sacred texts be explained more specifically in terms of orientation bodily, psycho-social, sociocultural, and political? How might the Bible and other sacred texts be explained as cultural products and as shapers of culture? How might they be explained as types or cultural phenomena or practices?

Introduction:Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

3

These are some of the questions that provided impetus for the African Americans and the Bible Research Project that has in turn inspired this collection of essays. These questions and some of the presuppositions underlying them are complex, political, and academically and sociopolitically transgressive. What follows is an attempt to articulate a theoretical framework within which the questions and presuppositions may be situated and engaged.

Reading the World- "Darkly":5 Problematizing the Conjunction and the Question In a riveting line from his poem written in 1945 entitled "Pondy Woods," 6 Robert Penn Warren, a Southern Agrarian turned New Critic, has a buzzard opine to a black male running away from trouble in a small southern town: "Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical." In a signifyin' retort to Warren's poem in a lecture given several decades later at Yale University African American cultural critic and poet Sterling Brown, whose career stretched back to the Harlem Renaissance, reportedly said, "Cracker, your breed ain't exegetical." It is from Houston A Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that I get word of Sterling Brown's retort. 7 Unfortunately, I do not have access to the full text of Brown's lecture. But we all have - as Brown must have had - the full text of Warren's poem. Here is how it begins: The buzzards over Pondy Woods Achieve the blue tense altitudes, Black figments that the woods release, Obscenity in form and grace, Drifting high through the pure sunshine Till the sun in gold decline. Big Jim Todd was a slick black buck Laying low in mud and muck Of Pondy Woods when the sun went down In gold, and the buzzards tilted down A windless vortex to the black-gum trees To sit along the quiet boughs, Devout and swollen, at their ease. By the buzzard roost Big Jim Todd Listened for the hoofs on the corduroy road Or for the foul and sucking ground. Past midnight, when the moccasin Slipped from the log, and trailing in Its obscured waters, broke The dark algae, one lean bird spoke.

4

Vincent L. Wimbush

"Nigger, you went this afternoon For your Saturday spree at the Blue Goose saloon, So you've got your Sunday clothes, On your big splay feet got patent-leather shoes. But a buzzard can smell the thing you've done; The posse will get you - run, nigger, run There's a fellow behind you with a big shot-gun. Nigger, nigger, you'll sweat cold sweat In your patent-leather shoes and Sunday clothes When down your track the steeljacket goes Mean and whimpering over the wheat. "Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical." The buzzard coughed. His words fell In the darkness. Mystic and ambrosial. "But we maintain our ancient rite, Eat the gods by day and prophesy by night. We swing against the sky and wait; You seize the hour, more passionate Than strong, and strive with time to die With time, the beaked tribe's astute ally. What this part of the poem makes clear to me is that given its position the line that most stirred Brown and Gates - "Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical" is indeed the line that Warren intended to provoke the reader. Brown and others were right to respond to it. But I am now not so sure that Sterling Brown's reputed response - as interesting for its parallel metrical pattern and syllabication as for its substance-addressed the most problematic aspects of Warren's buzzard's line. Brown and Gates seemed to have understood Warren to be saying that the black person does not and cannot wax metaphysical or theorize, cannot deal with complex conceptualizations, cannot intellectually transcend. In response, Brown seems to have said that the white folk do not and cannot see through the mists they themselves have created and now live in, viz. cannot critically parse or consistently deconstruct reality. On several occasions Gates set up Warren and Brown in such sharp conflict, interestingly and ironically enough, not so much in order to castigate Warren and applaud Brown, but in order to advance his argument for the imperative of theorizing upon the black vernacular tradition. 8 Gates believes, rightly I think, that no people, no "breed" is either naturally "metaphysical" or naturally "exegetical," or naturally incapable of such. 9 Warren's lines and sentiments, Brown's reactions to these and other lines and sentiments, and Gates's and Baker's uses of Brown's reactions to Warren are most provocative because they help to point to and define a number of issues and problematics that have to do with the complexities and politics of interpretation - of the Bible and other sacred texts, of society and culture, of the Bible and other sacred

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texts in terms of social-cultural texturalization, of society and culture in terms of textualization. 10 The most pressing among these interpretive problematics involve naming and dramatizing interpretation in relationship to social-cultural power, indeed, interpretation itself as a form of social power. These problematics include: the power to speak and interpret on one's own terms, in one's own voice; the silencing of interpretation from the periphery; the power dynamics in the invocation and use of a mythic canonical story; the determination and overdetermination of racial and ethnic identity; the importance of a safe site of interpretation and enunciation; and the significance of the darkness in interpretation - of self, text and world. In "Pandy Woods," Warren seems to have intended by "metaphysical" to point not merely to theorizing in general, and certainly not in a sense of a particular branch of philosophy, but to certain recognized, approved set of Western principles, styles, forms and practices of interpretation. Of course, Warren masks such things as natural and universal through the worldview and sentiment, the cranky speech and orientation, of the buzzard: the appropriate sociocultural disposition that is modeled as being not only (text-) learned, but also above it all, seeing things from a high and grand perspective, being philosophical (in the popular American sense of the term) and earnest in believing in the Christian myth; being patient, being willing to stay in the background for strategic purposes; being flexible; being willing to meet disappointment and surprise; being willing to wait for things to fall or come one's way, being willing to wait for (the others') death, then readying oneself patiently to swoop down and feed on the remains of the dead. Of course, the authoritative interpretive disposition is white. How could it be otherwise? The dramatic overrepresentation of Big Jim Todd forces the reader to assume that all others referred to or featured in the poem are white. The narrator and his world, certainly, must be assumed to be white. And the buzzard, if not white, then it is depicted at least as a spokesperson for or interpreter of whiteworld. As Warren here participates in the creation or perpetuation of "the nigger," "the Negro," "the Black;' does he not also participate in the creation of "whiteness" and "the white"? 11 As for the black runaway named BigJim Todd, he was chastised for being like his whole "breed," the opposite of the buzzard in every respect- impatient, passionate, always struggling and striving, always contesting and fighting in some form or another, even attempting to run away. It is not clear what precise immediate reasons prompted Jim Todd to ruri away; would anyone in Warren's world have cared? What is clear is that iU:running away he had made a fatal move - he had essentially cut himself off from a world; he had established himself as a maroon, one who had to continue running and fending off the dogs, with slim hope that one day he might be able to settle down and build himself an-other world. 12 According to the buzzard Jim Todd does not realize, at any rate, that running away is no good, that his death sh.ould be embraced. Besides, according to the Christian myth, one of the defining myths of the larger world in which both buzzard and Jim Todd found themselves (Tennessee and beyond), death may not always be the end:

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"The Jew-boy died. The Syrian vulture swung Remotely above the cross whereon he hung From dinner-time to supper-time, and all The people gathered there watched him until The lean brown chest no longer stirred, Then idly watched the slow majestic bird That in the last sun above the twilit hill Gleamed for a moment at the height and slid Down the hot wind and in the darkness hid. Nigger, regard the circumstance of breath: Non omnis monar, the poet saith." This speech is demonstration of "metaphysical" interpretation. But here it is not merely a capacity for or penchant toward theorizing; it is instead a certain culture-specific mystical-spiritual experience, disposition and orientation encoded in a particular white western reading of the Christian story. The buzzard's exegesis of the Bible - specifically, his interpretation of the passion story ("The Jew-boy died ... ") through the lens of the western classical tradition as evidenced in the reference to the Latin poet ("Non omnis monar, the poet saith") - is demonstration according to Warren of the capacity to wax metaphysical in a certain (white) key.13 Here is high dramatic display of the western intellectual and religious tradition in a form of biblical exegesis. The "Syrian vulture"? The unusual attention and even more unusual praise ("majestic"?) given to a representation of that breed by the buzzard must reflect some sort of intimate tie, kinship, solidarity. Warren's buzzard seems to see the vulture as heroic precursor. Does it-viz. does Warren -with all the attendant irony and powerful and disturbing implications, also see the ''.Jew-boy" as precursor to Big Jim Todd? But how could the buzzard then go on to hold Jim Todd in contempt? Hard to miss and hard to avoid considering as explanation for the buzzard's response to Jim Todd is the advanced state, one should even say, the corrosive, poisonous, blinding effects of the whitening or Europeanization of the ancient traditions - including the Bible-that the speech of Warren's buzzard reflects. The black figure, precisely because he is associated in the buzzard's mind with the Christ figure, the ''.Jewboy," becomes the figure par excellence of the outsider to the western intellectual and religious tradition. Big Jim Todd is expressly said to be other ("Nigger, your breed ain't metaphysical"), is rendered silent, and is not allowed to respond to the buzzard's scholarly scriptural exegesis. As translator and interpreter of the western religious and intellectual traditions the buzzard is not interested in, indeed, cannot tolerate, Jim Todd coming into speech: Pedantic, the bird clacked its gray beak With a Tennessee accent to the classic phrase; Jim understood, and was about to speak, But the buzzard drooped one wing and filmed the eyes.

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Sterling Brown's counterposing of the exegetical with the metaphysical raises the question about what the exegetical - the critical parsing - can mean and effect. Does it mean that with exegesis Big Jim Todd would have been able to see more clearly what his situation meant? With the facility for doing exegesis would he have been able to talk back to the buzzard, especially regarding the buzzard's interpretation of the Christian myth? Regarding what the Christian myth means or could or should mean in terms of his plight and how he should respond to it? Would exegesis facilitate interpretation of self and world? Brown was right to signify upon Warren. He was right to pick up on the buzzard's outrageous claim that his "breed" alone owned metaphysical speech. But both Brown's and Warren's assumptions about the practices and orientations associated with the terms may confuse and mislead us: Ironically, what the buzzard represented comes closer to the way in which biblical exegesis has actually functioned and continues to function in western high religious and academic circles. An effort to put it in the context of cultural politics and power skirmishes is in order. Biblical exegesis has historically shared all the methods and approaches and presuppositions of philology, including the latter's disingenuous claim about its objective engagement of the literature it calls "classics." At least two underlying strategies have been associated with philology that are particularly noteworthy because they are particularly ominous: one is "the tendency to constitute a particular space as inherently timeless ... or confined to its past ... "; the other is the tendency to deny to the many the project of power that is interpretation of the constructed mythic past through specialist techniques. 14 By the end of the nineteenth century classical philology had been turned into a rigorous and well-defined discipline (some called it "science") that we now recognize in fields such as classics, literature, or English and biblical exegesis. 15 One of the most chilling descriptions of the modem claims and presuppositions of philology in evidence in its different field representations is offered by a contemporary scholar of English and Indian literatures in solidarity with postcolonial thinking. Philology, argues Vinay Dharvadkar, is principally concerned with the past, and not just with any portion of the past, but specifically with the earliest period in recorded history. The discipline conceives of the ancient world as the source, beginning, or origin of a civilization, race, people, or nation, and hence also as the explanatory frame of reference for its entire subsequent historical development, evolution, or descent. In effect, philology constitutes itself as a comprehensive historical discipline, by assuming that the present condition of a society or civilization can be understood only as the outcome of its past. In the regress of successively "past" moments that constitute a particular people's history, the "first moment of true civilization" is historically and historiographically the master moment: if that epoch can be understood in its totality, then everything subsequent in time can be understood or explained by working out the requisite facts and principles of change. At the same time, philology constitutes itself

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as a textual discipline, practicing and perfecting the art of "slowly reading" words, documents, languages -'- the whole web of verbal significations that, in the first place, provides access to the past .... Moreover, in this perspective, since language and thought are inseparable, and language and civilization, history and human beings, documents and societies, are all the intertwined means and ends of philological investigation, philology ultimately also calls itself a master-science of the human mind. 16 The metaphysical penchant of Warren's buzzard shows itself most poignantly in biblical exegesis. Far beyond what happens with the classics of literature, much is at stake (as in social stability) in getting the Bible right - or under control. Thus, the importance of biblical exegesis, part of the larger discourse of philology, with its history of high sociocultural respectability, currency and influence. Few can be deemed authorities of the "classics" apart from certification of training in the "arts and sciences" of exegesis. Arguments and issues that have not been approved by the respective guilds are considered illegitimate. What the buzzard fetishizes and practices is not, as might be suggested by Sterling Brown's reported retort to Robert Penn Warren's chilling accusation against Big Jim Todd and his "breed," the opposite of exegesis. It is far more promiscuous, complex and insidious: it is a representation and valorization of exegesis that dramatically reflects a particular set of metaphysical and sociocultural foundations, politics, practices and prejudices. If Big Jim Todd is understood as "nigger," as one allergic to the metaphysical, as nonreader and non-exegete, then the buzzard must be understood as "cracker," whose practices have resulted in a whitening of the Christian myth and the rhetorical and textual traditions associated with it. According to the buzzard (and Warren and company) no dark peoples can be deemed capable of fathoming the white mysteries. But what if we were here to take up and extend Sterling Brown's signifying practice, honor its call for exegetical work and allow Big Jim Todd and his "breed" to speak and be the focal point of thinking? What if Big Jim Todd's experience - an instance of an African American experience -were the starting and focal point for reading, for interpretation? What if the reading of and thinking about the Bible that third rail of almost all discursive and ideological formations that have led to the constitution of the West-were read through African American experience? I suggest foregrounding African American experience for the study of the Bible not because the African American experience is the one experience that finally and alone is somehow the morally right focus that will lead all to the right interpretation of the Bible. Nor do I advance it for the sake of ethnic cheerleading or as privileged insight or wisdom for the privileged few of a certain hue. What it represents is a challenge to the still largely unacknowledged interested, invested, racialized, culture- and ethnic-specific practice of biblical interpretation that is part of an even larger pattern of such interpretation of literatures and of history in· the West. Incredibly, there are some even today within academic professional circles and within popular religious discourses who fervently claim that their particular brand of in-

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terpretation ("exegesis") is consistently carried out in (a scientific or disciplined or fair-minded) neutral key or mode. Such fervid neutrality can be believed in and practiced correctly only by the dominants. No special pleading here. Centering the study of the Bible upon African Americans would be a defiant intellectual and political act. It is warranted because, as Toni Morrison has so poignantly expressed the matter, "black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis .... " 17 The substitution of African Americans as cultural-hermeneutical template in the study of the Bible is compelling because African Americans are still a generally ignored and unproblematized but haunting starting point of reference with enormous potential to trip biblical scholars and other types of scholars onto a higher level of critical (=self-) consciousness about their practices. The focus upon such a people will force the study of the Bible to begin with some fundamental self-inventorying, phenomenological and sociopolitical, sociopsychological questions and issues; it will not allow the study of the Bible to begin - as is typically the case in the field-in the middle, with much taken for granted about the Bible as phenomenon, as holy book, about what is done with such a book, for whom and why, and to what end. The African American engagement of the Bible is too much a rupture, a disruption, a disturbance 18 or explosion of the Europeanized and white Protestant North American spin on the Bible and its traditions not to begin with the fundamental and open questions that can inspire the most nuanced intellectual work. How could one, having taken seriously the foregrounding of the African American engagement of the Bible, not begin with the fundamental question, which is not about the meaning of any text but about the who/,equest for meaning (in relationship to a [sacred] text)? This proposal is obviously not without its challenges and problems. That different interpreters will have different understandings of what "African American existence" might entail, how its boundaries might be established, different views about how such "existence" ought to be interpreted, and so forth, is clear enough. But this would not, I think, be the first major problem. The diversity and even conflict of representations and views around the matter are to be expected and encouraged. 19 But what matters most is an openness to beginning the study of the Bible (as it were) in a different key- in a different time,20 which means from a different site of interpretation and enunciation, with the necessarily correlative different presuppositions, orientations and agenda. Among the many assumptions upon which the modern-world practice that is the academic study of the Bible rests there are several important assumptions about time. The study of the Bible, like the philological studies in which it participates, is about the past and about difference - the far-distant past that is radically different from the present. This past that is deemed so different from moderns is nevertheless held to be to some degree and in qualified ways recoverable, accessible, translatable. But such results are thought to be possible only through certain appropriate and legitimate interpretive methods, strategies, approaches - "exegesis." The latter is claimed to be understood only by an elite core of shaman-like figures, "tribal theologians," 21 granted authority either by official church-state collusion (in

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most cases in historically socially homogeneous European countries and in their former colonies), or by unofficial (high) church-(high) society collusion (for the most part in the United States within which is found the oft-repeated but ironic claims regarding the separation of church and state). The problem with this situation is enormous and complex. Most important for the arguments of this essay is the legacy of the whitening, 22 viz. the Europeanization and Euro-Americanization, of the Bible, an example of western cultural domestication and containment. It is as a part of this phenomenon that the interest in the radical separation of the past from the present has been fostered and made evident. To begin the study of the Bible as the past, and not in terms of the immediacy and trauma that describe African Americans' engagement, is to assume something about the present-that the present is pacific and unified, uniform and consonant, ascendent and dominant, that it is constituted or determined by a fairly clear and dominant cultural myth and hermeneutical spin that needs continuously to be ratified and affirmed by the recourse to the past, to archivalization and memorialization. 23 The silencing of the present with respect to the engagement of the Bible - most often signaled by the calls to "begin with the texts," to "stay with the texts" - reflects the European co-optation and cultural-naturalization of the Bible and the high cost paid by all, especially the other "breeds," including slaves and ex-slaves, and many who are or were colonized. No matter what may be the actual representations in the biblical texts, the gendered and/ or racial-ethnic "Others" that were constructed by modern dominants could not either read themselves into these texts or read themselves in affirmative ways as long as they had to begin not with themselves, with their places of enunciation, in their own times, but "with the texts," viz. with the dominants' places of enunciation, with their constructed pasts and the hermeneutical spins that continue to give legitimacy and social and ideological power to a present that was secured and justified by those pasts. The origins of biblical exegesis are in the ancient world; but in terms of its most serious perduring impact, the modern European-North American versions of it need now to be addressed and reconsidered. 24 The call to stay always focused upon the (details ofthe) text and the past that the texts (according to the dominant hermeneutical spins) are claimed to represent has become a high cultural practice and art- "exegesis." But one might more truthfully dare call this practice/art what it is - a class-specific cultural practice that is a fetishization of text that in turn reflects a fetishization of the dominating world that the text helped create. Insofar as the focus is upon the foregrounded past, upon the ancient text and the antiquity that it reflects, to this degree the backgrounded present can remain unexamined and unchallenged. The most serious impact of the modern-day practice of exegesis can be seen in the paralysis experienced by the typical seminary-trained, exegesis-learned person who finds him or herself wanting and needing to address contemporary debates about social issues. The relevance and appropriate force of the Bible in the context of debates about contemporary social and political issues is understandably a matter of concern sharply felt among such persons. When they learn well the arts and

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sciences and politics of biblical exegesis they learn that they cannot possibly hold forth with confidence about the Bible because it is after all too complex, too much a matter of other worlds the historical and cultural distance from which they must respect. They learn that they likely will never have at their command the requisite languages or the sophistication in critical methods and theory for serious engagement of the primary sources. In short, the gulf between biblical worlds and our own are too wide to bridge. 25 Only the unsophisticate, the fundamentalist, thinks otherwise and will dare go beyond the point of paralysis. All too often the response of those trained at the highest academic (doctoral) level in the field of biblical studies is to cultivate essentially a mode of silence. This silence is a sign of the most important lesson that biblical studies teaches and cultivates in many seminary and religious studies curricula - a respect for the mystifications of biblical scholarship to the point that little is said about the Bible in terms of its role in contemporary society and culture. The silence is reflected in a particular orientation and practice or preoccupation: "plumbing," a digging deeply into the details, never to come up again for air, rarely to attempt to engage the broad issues of our ( or any) time. The scholar of the Bible, then, so oriented, adequately silenced, comes to represent either innocuous antiquarian practices or a type of religio-cultural foundationalism and apologetics. The former representation includes the self-styled "secularists," typically but not exclusively headquartered in colleges and universities; such types begin to stutter when asked to explain their interest in the Bible beyond reference to it as historical source, artifact or as literature. The stuttering sets in at the prospect of having to come to terms with psychosocial, phenomenological or existential or political issues. Such scholars remain fairly irrelevant and unattractive to the thoughtful and sensitive; many insiders and outsiders to the religious life hold them in contempt for their principles' blandness. The principled ("We study, we do not practice, religion here ... ") practitioners of "secularism" are ironically always having to explain and defend their very presence and their interests in the context of the "secular" academy. There is double irony in the fact that many students and faculty in the "secular" - private and public - academies are probably personally far more religious, including bibliocentric, than they know or can ever articulate. There is even more irony in the fact that the now "secular" old colonial and many other private colleges cannot understand their origins without recourse to the study of religious life and commitment and its political effects and institutionalizations. 26 The latter representation, in the form of the apologists, is more dangerous because it has historically been and continues to be for good and ill more authoritative and effective. The idea of a radical, consistent critique of the Bible in which no question is blocked, no issue is held to be inappropriate, is generally deemed anathema. As suggested above, the fact that Ph.D. programs in the study of the Bible, with few exceptions, are carried out explicitly or implicitly under the banner of churches, viz. in church-controlled colleges and seminaries, is revealing of our late modern society's inability to engage in radical sustained critique of its own history with the Bible.

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Even more telling is the fact that many among such programs, wherever they are housed, in the United States and in Europe, are oriented around "just getting the facts" in either the naivete of "secular" antiquarianism or the religio-cultural apologetic politics of theological schools, both of which cultivate and model silence and containment. The silence and containment are intended to keep the finger held firmly in the dike that is the Bible, the engagement of which always otherwise holds the potential for explosive controversy, ideological, sociopolitical ferment. Who cannot know that the Bible represents nothing if not the consistent clarion and provocation for disruption and disconnection, critique and challenge? Who handling it will not come to read it as road map for exiting, for de-formation and re-formation? Who reading history will not associate the Bible and its readers with social and political hope, thus, social and political instability, whether of the right or the left? What better way to halt or subvert this reality and perennial potential than by cultivating biblical scholars as the silent types whose fetish for the textual, the "facts," the "detail" can effect an intended obfuscation? What better way to secure the status quo than by sending Big Jim Todd to a mainline, progressive seminary and providing him excellent training in biblical exegesis, thereby rendering him forever mute or a stutterer? What is needed in the face of all of this? There are, to be sure, no cure-alls. Clearly, not all see a problem to be addressed. But some may agree that in order to frustrate what can be termed theological and religious mis-education of African Americans and others an intervention of some sort is in order. I suggest defiance and interruption - of the silence and of the grand hermeneutical spin that the silence facilitates. Surely there are several possibilities for addressing the situation as I have described it. What I now propose as only the beginning of theoretical argumentation and exploration is a bit of defiance - in the way that Warren's Big Jim Todd would have been defiant had he spoken back to the buzzard in the language that Sterling Brown used. I mean here defiance of a cultural fetish dressed as academic tradition that would have me begin my serious thinking about the Bible in a remote and alien past and place, instead of in my own world. I propose that the whole discourse, the entire practice that is biblical interpretation, be reconsidered and differently construed. I propose that African American experience, or what African American experience can come to represent, be placed at the center of the serious study of the Bible, including academic study of the Bible. Rather than seen as an attempt simply to force a different dominant center in place, this "centering" of African American experience should actually represent an attempt at the de-centering2 7 and explosion of all prevailing interpretive paradigms; it should represent the call to make room for and to take seriously what the study of the Bible should be about as a type of cultural practice, why it should perdure, and on what terms. Consider more specifically what it might mean to have African American experience be the springboard for the construal of the study or engagement of the Bible:

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1. More consistent and intense and critical focus on the modern world and on the present and on the problematics of sacred texts in the present. The long history of the changes and attendant controversies around the designations by which persons of African descent refer to themselves and have been referred to by others - including the double nature of the current most popular designation ("African American") - reflects much about the drama of the collective experience of the people at issue. Who are they? Whence do they come? How is it that they do not have one name throughout their history? Why would they refer to themselves, and others refer to them, in so many different ways through history? Do they have a history? 28 These questions begin to get to the heart of the complexity of African American existence. By definition this complex experience represents a radical creolization, cultural bricolage. As much as if not clearly more than any other collectivity African Americans are "moderns." 29 While many European conquerors and immigrants in the Americas were exercised, even experiencing some angst, over how much of the "old world" and its "medievalisms" to leave behind or to renegotiate, enslaved Africans faced a type of "social death." 30 Survival for Africans meant learning to assemble cultural pieces from radically and involuntarily shattered social-cultural experiences, from rupture, disconnection. It meant developing facility for taking what is left of shattered experiences and "making do," learning what it takes to survive on what is at hand and forge an identity for themselves - "a new name" - in strange , settings and under most difficult circumstances. These people as people, it can be argued, were among the first who "experienced" (what has come to be called) the United States as a "new world." They were, if not the first, certainly, among the first- because forced- to establish identity in the constructed "new world." Were the African American experience, then, to become the center of academic biblical studies it would force a shift of focus from the past to the modern to the present, from preoccupation with interpretation of texts to interpretation of religious life as the creation of social-cultural life. Perhaps, most significantly, it would cause an interruption in the dominant cultural hermeneutical spin that in so many respects assumes modern European-North American Christian culture as the natural modern reification and rightful interpreter of ancient biblical communities and traditions. African Americans interrupt the assumption and telling of the story of the European-Americanization of the Bible because African Americans beg explanation and definition: their presence has to be explained. The story of how and why they came to engage and to embrace the (whitened European) Bible as sacred and as sacred text cries out for psycho-social, phenomenological, historical interpretive explanation. Thus, they challenge the telling of the story of the making of the West and America in terms of biblical history from the past to the present in any simple terms. Any effort to account for the Africans in the West must begin with modern slavery. And any effort to explain how and why they have survived that respects their own testimonies would have to include the religious - communities, orientations and practices, rhetorics, visions, texts. But the religious "testimonies" would function not as "texts" that would then serve as sources of the official or dominant spins

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on history or doctrine. They would instead serve as a storehouse of rhetorics and visions that function as "weapons of the weak." 31 Those who view their present in terms of struggle, conflict, resistance and hurt are less likely to want to begin serious questioning and thinking in general, certainly not about meaning, anywhere but in the(ir own defined) time. 32 The present experienced by such folk is grave, serious, traumatic; it should not be allowed to recede, to be taken for granted, to be easily manipulated, to function simply as the last dramatic inevitable part of the powerful ideological spin, the end of the devolution that is assumed by the social-cultural-religious "myth of origins" constructed by the dominant in order to help hold all things dominant in place. For those created and shaped by hurt in the modem world, the present remains the focus of thinking. There is not room for or any easy acceptance of the past seen in terms of antiquarian interest or as legitimation or even explanation of the present as inexorable. Informed by African American experience, the academic study of the Bible would then need to reconsider its primary agenda as the study of history and of texts. The African American experience should always dramatically challenge biblical scholars to ask whether biblical scholarship focused merely upon historiography or literaryrhetorical artfulness can ever be considered benign. 33 It should always raise the question whether one can be or should be said to be a scholar of the Bible without taking seriously the problematics, including the determinants of historical-cultural receptions, of the Bible. With African American experience in the foreground ancient history and literary-rhetorical artfulness as primary approaches to biblical scholarship would need to be made compelling, not presumed to be the right or the initial focus. 2. More consistent and intense and critical focus on the phenomenologyof socialculturalformation and the creationand uses of sacredtexts. The fathoming of the functions and understandings and uses of the Bible in contemporary African American society and culture should direct more attention upon an analysis of the problematics of the interaction of society and culture and sacred texts in general. The very broaching of the African American experience should cause a dis-ease, a shaking of the historicism and, in all too many places old and new, the theological foundationalism that has been the hallmark of biblical studies. 34 From the perspective of the African experience in the Americas nothing now seems natural or a given. Now everything requires explanation, argument, a rationale. Sacred text? The Bible? These very categories now require more sharply critical consideration. If not the categories themselves, are the phenomena behind the categories universal? Or are the matters basically western? Addressing the issue is important. With African Americans in the foreground the addressing of the issue is critical; it is where the probing must begin. So - the Bible and African American society and culture? The "Bible" here to begin with clearly cannot be understood as a transcendent, ahistorical force; it must be seen as a decidedly sociocultural, political, historical construction but as such a nonetheless dangerous and powerful force. The danger and power and volatility of the construction are such that

Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

those dominant peoples most intimately associated with and clearly defined by the construction could never really decide whether those they enslaved and defined as "other" should be thoroughly inculturated through the agency of the Bible or should be kept far away from it. 35 African slaves, for the most part, were also wary of and hesitant about the locus of power that the whites called "the Scriptures." 36 Beyond the power dynamics and maskings on the part of whites and the ambivalences on the part of Europeans and Africans in the early period of contact, how can the African American interaction with and interest and even investment in the Bible apart from the gaze and manipulations of whites be explained? Probings of the complex social-cultural orientation and formation issues should ensue. Did the people (re-)create the text? Did the text create a people? How did and how does one shape or determine the other? What are the indices of the influence of the one upon the other? To be sure, it would seem, on the one hand, that there must first be a people in order to create special rhetorics and visions texts, define them as "sacred" and then engage them accordingly. On the other hand, it would seem that especially arresting, poignant, challenging rhetorics and visions, encountered via texts, have inspired and continue to inspire prophets, seers, inveiglers, inspire and shape causes, movements, form peoples, "breeds." Again, the African American example can present a challenge. How could the formation of African America, as an e~ample of a social-cultural formation in the West, be understood without heightened attention to the Bible, specifically, the manner in which the Bible was used as language world within which those violently cut off from their home could speak again? How could African America be explained except by reference to their decidedly political, self-defensive and offensive use of the Bible in opposition to the uses to which white Protestants put it in the construction and confirmation of their world? When African slaves began to take up the Bible from sites of enunciation and on hermeneutical terms decidedly different from those associated with the white slavers the jig was up, the hermeneutical-cultural dominant spin was interrupted, the most serious critical exegetical and metaphysical deconstruction work began: the tight, closed circle of reference - Bible leads to the dominant (white) West and to (white)America, the West and America embody the biblical story-all this was broken. The cultural-ideological spin, the hermeneutically closed circle, the appeal to the Bible as medium of divine legitimation of the reigning social-cultural formations are all in light of the African presence - now made to seem what they are - powerful constructions, fictions, but constructions and fictions nonetheless. This is because the African American presence is an interruption if not a weirdly and ironically belated "Christian" presence in a belatedly "Christian" nation, an utterly shocking surprise to the dominant collective consciousness in terms of sheer survival and endurance. Now it remains for a).1- biblical scholars, especially- to come to terms with what this interruption should mean. Sacred texts are as much determined by society and culture as society and culture are determined by (among other things, to be sure) sacred texts. The recognition of the complexity of the interrelations of sacred texts and society and culture can

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be sustained, however, only through consistent focus upon forces that denaturalize the relationships between society (for example, the United States) and the sacred text (the Bible). Because of its obviously all-too-tragic-worldly beginnings, the African American experience with the Bible in fact can provoke a higher critical disposition: It makes it both reasonable and compelling to ask the following questions that must be prior to any engagement of texts -why do people create sacred texts? To be sure, not all create and invest in sacred texts. Perhaps, the phenomena behind the phenomenon of the making of sacred texts are what should capture and command the attention and imagination of the scholar of religion. 37 But it is precisely the raising of the question about the specific phenomenon that is the African American making of and investment in the specific sacred text that is the Bible that provokes the critical questioning about the general phenomena having to do with the creation and negotiation of sacred media. I do not think that I would have gotten to such a level of critical questioning apart from focus upon the African American situation. The latter has provoked me to ask- What are people doing when they create and continue to define themselves by, address each other through and on the basis of, sacred texts? What psychosocial dynamics are in place when such things happen? What sociopolitical dynamics? What status- and gender-specific dynamics? Toward what psychosocial, sociopolitical good and/ or ill do these dynamics play? Until these and other such questions are addressed in the context of academic programs in Bible no truly critical breakthroughs can be experienced. By this I mean breakthroughs not only in biblical studies, not merely in religious and theological studies, but in the study of social and cultural formation in general. 38 The phenomenon of the sacred text is so tightly interwoven, so deeply imbedded, within so many aspects of the collective worlds in the West that I dare say no truly critical breakthrough is possible apart from addressing it. In it is a significant key to understanding who we are, what we have become, what we have decided upon and also decided in agreement to forget. It is the belatedness and complexity and transparency of the African American engagement of the Bible that may hold clues to a broader, perhaps, if not universal, phenomenon. The African American experience with the Bible points to what I think is an easily discernible cycle of social-cultural formation that begins with deformation, proceeds to formation and re-formation that in turn necessarily leads again to de-formation. The Bible functions differently in different parts of the cycle. Although this cycle would not exhaust or explain everything in African American experiences, its potential explanatory power is great. About this cycle more is to be discussed below. 3. More consistent and intense and critical focus on the Bible as script/manifesto that defines and embraces darkness.

With African American existence as the starting point for the study of the Bible a greater sensitivity to the Bible as manifesto for the exiled, the un-homely, the marginal, the critics and inveiglers will be sustained. When African Americans are brought into focus it becomes clear that the biblical legacy of radical orientation

Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

17

toward the world, including what the late ancients and early European medievals called contemptus mundi, 39 what Nietzsche 40 and Scheler 41 among modern European interpreters referred to as ressentiment, and what Africans-made-slaves themselves meant when they said they were "trabelin' on," "travelin' through an unfriendly world." 42 When African Americans are foregrounded this legacy is then recovered and intensified and is necessarily made part of the conceptualization and orientation of religion in terms of social restructuring and ferment. Almost from the beginning of their engagement with it, African Americans interpreted the Bible differently from those who introduced them to it, ironically and audaciously seeing in it - the most powerful of the ideological weapons used to legitimize their enslavement and disenfranchisement-a mirroring of themselves and their experiences, seeing in it the privileging of all those who like themselves are the humiliated, the outcasts and powerless. It was seen as a sort of rhetorical paint brushing of their existence and a virtual manifesto for their redemption and triumph. So for African Americans to read Scriptures is to read darkness. By referring here to darkness I do not mean to play the usual rhetorical-symbolization games that set up endless but predictable polarities and dualities. I mean here simply that African Americans' engagement of the Bible points to the Bible as that which both reflects and draws unto itself and engages and problematizes a certain complex order of existence associated with marginality, liminality, exile, pain, trauma. In order to sharpen the point, I should like again to reference Warren's poem: in it not only does the Bible - captured in and alluded to by the buzzard in the speech regarding the final dramatic acts in the Christian passion story - appear fundamentally to be about darkness, but Jim Todd as a runaway, an exile, an unhomely, silent one is depicted in the darkness as a type of biblical character, even, as argued earlier, a type of Christ figure. And, somewhat ironically, it is also the case that the ongoing general existence associated with the buzzard - the lonely high flying and perching, the long passive wait for relief that comes always at the expense ( the violent sacrifice) of others - is darkness. But might or must this not be darkness of another origin and type? One of the most haunting interpretive issues that remains about both Warren's poem has to do with whether and in what respects darkness is biblical. The presence of the black male figure in relationship to the Christian story that is alluded to in the poem makes the matter of darkness rather unavoidable and most problematic. 43 To whom does the Christ figure belong? With whom is such a figure in solidarity? Is he a triumphant militant figure? A crafty and powerful political type? Or is he to be seen in relationship to the silent black runaway who can in turn be understood only in terms of violence and sacrifice, in terms of contempt and humiliation? The dark figure in the poem does not- is not allowed to - speak. But the reader cannot- because the cranky buzzard with the penchant for the metaphysical and the exegetical cannot - avoid thinking that there is a haunting relationship between the less than final death of the ''.Jew-boy" and the plight of the black runaway. That relationship is chilling, troubling; how could the wise old bird not have seen the point and explored it with Jim Todd? Or did he not see the point? As authorita-

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tive interpreter of the script(ure)s of the dominating culture is the buzzard a high church official? A professor of Bible? A writer of commentaries? A member of the Society of Biblical Literature? Warren obviously thought it realistic and appropriate to keep Jim Todd and the world that surrounded him silent regarding such matters: Jim understood, and was about to speak, But the buzzard drooped one wing and filmed the eyes. Might Jim have come to see a relationship between the irrational persecution and execution of the Jew-boy and his own dark plight in Pondy Woods? Might he have come to understand that things are seen differently in and through the dark? That having been forced into the darkness the darkness must be negotiated, fathomed? That darkness is what the story of "the Jew-boy" is all about? That darkness is not necessarily the end, that one can survive it- non omnis moriar- and can see things differently in and through it? The depiction of the black runaway in Warren's poem points to the need to explore the history of the African Americans' engagement of the Christian myth and of the Bible in general as dark scripts. This history of African American engagement of the Bible is likely to throw a different light on how the ancient radical contempt for the world and resentment rhetorics and orientations of the Bible the problematization of darkness - came to be both reflective and evocative of some modem social de-formations and re-formations. As some interpreters have argued, much if not all of western Christian culture (including the United States) can be explained as a biblical formation, 44 as a complex of biblically inspired socialcultural nations. Yet what remains to be explained are the processes and dynamics by which such marginal outworldly collectivities became outworldly nations, even including supra-national outworldly powers. As much in need of explanation is the development that resulted in these outworldly nations not simply becoming "secular,"45 but falling into a sleep, a kind of forgetfulness with respect to their origins, especially the originary impulses behind them. This forgetfulness has led to the betrayal of those very impulses such that other successive outworldly individuals and groups are not recognized. 46 On account of their origins in the North Atlantic, their formation as a people in the modem world in connection with the engagement of the Bible as manifesto of outworldly sentiment, African Americans represent a rather fascinating window onto the psychosocial ramifications and power dynamics, including the infra politics, involved in social formation, especially that formation that articulates the internal dynamic and responses to the outside world in relationship to sacred texts. As "moderns," that is, as those who have had to forge identities even as they were cut off from their roots, languages, traditions and heritages, those who now call themselves African Americans became a people not exclusively so but to a great degree through creative identification with and the creative engagement of the Bible. The latter was compelling because it contained the stories of those whose experiences mirrored the experiences of the uprooted, un-homely Africans.

Introduction:Reading Darkness,Reading Scriptures

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So there are in the challenges presented in this essay implications and ramifications for different academic disciplines and fields and in general for thoughtful persons of different backgrounds and persuasions: This project presents to academic biblical studies the most defiant challenge: it argues that the point of departure for and even the crux of interpretation not be texts but worlds, viz. society and culture and the complex textu(r)alizations of society and culture. Further, it argues that this point of departure should begin in a different time - not with the ("biblical") past but with the present, that is, with the effort to understand how the present is being shaped by the Bible (which then provides warrant for forays into the past). This is also a demand especially for the United States, that biblical studies should for the first time be indigenized. 47 It may not be the only culture so relevant here, but I have little doubt that the focus upon African America and the Bible will force and facilitate in a powerful manner the Americanization of biblical studies. The very concept of indigenization in such a complex multireligious, multicultural, multidimensional and still youthful society will surely provoke a number of questions and challenges. The call for the indigenization of the academic study of the Bible is a call to open up a host of possibilities for reconceptualizing and restructuring theological education and religious studies. Imagine what might develop if just a few graduate programs in the United States were to take seriously our situation in the United States-not that of Europe!-as primary conceptual basis for the academic study of the Bible! 48 The whole matter surrounding Jim Todd and the buzzard raises the question about what is at stake for academic professional biblical studies in having Jim Todd speak or having the buzzard alone continue to hold forth. What if the likes of Jim Todd were to read and to speak and write about the Scriptures? Given such a figure, given whence he comes and what he must do (run), in sum, given his otherness with respect to the discursive traditions represented by the buzzard, his reading of Scriptures would inevitably be "strong," critical, revisionist, an effort to find his own "original relation to truth," to "esteem and estimate differently" -it would, in sum, be a necessary "misreading." 49 The latter would represent empowerment not only for the reader, but a challenge to biblical studies to rethink its interests and agenda and orientation. For African American studies and cultural studies in general, it will henceforth be rather difficult to imagine that any serious multidisciplinary study of African America would not need to fathom the dramatic history of engagement between people and the text in order to get at the texture of the people. I think the sort of project that this essay calls for will make it less acceptable for scholars of African American · culture to continue the artificial separation of religion and culture, religion and history, as though religion were in some sort of bubble, somehow impervious to thoroughgoing comprehensive criticism of African American life, something to be set aside as a matter for the "religious" to pursue. Because the conjunction that is African Americans and the Bible already presumes a certain high level of critical sophistication and breakthrough regarding religious sentiment and practices as cultural sentiments, sediment and practices, and because African American studies

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has still on the whole not figured out what to do with the religious orientations and practices of African Americans, 50 the focused attention upon this topic will most likely have a powerful impact upon the shape of African American studies. Impressionistic statements and generalities about African American religious life and African Americans and the Bible offered from any quarter will be less defensible in the wake of this collection of essays and the research project behind them. For phenomenological and comparative studies, the engagement of the textual for the sake of mediating the sacred and articulating and negotiating the most important issues would help scholars parse African American and many other cultures to ever finer degrees. The focus upon the Bible as a sacred text is both broader and narrower than the focus upon religion and culture. Such focus would surely inspire a more consistent comparative approach than has been seen before. The sacred text, although not necessarily universal, is a category that is broader and more expansive than Christianity and church, than doctrine. The heuristic significance and potential of this category for comparative study of cultures has not been pressed as far as it should. The African American history of engagement of sacred texts invites and makes compelling the comparative inquiry that comes out and addresses ,the most immediate sociocultural situation. The pressing of the matter will have radical implications far beyond the interpretation of any one text: it will matter a great deal for the study of comparative religions, culture and worldviews. In an era of significant social-cultural balkanization, whatever helps us understand more clearly the codes through which so many ofus communicate within our different circles or worlds is no small contribution. Imagine the possibilities for conversation and debate were we all across many different traditions to be able to ask of one anotherwhat are we saying about ourselves and about the others, and what are we doing when we scripturalize? But far beyond possible reform and reorientation of any field or discipline, much is at stake in the existential, psycho-social and cultural-political challenge represented by a focus upon African Americans and the Bible. Imagine a person of color (especially) not having to decide whether to undergo the experience of the receding or splitting of him- or herself in the academic study of the Bible. Imagine that person not having to face the matter of foregoing seminary education or religious studies altogether in order to address and critically probe the black religious self and that self in relationship to sacred texts. The other way- the way of probing deeply the European history of the naturalization of the Bible and European cultures has been tried. Dark figures learning the tools of the classics-philological trade in an effort to convince the buzzards (and all that they represent) of their humanity has been tried; but it has not resulted in intellectual or cultural repentance or reform on the part of buzzards -just ask Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke and Sterling Brown, Howard Thurman and Benjamin E. Mays, Francis Harper and Zora Neale Hurston. These and many others mastered the forms and styles,51 the metaphysical and exegetical arts and sciences, of the world that the buzzard represented in hopes that such a world would in tum engage them. Would Warren's Jim Todd have been addressed differently had he read and recited Latin

lntroduction:,Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

21

or Greek? Would this have facilitated Jim Todd finding his way to safety out of the darkness? Only the most simple-minded or the most prejudiced will read this essay as an argument against the African American or any other group learning of Latin and Greek, of metaphysics and exegesis, and so forth. This essay is a challenge not to read less but more; it is a challenge to read more widely and deeply- and more critically. It is a challenge to begin not with ethnic celebration or cheerleading, but with serious multidisciplinary collective probing. And such probing should begin not in the co-opted past that legitimizes and renders obscure the shape and control of the present, but in the presentthe complex, troubling, problematic present, the present that is mixed in psychosocial effects, the sometimes silent and loud, pathetic and tragic present, the sometimes embarrassing and coarse, but always fascinating present. This is where the probing can and should begin for many of us so that we rhay learn first how to recognize our positionality and how to relate that positionality to critical probing. Then we can determine what questions we shall need to raise and what problematics we shall need to identify, what languages we need to study, what verbs we shall need to parse, what research agenda we should adopt- and why. And all of this will be understood in relationship to that complex of tradition, literatures, rhetorics and visions and history we call "the Bible," now for us the very meanings of which and the research agenda around which are to be determined. A reading of darkness as psychosocial reorientation, as self-possession and critical point of departure, as a higher critical gaze, can reorient and redefine the agenda of interpretation. A reading of darkness is a type of reading of Scripture that is a form of exiting of culture. 52 The African American experience with the Bible suggests that the Bible is viewed as a reflection or reading of this darkness, this "black (w)hole." 53 Anyone can read darkness. Darkness is here to be equated neither with a simple negative nor with any one people or class. It is a particular orientation, a sensibility, a way of being in and seeing the world. It is viewing and experiencing the world in emergency mode, as through the individual and collective experience of trauma. Such viewing and experience is not the unique experience of any one people in any one place or period in history. But all readers should take note: Because the darker peoples of the world are the ones of necessity consistently making a dramatic and compelling argument that to read darkness is to scripturalize and to scripturalize is to read darkness, they ought to be heard on this matter of reading darkness and reading "darkly." Those who may be identified with the perching buzzards - the still dominant interpretive spin on "authoritative" texts - ought now to turn toward such people and first listen to and then engage them and their dark soundings and all that to which such soundings point. The remaining issue, then, may be whether an important challenge is taken up: to take note that the difference such people and their soundings may make lies not in interpretation of (the culturally overdetermined) sacred texts but in the construction and manipulation of "world," and of meanings in relationship

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to - including the "misreading," even the "not-reading," against-such texts.

54

the going beyond and

Reading Dark Peoples Reading the World Darkly The essays that follow represent the beginnings of an attempt to focus the study of the Bible upon African Americans and to identify and address some of the implications and ramifications, issues and problematics that attend such a focus. The categorization of the essays below represents my attempt to facilitate such focusing and critical discussion regarding some of the implications, ramifications, issues and problematics that are logically inherent in and behind the conjunction that is the topic "African Americans and the Bible." Such categorization is made all the more defensible and compelling if the conjunction of African Americans and the Bible is, as I think it must be, posited as a particular exemplum of a set of broader, nearly universal, comparable conjunctive categories - sacred text and social texture. This book, it needs to said, with all the power of paradox that can be applied, is both specifically about African Americans alone and not at all about African Americans. Only those readers who will seek to understand what is at stake in such a paradox and the complex political thinking and modulation and positioning that it demands will ultimately understand the impetus behind and the power of this collection of essays. This book focuses upon African Americans and their interactions with the Bible not because they represent or reflect something unique in history, but because they rather dramatically and poignantly reflect a fairly wide-spread if not universal set of experiences. Yet it is the peculiar rhythms of their experiences of that history (of interactions with the Bible, as example of the category sacred text), with their lags that nonetheless challenge greatly the interpreter's compass and sharpness of consciousness. 55 So I have sought to categorize the collected essays in terms of three different types of interactions between sacred text and society-with African Americans as exemplum. These three types of interactions represent a cyclical history of a quality of experiences and orientations. So the discussion about them is appropriately framed by material that provides historical contexts and other points of reference. Thus, the collection is divided into three major sections - Pre-Texts; Con-Texts; and Sub-Texts. The first of the major internal sections - Pre-Texts- functions to provide some general orientation to serious thinking about the conjunction of African Americans and the Bible. The essays in this section are divided into subsections that include focus. upon: historical streams of influence upon the African American engagement of the Bible (Africa; African diasporic communities; early Euro-American religious traditions and culture), as well as historical and contemporary social matrices that are argued to be determinants or useful comparisons (American culture; African cultures); (preliminary) ethnographic work and social-scientific analysis the object of which is the contemporary situation; and a proposal for a phenomenologicalhermeneutical framework. In providing some general orientation to the complex

Introduction:Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

23

topic of the book, this section makes clear how important it is for the interpreter to begin not with the sacred text, but with world or social texture. This point is made most compelling as the case is made for beginning the serious thinking about African Americans and the Bible in the present. Both the impetus and need for, and a schema or outline of, an interpretive history of African Americans' engagement with the Bible are suggested by the questions and issues and problems found through attention given to the engagements of the Bible among contemporary African Americans. Only by taking stock of and analyzing the persistence of African Americans' interactions with the Bible can an interpretive history be conceptualized and structured in a manner that allows the interpreter to locate him- or herself, identify his or her interests and agenda, and thereby have a chance to register such in the identification and treatment of pertinent sources. The second major section - Con-Texts- contains the largest number of essays and is the logical response to the first section. It includes selected 56 essays that isolate and analyze particular historical situations in which an African American or a group of African Americans engages the Bible. As such, the section draws attention to selective sources that provide the opportunity for going beyond the lining up of essays on the basis of an all too common unimaginative linear or chronological narration often based on the adventures of elite individuals or institutions. What is offered here is a step toward the proffering of a creative interpretive history of a complex people based upon interactions with a complex phenomenon. Because it necessarily respects all types of interactions with the Bible -whether literary or rhetorical and oral, whether official ecclesiastical or street-based,. whether strictly religious or self-styled secular and anti-religious, whether academic and studied or decidedly anti-intellectual - such a history has the potential to explain or illumine more of the twists and turns of African American life than many previous histories, academic or popular. I propose such a history through the isolation of three thematic subsections that reflect respectively the world-making dynamics of: (1) flight or marronage 57 (deformation); (2) settlement and building on a site of marronage (formation); and (3) self-making, self-naming, and negotiation with the outside world from the site of marronage (re-form [ul] ation) - respectively entitled in the themes: "You Better Run ... "; "I'm Buildin' Me a Home ... "; and "Talkin' Mumbo Jumbo and Following the Neo-HooDoo Way." Each subsection represents an important moment or phase in the making of African American life in relationship to sacred texts. 58 I do not intend for any one phase or moment to cancel out the others; I intend only to indicate that each successive moment represents movement, change, diversification, complexity in orientation in African American life. Each essay entry may in fact include sources that could warrant that essay's placement in more than one or in a different category altogether; this much it is important to concede. But it is, I think, more important to establish heuristic categories and criteria for evidence for the dynamism, the movement, change and differentiation in the construction of African America in relationship to the Bible (and other sacred texts) than it is for all interpreters right away to agree upon and freeze the actual evidence for such. 59

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Vincent L. Wimbush

Cyck of Life-in-Marronage Based upon the African American Lag

,. .,,...-

-

-

Humani~ (Genera

/

.....

'

AfricanAmericans (Macro)

~

I

(Sub-groups)

I

(~.,~·'

I

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I I I

"-..._/

\

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The history that is reflected in the schema is more cyclical than linear: since this history is really all about self- and world-making, and since such "work" is never complete, there is always (at different speeds) the necessary return. The African American exemplum commends itself as particularly worthy of focused attention, I want here to stress again, not because African Americans are unique in experiencing these moments or phases but on account of the nature of their experiences - the lags or intensities or depressions that enslavement and aftermath represent - in the cycle. 60 Such difference, such a slowdown or disturbance in the larger western instantiation of the cycle may teach much about the nature of the more universally experienced cycles. The historical schema that I propose here assumes that the relationship between African Americans and the Bible is complicated - the one does not absolutely determine the other in any direct or simple manner; but there is an interrelationship that begs for explanation. Insofar as the schema classifies African Americans' relationships with the Bible in terms of the history of struggles for social construction

Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

25

it intends to help explain not merely what happened but how and why. I want with this schema to provoke thinking about what the folk who interacted with sacred texts were doing and what they thought they were doing. I should like this proposal to challenge interpreters to reflect upon the making and manipulation oflanguage worlds that interactions with sacred texts facilitated- and with what effects. The first movement takes its title - ''You Better Run ... " - from an African American sacred song in the public domain. It captures a widely shared African Americanized Christian and perhaps a nearly universally shared human sentiment and longing for flight, 61 escape from, de-formation of, dominance, whether in the form of old sociopolitical regimes in general, religious tradition, traditional social (class and gender) orientations, arrangements and associations, and certainly, enslavement and imprisonment. The Bible figures in this movement among African Americans in supplying many exemplary figures of de-formation or flight. The need for flight is, perhaps, never fully met or satisfied. And there have been instances in which flight has necessarily been mixed with ongoing dynamics and infrapolitics of dominated groups. 62 But there are also periods in which the pressing need is to run for one's life. The essays in this subsection and the sources upon which they focus provide dramatic evidence for such a movement among African Americans. Flight can be associated with certain clearly delimited periods in the history of African Americans. But the whole point of this interpretive schema is that one can discern the deep rumblings and yearnings and articulations of meanings of African American life by actually refusing to delimit such a movement to traditional periodizations. Flight is evident as primary movement or phase in the larger cycle of return; but it is also ever present in particular sub-groups of African American life and, of course, among many individuals - those for whom the trauma continues to be most palpable and persistent. Jim Todd, the character in Warren's poem "Pondy Woods," discussed above, clearly represents the flight that captures an aspect of or moments in African American life. Warren's depiction of the black male in flight-in marronage-is not in itself problematic; it is significant because it provokes the reader - some readers, this reader! - to beg for clarifications about such matters as the principal impulses and motives behind and meanings, as well as the ultimate direction and outcomes of, the running for Jim Todd. As already pointed out above, Warren's "maroon" does not speak. But we must now insist upon hearing from maroons themselves and finding out who they are, why they run, where and how they end. This interest in turn provokes interest in and consideration of other parts or movements of the cycle; The second movement"I'm Buildin' me a Home ... " -also draws upon the words of a sacred song. 63 Although not very old, the song nonetheless touches chords. As a medley of a sort of other traditional spiritual songs, this song draws upon sentiments that have been long resonant in African American culture, articulated most vividly and poignantly in religious culture. This second movement in the making of African America is the settlement or formation phase. Obviously, it builds upon the first phase insofar as the tum towards settlement and building

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presumes escape from domination, at least a degree of freedom from danger, and a different and relatively safe site of enunciation and different space. 64 The essays included are again quite selective. They cannot claim to present or represent all evidence for the holding of the sentiments and the actual building efforts that constitute the making of African America. But they do provide a rather diverse presentation of evidence for such a movement in relationship to the Bible. And again, I think it important for the reader to be cautioned against associating this movement with the traditional periodizations of African American history. As is the case with flight, the building-of-home or formation phase is also recurring in the larger cycle of African American life. To limit such a movement to one period in history or even several pointed periods-Reconstruction or Harlem Renaissance or the civil rights era-is to miss the deeper meanings of the motif. The point is to seek to understand what may be happening, what the people may mean in any one time when they foreground "working on the building." What the Bible may offer is code for what the effort is all about. The title of the third phase or movement"Talkin' Mumbo Jumbo and Following the Neo-HooDoo Way" - is my effort to press the rhetorics and sentiment of Ishmael Reed 65 into the service of representing heightened collective criticism, sharply cut articulations of identity, and efforts at self-making, self-naming, reformation, re-formulation, and re-orientation among African Americans, as well as negotiation with the outside world. These representations range from the most conservative to the most radical, as well those many different representations in between. 66 Reed is in my view an exemplary figure in African American literary history, arts and criticism. For my purposes in connection with this book, I am not interested in defending or opposing Reed's particular views; they are important and controversial and should be discussed and debated on their own terms. His rhetorics provide categories for the heightened self-criticism of, the circling around and turning back upon, African and African American traditions - all for the sake of re-form and re-orientation. Following upon and taking cues from but not necessarily agreeing in all matters with Reed, "Mumbo Jumbo" 67 here refers to a specifically accepted African American language or discursive formation, a certain "stylin'" or "signifyin'" embraced ironically in spite of what the term means among dominants. "Neo-Hoodooism" 68 here refers to a specifically heightened African and African American self-consciousness, sensibility, orientation to the world, practices in the world. The term, including the qualifying prefix, is deliberate and important: it reflects sharp criticism of American and African American mainstream society, including its religious culture. It also reflects the challenge to return to and privilege traditional African and African American traditions and sensibilities. Most important to note here are the self-critical sensibilities and agenda that are in Reed's rhetorics. Behind the rhetorics is Reed's penchant for parody, paradox, irony and pungent humor, exaggeration, understatement - in short, all sorts of rhetorical and discursive strategies employed in order to level critique against the self, against African American culture and, of course, against "the world." These

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strategies are put in the service of pressing African Americans to look critically at themselves and their translations of their own and others' traditions and histories. Quite obvious is the fact that this movement or phase presumes the other two movements. The level and intensity of self-criticism practiced by the likes of Reed makes sense and is realistic only after a people has been able to escape immediate and pressing genocidal conditions and has assumed fairly independent sites of world-building, can call itself by names of its own choosing, and so forth. Yet again it must be stressed that this heightened self-critical phase must not be limited to any one particular period in history; particular segments of the African American world may be identified on an ongoing basis with such practices. The African American world on a larger scale has certainly tended to return again and again to more or less heightened critical modes. That this work of criticism and return called for and practiced by Reed (and others) is categorized in terms of esoteric language and religious tradition is particularly important. The selected essays will certainly make it clear how important religious language and vision have been in the call to re-form African American society and culture. In this effort the Bible has figured quite prominently and has functioned in quite different, even contradictory ways, legitimizing a wide range of different sociopolitical collective and personal orientations. These different orientations may not square with Reed's politics and orientations; this is not the critical issue; but Reed's language challenges interpreters to consider what it means for a people to be positioned to look back upon traditions on certain terms and in a critical way. The call to embrace the "neo-hoodoo" way and to talk "mumbo jumbo" is a call to take unto the collective self all that has gone before it and sift it carefully and deeply. This practice never comes to closure precisely because neither the past nor the sifting will be understood in the same way by different groups in different eras or even different groups in the same era. How does the Bible function, what and how does the Bible "mean," 69 in relationship to these different movements or phases as outlined? The subsections in Part III here outlined as movements in the making of African American culture are not, and should not be, argued to have been necessarilyand directlyinfluenced or mandated by the Bible. No single directional flow of influence or determination or simple causation can be established. On the contrary, what the focus upon African Americans as reflected in the essays below and in my proposed interpretive schema of movements discussed here seems to suggest is that in the Bible was found a rich storehouse of languages and rhetorics, including stories of heroic individuals and groups, songs, visions, poetry, exhortative and excoriatory / denunciatory speeches -all of which have reflected and continue to reflect some parallel phases in African American formation and strivings. 70 But this means that the Bible was less the source of, the impetus behind, the explanation for, the movements, than a record or mirror of such. Put another way, it is arguable that these movements of human striving and formation are (with due concessions to the usual appropriate qualifications) universal or nearly universal, that the Bible does not so much cause such movements as it- in arresting and compelling ways, to be sure - records or

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captures them. In this respect, it is found to be most compelling to those individuals and groups experiencing most profoundly the lags of the human cycle - persistent hurt and trauma, the palpable immediate need to escape. Insofar as the Bible is record and reflection of the generalizable, if not universally experienced, movements sketched above, it can be argued that in their cycle of formation African Americans in a dramatic way are themselves a biblical people. And insofar as it records human striving and formation work, the Bible is in a most dramatic and poignant manner dark script, written for the most part by and for the marooned, who have been and continue to be for the most part dark peoples. It is not that the cycle of striving and formation is exclusively black or African American; on the contrary, it is universal. But among the many complex meanings of African American existence, that of the persistence of flight, formation and reformation - biblical themes all - resonates. The persistence of such realities the socioeconomic-political and psychosocial, existential lags that are the result of enslavementas part of what defines African American existence does not so much privilege African Americans in any absolute sense in terms of claims about the Bible; but it makes compelling the focus upon African Americans as a window onto the Bible as both cultural product and cultural signifier. African Americans are not somehow the people of the most profound insight into the interpretation of any particular part of the Bible. In fact, on the whole they have historically not so much read as they have practiced, as mentioned above, a type of "not-reading" of it, and have striven to attain heightened consciousness of their experience as that which the Bible rather dramatically and poignantly records. They are not so much the keenest interpreters of the Bible as they are, as modern maroons, the modern extensions, social actors, of the Bible's dramas. On account_ofhaving been forced into experiencing a chronic lag in the cycle of human formation, African Americans have become an example of a modern collective social reification of the Bible, modern social instantiations of the Bible. And through focus upon them the Bible becomes intelligible and poignant as reader of human striving and a manifesto for its movements. The third and final major section- Sub-Texts-includes short reflections about the import of the topic of this book, including, in some instances, reflections upon some of the specific major essays included in it. These reflections are from twelve different individuals representing different social and religious worlds, generations, professions, settings, fields and disciplines and orientations. They include clergypersons, experienced academics, students, activists. What makes this section important is that it presents and facilitates and encourages a great range of different understandings of and responses to the topic to surface. In other words, the second stage of conversation about the multifaceted topic of the book is through this section already built into the book. Individuals have not been asked to focus upon any particular set of issues. They were asked only to address the matter of the implications and ramifications of the general topic that is the conjunction African Americans and the Bible. So it is all the more fascinating to take note of what issues and problematics, what questions and implications and ramifications are addressednot resolved - in the different

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reflections. In general, beyond the specific topics selected and issues raised and pursued by essayists (and the editor), the writers of the short reflections attempt to answer questions - what does the topic of the book mean? To and for whom? What difficult issues and questions were avoided? By whom? What challenges are directed? To whom? The reflections included in this section represent the complexity of the topic of the book. They also poignantly name the salient issues that were behind the research project that is behind this book. They thereby facilitate the engagement of some of the issues that will continue to demand disciplined and honest thinking. This book will have served an important function if many come to recognize how fruitful can be the fathoming of the conjunction of African Americans and the Bible for serious thinking, academic or otherwise. It will have met its goals if many come to recognize that the days of the adequacy of impressionistic thinking and statements about the relationship between African Americans and the Bible are over, that only serious, multidisciplinary approaches and sensibilities and collaborative work will prove adequate in addressing the issues. The challenges of the conjunction of African Americans and the Bible as historical and perduring cultural phenomenon are too complex and compelling to be ignored or to be taken lightly: again, because it is at the same time shockingly specific and also easily generalizable, the conjunction is in some respects easily grasped, easily subject to some scientific means of scrutiny and verifiability. Nevertheless, because it provokes concerns that are and have always been politically and ideologically destabilizing (in some cases seen as "the third rail" in matters of social and cultural control and identity), including now even the threat of transgressive and promiscuous academic disciplinarity; and because of the numbers and diversity of discussants, it can be argued that this volume is less a(nother) published book of essays than an event,7 1 the beginnings of a movement of a sort that argues for the heuristic power of allowing the chronically marginal 72 in American society to become the basis for thinking seriously about the self and critical sociocultural phenomena. In this sense, thoughtful persons, whether Americanists, including African Americanists, cultural critics, theologians, philosophers and phenomenologists, social scientists, or biblical scholars, whether African American or not, whether in or of the United States or not, can no longer easily deny or downplay the challenges and issues named by the conversation that this book as event both inaugurates and facilitates. Reading African Americans in terms of marronage, marronage in terms of experiences forced, especially upon dark peoples, 73 and the creation and reading of Scriptures in terms of the darkness of marronage - all these "readings" can prove to be compelling. I can no longer go back to the Bible - or to discourses about the Bible -whether for teaching, engaging in research, or for self-(re-)construction, except through darkness. For me to read "darkly" (en ainigmati) is to attempt now to read the enigma that is (human) existence through and on the basis of - not turned away from! - my dark self and my dark world. It is the reading of the self (not the text[s] !) that is important and awe-ful - both illuminating and freeing and disrupting and frightening. Let all serious readers beware.

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Notes I. New York &view of Books 45, no. 10 Gune 11, 1998): 64-68. 2. Ibid., 64. 3. Ibid., 64-65. 4. American Quarterly 50, no. 1 (March 1998): 1-23. For a similar impulse in the arena of biblical studies, although without the explicit substitute agenda or program proposal, the reader should note the two different collections of essays, the one edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah, Voicesfrom the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (London: SPCK, 1991); and the other by Cain H. Felder, Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991). Although the second collection was edited by Felder, it was the result of years of collaboration and discussions among African American biblical scholars (x-xi). Felder had offered a sketch of his own proposal for biblical studies in the publication of a collection of his essays, entitled Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class, and Family (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1989). Another example to note in biblical studies is the provocative work and career of biblical scholar Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. For decades if not during her entire career, Schussler Fiorenza struck a chord similar to the ones struck by Mary Helen Washington, but in terms of the focus upon women in the study of the New Testament and the earliest period of Christianity. Among her several works see especially In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983) for a model of the substitution scholarship. And see her most recent publication on the politics of biblical scholarship, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999). This work is an elaboration upon Schussler Fiorenza's presidential address delivered before the Society of Biblical Literature in 1987. She became in 1987 the first female president of the then more than one-hundred-year-old scholarly organization. 5. From the KingJames Version of 1 Corinthians 13:12. The Greek expression is en ainigmati (for the New Testament an expression occurring here only), meaning "in an enigma." As problematic as the translation is for so many reasons, it is poignant here. What is enigmatic is existence, the traumatic nature and emergency mode of existence-its origins and perdurance. It is this trauma and emergency that the Bible and African American existence reflect and that African American cultural representations interpret most consistently and intensely, but never with any closure or finality. 6. Taken from Robert Penn Warren, New and Sekcted Poems: 1923-1985 (New York: Random House, 1985), 319-21. 7. Houston A. Baker, Jr., in his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), made reference to the retort in the context of a discussion about the import of the title of Alain Locke's famous edited work The New Negro: An Interpretation: "Exegesis, hermeneutics, the offices of interpretation and fitting analysis vis-a-vis Afro-America, according to Locke's title, are now the project of the black spokesperson himor herself' (72). See also Henry Louis Gates,Jr., "Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic; It's All Greek to Me," in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirk et al., Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 225 and n. 11. 8. Ibid., esp. 252-53. 9. Ibid., 255. 10. Note the title of the Research Project and the International Conference behind it: "African Americans and the Bible." The conjunction here is important: it signals a radical openness to identifying and addressing a wide range of problems and issues. This openness is also inviting of a rather wide range of questions and problematics, disciplinary discourses, their methods, approaches and orientations from the very beginning of the inquiry. This

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orientation seems to me to be far different from the usual penchant of determining from a safe and controlled disciplinary perspective whether other disciplinary methods and approaches can be engaged and to what degree. The Research Project that inspired this essay, like the study of the Bible, in my view, cannot belong to or be controlled by the politics and orientations of any one discourse or discipline. In my view, such control has been the most significant problem that I have had to face in the field of biblical studies. I assume that I am not the only one to face such a problem. The African Americans and the Bible Research Project is my attempt to address the problem. This is being done by opening up and modeling the study of the Bible to many more possible interests and projects. 11. On the subject of the construction of whiteness in American culture, see Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin, eds., Whiteness:the Communicationof Socialldentity (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999); and Valerie Melissa Babb, WhitenessInvisibl,e:The Meaning of Whitenessin American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 12. Warren's slim development of the escaping Jim Todd character is enough to remind the reader familiar with the African experience in the United States and in the Americas in general of the dramatic history of black runaways, especially runaway slaves, often called maroons. For historical and comparative perspectives on the maroon, see Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies:Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 [1979]). Now available to address the lack of scholarly attention to the phenomenon in the United States, students of marronage can consult Hugo Prosper Learning's published dissertation, Hidden Americans:Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas, ed. Graham Hodges, Studies in American History and Culture (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995); and John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebelson the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). According to Price, the English word "maroon," like the French term marron, derives from the Spanish cimarron. In the New World contexts cimarron originally referred to cattle that had escaped into the hills in Hispaniola, as well as to fierceness and wildness in general. Later, it was applied to Indian slaves who had escaped from the Spaniards. By the early sixteenth century the word was used to refer primarily to African runaway slaves (pp. 1-2, note 1). See Houston Baker's use of the term in connection with his argument about African American struggles to face the modern in his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,76-79, 95, 100, 103. 13. How otherwise can the reference to Jesus (''.Jew-boy") in juxtaposition to the "nigger" be explained? Whose categories, labels, distinctions are these? In relationship to whom are these figures the others? 14. See Carol A Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, "Orientalism and Postcolonial Predicament," in Orientalismand the PostcolonialPredicament:Perspectiveson South Asia, ed. Carol A Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, South Asia Seminar Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 17; and Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism:Anatomy of Interpretation(Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1993), especially chapter one, with Erich Auerbach as starting point, on the history of philological, biblical interpretation and literary criticism. 15. The latter are mostly housed in theological seminaries (mostly in the United States) that are independent of universities or in divinity schools that are part of church-founded, church-related, sometimes still church-controlled universities. It is rare to find a university without such history and/ or continuing influence and with a thoroughgoing critical program in the study of the Bible, viz. without any conditions upon the agenda and presuppositions of such a program. Given my primary professional location at an independent theological seminary, I explain my own ironic "flight" from the traditional expectations and assumptions and orientations to be partly the result of the influence of a few very bright students here of varied backgrounds

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who as they find themselves located at the mouth of Harlem engaged in the academic study of the Bible clamor for something other than the old obfuscations called exegesis. But this means that such students-as they continue the journey with me-want not less rigor but more, not a lesser but a sharper critical approach, not the acquisition of the theological foundational "facts," but ways to go deeply and honestly inside themselves and come out whole and articulate by threading through the whole process and thereby disentangling (deforming) and reshaping that most complex, tightly wrapped and elusive of psychosocial and sociopolitical constructions called the Bible. The irony of it? That such a school can be both a complex maze and a path outward. Only those students who are interested, who are invested in coming to terms with themselves and their world and how it is made and why it is made the way it is, are likely to want to travel this way. I am not sure that the typical "secular" university student (whether in religious studies or not) would want to travel this direction. For many there will remain too many rigors intellectual, psychological and political- to want to cut the deal. 16. See his "Orientalism and the Study of Oriental Literatures," in Breckenridge and van der Veer, Orientalism, 175-76. 17. See this provocative argument as part of the exchange in connection with her William E. Massey Sr. Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1990 and published as Playing in theDaik (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), viii. 18. Again, note here the arguments regarding African American disruption of discursive spin advanced by Mary Helen Washington in her address before the American Studies Association. See p. 2 and n. 4 above. 19. For a sophisticated discussion of some of the different and conflicting views from the perspective ofreligious studies and cultural criticism, see Victor Anderson's BeyondOntological Criticism:An Essay on African American Religiousand Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995). 20. Regarding the matter of the "time-lag" that minority and diaspora discourses represent, see the arguments of Homi K Bhabha, in his The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 191-92, 198, 199, 237, 246-56; and in Breckenridge and van der Veer, "Orientalism," 18. Clearly, much more attention needs to be given to this notion of the "lag," especially to the matter of persistence of the experience of trauma that attend the lives of so many within minority groups. In the case of African Americans, slavery and its aftermath must be addressed if there is to be any possibility for understanding the "lag." Statistics of all sorts can certainly help establish the facts of the perduring otherness of African Americans in American society- another way of explaining the "lag." 21. This expression is used by Jonathan Z. Smith, in his essay "Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon," 52, in his collection of essays entitled Imagining Religion: FromBauykm toJonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). There is in my view nothing inherently wrong or inappropriate about being a "tribal theologian," as long as one understands to what tribe one belongs, for what tribe one works and plays. The extent to which this point is understood the impetus behind and the import of the African Americans and the Bible research project will be grasped. 22. Note again in Warren's poem the extent to which Jim Todd is characterized specifically as a black person who because of such identity must be outside the bounds of Christian traditions and the legitimate interpretation of such. And see Breckenridge and van der Veer, 3-28, regarding the manner in which other ancient literatures are Europeanized and Euro-Americanized, and other peoples are made outsiders as readers and interpreters. The dominants effect this situation through the construction and maintenance of a chasm between ancient situations and traditions and present condition, which they control.

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23. See here Krister Stendahl's discussion in his 1983 Society of Biblical Literature presidential address, "The Bible as a Classic and as Holy Scripture," Journal of Biblical Literature l 03, no. 1 (1984): 3-10, especially 3, regarding linkage between interest in the past and cultural placidity and dominance. "Could it be that preoccupation with history comes natural when one is part of a culture which feels happy and hopeful about the historical process? Hegel's pan-historic philosophy belongs, after all, to the ascendancy of western imperialism-it was even said that other parts of the world were "lifted into history" when conquered, colonized, or converted by the West." 24. On ancient exegesis see the comprehensive article "History of Interpretation," Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 305-24. Jewish, Early Christian, and Middle Ages to Reformation sections most relevant. See also the section on Modern Biblical Criticism in the same article, 318-24. And certainly Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's 1987 SBL presidential address, "The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship," Journal of Biblical Literature 107, no. 1 (1988): 3-17, and the elaboration upon the same themes in her recent book, Rhetoricand Ethic: The Politicsof Biblical Studies. It should be part of any reading on the history and politics of modern biblical scholarship. 25. See in John H. Hayes and Carl R. Holladay, BiblicalExegesis:A Beginner's Handbook (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987), 14-18, the quite (guild-) traditional handling of the matter of the exegete's relationship to his or her own present world-namely, in terms of the enormous distance or gap between the modern reader and the ancient texts. Only "specialized exegesis" can bridge the gap. Those challenging such a stance include contributors to Fernando Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, eds., Readingfrom This Place:SocialLocation and Biblical Interpretation,2 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995); Teachingthe Bible: The Discoursesand Politics of BiblicalPedagogy(Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis, 1998); and the Bible and Culture Collective, The PostmodernBible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). See also Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism,for the broadest perspective on the impetus behind and implications and ramifications of the roots of modern biblical scholarship: While the Middle Ages had no historical understanding of antiquity ... and the Renaissance felt only a certain distance from its old models, the Reformist return to original texts ... brought an acute sense of division between the two parts of the Scripture and the two levels of experience, the present and the past. With the erosion of feudal and church power, and concomitant advances in astronomy, colonialism, and trade, the harmony of religious and secular spheres collapsed and the possibility of alternative world orders gained in appeal ... the success of the Protestant churches and the achievement of Renaissance humanism gave the seventeenth century the sense of a new order ... and a new beginning (modernity) .... As for the chronological meaning of the Modern, it involved an acute sense of separation ... from the past, specifically from antiquity. This historical sense was the belief in an ancient and extinct integrated civilization ... which was usually identified with Hellas. With this nostalgic belief, a long process, which had begun with the removal of the Scripture from the purview of the church for the bourgeois reader's personal edification, was completed some one hundred years later: as the modern state won the battle of the Book against the church in the name of the individual, the past (of both state and individual) was declared History and called Greek, while the present was proclaimed Modern and defined as Judaic (38-40). An easy substitution for the "Modern" brings us back to the African American situation as opportunity and challenge.

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26. See George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield, eds., The Secularizationof the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), for historical perspectives and discussion of a wide range of issues. 27. See Schussler Fiorenza, "The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation," esp. 13-17. 28. See the article on "Black Identity," by Comel West, in Encydopedia of African-American Culture and History, vol. 1, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996), 353-60, and Victor Anderson's Beyond OntologicalBlackness, for treatment of pertinent issues and problems. 29. See Houston A. Baker's argument about the origins of African American "modernism" in his Modernism and the Harl.emRenaissance,12, 93, 96, 101. 30. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 31. See James C. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak:EverydayFormsof PeasantResistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Domination and the Arts of Resistance:Hidden Transcripts(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), for wide-ranging discussion of pertinent issues. 32. See Bhabha, Location, 178; also Deborah McDowell, "Negotiations between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom - Dessa Rnse," in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 147. 33. This view certainly squares with those of Schussler Fiorenza. See her Rhetoricand Ethic, Part One. This discussion includes but goes beyond her SBL presidential address. 34. See the provocative essay written by Timothy Fitzgerald, "The Ideology of Religious Studies," Bulletin: The Council of Societiesfor the Study of Religion 28, no. 2 (April 1999): 39-41. This essay is a revised excerpt from Fitzgerald's forthcoming book by the same title, to be published by Oxford University Press. 35. See Eugene D. Genovese, Rnll,Jordan, Rnll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974); Lawrence Levine, Black Cultureand Black Consciousness(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The '1nvisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Nathan 0. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds., The Bible and America:Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), for comprehensive discussions of the events and issues. 36. Although it needs to be updated, Harold W. Turner's discussion of Africans' responses to missionaries' efforts to teach them the Bible provides important historical background and comparative perspectives. See his ReligiousInnovation in Africa: CollectedEssays on New Religious Movements (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 271-88. See also Samuel D. Gill, Beyond "The Primitive":TheReligions of NonliteratePeoples(Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 226-28; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 239-43; and my exploratory essay, "The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretative History," in Stony the &ad We Trod: African American BiblicalInterpretation,ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 81-97. 37. This is the focus of my next publication project. 38. Here I am sharing some arguments waged over the years by Wilfred Cantwell Smith regarding the importance of phenomenology of Scripture as part of the academic study of the Bible. But I think I am sharpening his arguments by suggesting what specific ways biblical scholarship might be reoriented. I am also addressing as part of an attempt to understand more clearly the larger phenomenon of scripturalizing what is arguably the most dramatic modern local cultural example of scripturalizing practices, an example totally ignored by Smith and his students. See Smith's l-Wiatis Scripture?A ComparativeApproach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); Miriam Levering, ed., Rethinking Scripture:Essaysfrom a ComparativePerspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); William A. Graham, Beyond the Written

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Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). But note now Barbara Holdrege's contribution to this volume. 39. See extensive treatment of related themes in Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergenceof Western Guilt: Thirteenth-Eighteenth Centuries (NewYork: St. Martin's Press, 1990), and in Ann Ramsey, "Flagellation and the French Counter-Reformation: Social Discipline and the Evolution of a Penitential Culture," in Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Two most important primary texts that expound upon the theme are in Scorn for the World: Bernard of Cluny s De Contemptu Mundi, Latin text with English translation and introduction, ed. Ronald E. Pepin, Medieval Texts and Studies 8 (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1991), and Lothario dei Segni (Pope Innocent III), On the Misery of the Human condition [De miseria humane conditionis], ed. Donald R. Howard, Library of Liberal Arts 132 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). 40. See most especially Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral 1887), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, with Ecce Homo (New York: Vantage, 1967). But for fuller bibliographic listing and collection of important critical essays, see Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Among the most important essays are: Richard Solomon's "One Hundred Years of Ressentiment: Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals," and Ruediger Bittner's "Ressentiment." 41. See Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994). Trabelin' On: The Slave journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979) 42. See Mechal Sobel, Trabelin' On: The Slave Journey to an Afra-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), esp. 52, 101, 109, 118, 126, 227, 229, 246-47, for treatment of the motif in African American slave traditions. 43. See Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequencesof Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, D.C.: Civitas Counterpoint, 1999), 218-19. My thanks to Union New Testament and Christian Origins Ph.D. student Marie Case for leading me and the seminar on the Passion Narratives I led spring semester 1999 to this book and its controversial argument regarding notions of sacrifice in the Christian west, specifically, the United States in connection with African Americans. 44. See as provocative contribution from a scholar outside the fields of religious studies and theology, Harold Bloom's The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). See also the following different treatments on the theme: Martin Marty's Religion and Republic: The American Circumstance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Conrad Cherry, ed., Gods New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1971); Richard T. Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Nathan 0. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, eds., The Bibk in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); James Oliver Robertson, American Myth, American Reality (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980). A most fascinating addition to the discussion is the work of biblical scholar Charles Mabee on the functions of the Bible in particular in American culture. See especially as part of a series he edits his &imagining America: A Theological Critique of the American Mythos and Biblical Hermeneutics, Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 1 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985); and Reading Sacred Texts through American Eyes: Biblical Interpretation as Cultural Critique, Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 7 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1991). In an effort to join Mabee in conversation a select group of students at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University contributed essays to this general topic. See their contributions in The Bibk and the American Myth: A Symposium on the Bibk and the Constructions of Meaning, ed. V. L. Wimbush, Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics

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16 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1999). From within the circles of biblical scholars, Mabee and again Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza stand out in terms of their direct challenge to the guild of biblical scholars to deal with the politics of modem biblical scholarship. 45. See Marcel Gauchet's provocative discussion about the complex origins of the "secular" world and related issues in his The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of R.eligion, trans. Oscar Birge (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 46. Is the cultivation of such forgetfulness among the respectable religious of the culture part of the sensibilities and agenda of modem biblical studies? How otherwise can its benignity within the academic and religious culture be explained? How can a practice that entails the handling of psycho-social and cultural explosives be otherwise explained? 47. Of course, the Bible has been so indigenized, here meaning Americanized, among "common folk," for some time. This explains its continuing relevance and power and sometimes problematic presence in American culture. But academic discourses about the Bible on the whole and academic programs in the study of the Bible have not at all been Americanjtect. This is the challenge that the academic study of the Bible faces in this country. 48. I am serious enough to imagine here the same sort of creative initiatives and t}reoretical work in the study of religion finally with thoroughgoing unqualified critical focus upon sacred texts in American culture that have been developed in other arenas - political and legal theory, sports, medical science, and so forth. That there has not with very few exceptions been developed and sustained in the academic study of Bible and other sacred texts recognizably American orientations, orientations that have taken the fact of being in the United States and taking the pulses of the United States into consideration, is surely a long and dramatic story about religious and academic politics that histories of interpretations rarely touch upon. 49. See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3-4. 50. This separation or blindness can be seen most dramatically in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). There was not a single section or even essay focused upon religion! There was not a single major entry in the index having to do with religion! (The exception was a single minor subcategory entry on the "Black Church," under the major entry on "Black institutions.") The editor, a senior scholar with an appointment in a history department in a large midwestern university, and contributors, historians of American and African American history, of varied backgrounds, reflected the virtual silence about the religious life of African Americans in historiography on African Americans in the past, and obviously, did not find it compelling enough to think it would or should be part of the future work in the field. I would like to think that the situation that obtained in the mid-1980s no longer holds at the dawn of the new millennium. But I am not aware of a sea change in attitudes and in scholarship. What is clear to me is that a willingness and capacity to address the phenomenon of the interaction of African Americans and the Bible presumes a high level of sophistication regarding the religious orientation of African Americans. Perhaps religion in general for many scholars, but certainly the Bible in particular, as critical subject matter, is considered "third-rail" stuff: touch it and one either is shocked to death or comes alive in a frighteningly different form. 51. See Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem R.enaissance, xviii, 8, 22, 31-32, 47, 50, 67, 85-87, 93, for a fascinating discussion regarding African American "mastery of form." 52. See the discussion regarding scripturalizing as cultural practice and as exiting of society and culture in Wesley Kort's "Take, R.ead": Scripture, Textualiry, and Cultural Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). John Calvin, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Blanchot are treated in creative ways as theorists of what it means to read Scripture in western culture.

Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

37

53. This notion of reading of Scripture as reading of darkness I have come to realize squares with Houston Baker's arguments in his brilliant book Blues, Ideology, and AfroAmerican Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 144-5 7, about the "black 'blues life'" - life still all too often defined by "poverty ... hunger-ridden days ... restless moving ... meaningless pain and ... endless suffering" ( 146) - and the "black (w)hole" as the African American expressive self-healing response to it: ... in the script of Afro-America, the hole is the domain of Wholeness, an achieved relationality of black community in which desire recollects experience and sends it forth as blues. To be Black and (W)hole is to escape incarcerating restraints of a white world (i.e., a black hole) and to engage the concentrated, underground singularity of experience that results in a blues desire's expressive fullness. The symbolic content of Afro-American expressive culture can thus be formulated in terms of the black hole conceived as a subcultural (underground, marginal, or liminal) region in which a dominant, white culture's representations are squeezed to zero volume, producing a new expressive order (151-52: emphasis his). But in making African American "life-crisis" (including the "black blues life" and the healing that the "black (w)hole" represents) an "inevitable event," equivalent to such other life crises as birth, puberty, and death, Baker, in my view, made a serious misstep. Drawing upon anthropologist Arnold van Gennep's (The Rites of Passage) schema of three rites of passage meant to explain (typical? universal?) transformation from one stage of social life to another, Baker posits three stages or "rites of the black (w)hole": separation from white society; renewal of desire and instruction in black life in the "betwixt and between"; and aggregation or reintegration (153-57; see diagram on 156). Most important to note is that Baker assumes the irreversibility of the transformed experience. Once you go (into the) black ([w]hole) you do not go back! Baker focused for the most part upon fiction, in particular the work of Richard Wright (especially Black Boy), as the basis for his arguments about African American "black blues life" and "black (w)hole." I agree with him that Richard Wright's work serves as an important and appropriate "mediating textual ground" for meditation and argumentation, especially because of the various charges leveled against him that he was insufficiently tropological, too much the protest writer, in sum, as writer, too dark! Yet Baker's focus upon Wright unfortunately led him to think that Wright had done more than problematize "the black (w)hole"; he thought that Wright had in fact detected the "set pattern of rites marking the Afro-American underground experience" (152). Baker's mistake was not in focusing upon Wright. Nor was it in his interpretation of Wright. It was in not seeing the Bible not only as a most important "mediating textual ground" for African Americans, including Richard Wright. Because the interaction between African Americans and the Bible, as this essay suggests, registers a quite different pattern of rites for African American experience - more circular than progressive and irreversible - and because African Americans and the Bible represents a much longer and more complex history of interaction than does African Americans and Richard Wright, it must be taken into account. If the interaction between African Americans and the Bible is taken into account, certain questions about the inevitability and linear progressive nature of the development of African American life will need to be raised. The perduring interest in the Bible among African Americans clearly has and deserves multiple explanations. But one I offer for consideration is most relevant here: the Bible actually does not resolve problems, it only raises them again and again in story or different forms of speech. It is because there is little or no closure that the Bible remains compelling, addressing from generation to generation and within each generation the same issues of the world as problem and a puzzle, as being unfair,

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unjust, hurtful, and the need to escape from it, and so forth. African Americans' continuing intense interaction with the Bible suggests that Baker's and Wright's views regarding darkness need to be qualified by reference to the interaction between the folk and The Book. 54. See the discussion regarding "not-reading" in Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora,Diaspora of Signs:Literacies,Creolization,and VernacularPracticein African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 103-21, 123, 135-36, 175. According to Gundaker, "Not-reading ... is a coexisting difference, a cosmological break-pattern that cuts across literacy, not devaluing reading, writing, or alphabetic script but momentarily illuminating and provisionally displacing them" (121). 55. I have in mind here the fact that African Americans share some experiences with other types of historically marginal groups - other ethnic minorities; women; religious minorities. But they also clearly are quite different in many respects from such groups. See R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), for interesting discussion of some of the exempla and some of the pertinent issues. For a fascinating study of one of the groups included in Moore's company of religious outsiders, see Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Placeof the Latter-daySaints in AmericanReligion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). (Interestingly, women are not isolated by Moore as one of the groups of outsiders. They are listed in the index under Christian Science, the nineteenth century, and Pentecostalism.) African Americans, I want to argue here, are not exotics: they are not unique in the world in terms of experiences with sacred texts. But they should not be lumped with others without seeing what peculiarities they represent even as legitimate representatives of humanity. Some groups deemed outsiders by Moore should now probably be taken off the list. It may have been defensible to regard Mormons as religious outsiders in the past. But they now exercise considerable economic, political and socioreligious control in the western United States. Some even claim that they own their own state! But beyond their "state," they find it not impossible, as a group, in most parts of the country, to blend in. Women? As a group? Clearly the matter of outsider status is complicated. I assume that in the way that Moore's index included women as qualifications or exceptions, and so forth, in terms of the major categories of religious movements, so women as a group should qualify arguments regarding African Americans. But none should deny that today African Americans surely belong to the list of those deemed outsiders in several respects. In fact, every relevant index is likely to show that such a people are the chronic and persistent outsiders - others. Susan Mizruchi, in her The Scienceof Sacrifice:American Literatureand Social Theory (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1998), a fascinating and provocative and comprehensive study of the notion of sacrifice in Western, especially American, culture, argues (see esp. p. 7) that sacrificial thinking with all its attendant horrors (from ancient crucifixion to modern lynching as forms of cruelty) was inspired by and coalesced around those who could be easily labeled strangers, and, in the case of black folk in particular, the "relentlessly alien." This is startling. But the issue for me in this essay is not whether African Americans are such according to every relevant index, but what sorts of implications and challenges - heuristic and political - the perception of such status presents. For the hint of an understanding of what such a challenge may be that anticipates to some degree but does not understandably go as far this collection of essays, see Harold Bloom, The American Religion:The Emergenceof thePost-ChristianNation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Bloom includes African American religion in his discussion of what constitutes the American religion (chapter 15). In fact, he argues that African American religion-of the folk variety or strand that historically has been centered in but is not at all limited to black Baptist traditions is the paradigm of the American religion. By focusing upon African American sensibilities, especially its negotiation of freedoms - for and from the self- a deeper understanding of American religion and the American collective self can be had. Bloom's understanding of

Introduction:R.eadingDarkness, R.eadingScriptures

39

the importance of the African American exemplum in the study of the American self also informs this collection of essays about the study of the cultural practice that is scripturalizing. 56. The number and the diverse spread of essays included in this section notwithstanding, it is clear that for a number of reasons not all worthy topics could be included. Yet I maintain that the selection of essays included in this section is sufficient to advance and defend the historical-interpretive schema and the conceptualization behind it. I should also indicate that essayists were not asked or forced to select topics that fit the schema. I invite readers to challenge decisions made and to offer other possibilities of topics for inclusion in the discussion. This must be done in order to advance the discussion about the issues. 57. With the terms "de-formation," "formation," and "marronage" I am drawing upon Houston Baker's reading of the social dynamics that led to and flowed out of the Harlem Renaissance. See his Modernism and the Harlem R.enaissance:de-formation, 49-51, 56, 67, 75, 92, 99, 103-4, 107; for references to marronage, see also note 12 above. I remind the reader that for historical and comparative perspectives on maroons, Richard Price, Maroon Societies,Leaming, Hidden Americans, and Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, should be consulted. Seen. 12 above. 58. This sacred text, as the selection in this book indicates, has been and remains for the most part, but not exclusively so, the Bible. That there are other such texts - the Qur'iin, among others, traditional and newly created- is not disputed or taken for granted. I concede that the representation of the engagement of such other texts is not adequate. More attention to filling in the gaps should remain among the research challenges that this book can identify. 59. It was the reading and re-reading of the arguments of the different essays submitted for consideration that convinced me of the defensibility and heuristic power of the schema. But my close colleagues and my students know that I have wrestled with some of the same sources and issues for some time and have offered summary and preliminary versions of the schema presented in this essay. See my essay "The Bible and African Americans: Outline of an Interpretive History," 81-97; "African American Traditions and the Bible," in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12-15; "The Bible and African American Culture," Encyclopediaof African-American Culture,vol. 1, ed.Jack Salzman et al. (New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996); and "African Americans and the Bible," HarperCollinsBible Dictionary,Paul Achtemeier, gen. ed. with the Society of Biblical Literature (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 15-17. For other interpretive schemas by African American biblical scholars see Renita Weems, Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Womens R.elationshipsin the Bible (San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988); Cain H. Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters (1989); Stephen B. Reid, Experience and Tradition:A Primer in Black Biblical Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990); and Brian Blount, Go Preach!Marks Messageand the Black Church Today (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis, 1998). 60. To return to the matter of the cultural "lag," see note 20 above, and the reference to Bhabha, Location of Culture. I think it important to stress here that African Americans' experience of the arguably universal cycle of collective human movement or striving scrambles normal time: their experience slows down the cycle of human movement, not due to their own making, but on account of the other-ing, alienation and liminality that modern racism is and effects. It is persistence of such that so slows down African Americans' movement through the cycle that they are made a compelling case study in human striving. For example, so necessary is it for this modern homeless people to engage constantly in "flight" from danger, etc., that it seems imperative to focus upon them as a way to understand what "flight" means in human history. African American fiction (Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon as a great example) should certainly be mined for the images and stories that keep alive the folk tradition about flight and its various purposes.

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61. The song continues: " ... you better run to the city ofrefuge, you better run!" This and related themes about the need for those who were traveling through an "unfriendly world," who found themselves in "this world" that was "not my home," were common in spirituals and other songs. See "The Vernacular Tradition," by Robert O'Meally, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Henry Louis Gates,Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, gen. eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 5-6. And see again Mechal Sobel's discussion of the motif of "trabelin'" in Afro-Baptist, and by extension, a significant segment of African American culture, in her book Trabelin' On, passim. This motif captures much but not all that I intend by the notion of flight. 62. Regarding infrapolitics of dominated but resisting groups, with sensitivity to African American history, see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, chap. 7. 63. Composed by Uzee Brown, professor of music, Morehouse College. The composition draws upon other traditional songs. 64. In his introduction to Maroon Societies, Richard Price creatively addresses the matter of the challenges of the settlement or formation of maroon societies, 10-30. See also Sally Price and Richard Price, Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), for a rather different and fascinating approach to the subject of formation. This matter of the challenges of formation after de-formation (or flight) is in many ways what Houston Baker's argument in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance is all about. See especially xvii, 8, 22, 31-32, 47, 50, 67, 85-87, 93, for arguments about "mastery of form." 65. See Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (London: Macmillan, 1988); Neil Schmitz, "Neo-HooDoo: The Experimental Fiction of Ishmael Reed," Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Criticaljournal 20, no. 1 (January 1974): 126-40; and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 217-38, for comprehensive treatment of Reed's work and responses to it. I am less interested in the various critical responses to Reed than I am in what Reed's work represents in terms of a view and representation of African American existence or stance in the world. 66. The few studies on marronage have tended not to isolate the challenges that I address here as part of a separate movement or stage. Such a separate movement, it seems to me, is necessary in order to explain the circular or cyclical aspect of human formation. What goes around does come around again - and again. But certain intensities and pressures are needed in order to sustain the movement. My third stage represents nothing else if it does not represent intensification of sentiment and heightened pressure. 67. Mumbo jumbo (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972). No "definition" can capture what Reed wanted to challenge readers to consider. His own attempt at providing a definition is vintage Reed- at once sensitive to and contemptuous of the lexicographical meaning and the world that constructs such meaning (7). Reed apparently could not resist taking and satirically fathoming the fourth and final dictionary entry-under the heading "Gibberish." (Note The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ed. William Morris [Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1969-76].) What we confront in Reed here is an attempt to capture a type of language or language world, a set a practices -African, African Caribbean, African American - that translate a world. According to Gates, Reed makes the point about where African Americans are or ought to be positioned by "signifyin(g)" on tradition: "Mumbo Jumbo is the received and ethnocentric Western designation for the rituals of black religions as well as for black languages themselves .... Mumbo Jumbo, then, signifies upon Western etymology, abusive Western practices of deflation through misnaming, and ... serves as a critique of black and Western literary forms and conventions, and of the complex relationships between the two" (220-21).

Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

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68. See his "Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto," in Ishmael Reed, Conjure: Sekcted Poems, 1963-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 20-25. These are rather complex works, often very difficult to decipher. But in Reed's explanation of what "Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto" entails one can find evidence of all of the emphases I think are characteristic of this third part of the cycle of African American existence - re-formist, re-vivalist, at once radical, hyper-critical, cynical and biting and old landmarkist and fundamentalist. These seemingly contradictory emphases are all registered in the interest of trying to re-define and re-capture a compelling, vital essence and core that was viewed as lost in the shuffle or the cycle. Note the need for old and new religious symbolization and hermeneutics: Neo-HooDoo is a "Lost American Church updated ... the music of James Brown without the lyrics and ads for Black Capitalism ... the 8 basic dances of nineteenth-century New Orleans' Place Congo ... modernized into the Philly Dog, the Hully Gully, the Funky Chicken, the Popcorn, the Boogaloo ... Neo-HooDoos would rather "shake that thing" than be stiff and erect. ... HooDoo is the strange and beautiful "fits" the Black slave Tituba gave the children of Salem. (Notice the arm waving ecstatic females seemingly possessed at the "Pentecostal," "Baptist," and "Rock Festivals" [all fronts for Neo-HooDoo]). The reason that HooDoo isn't given the credit it deserves in influencing American culture is because the students of that culture both "overground" and "underground" are uptight closetJeho-vah revisionists. They would assert the American and East Indian and Chinese thing before they would the Black thing ... Neo-HoodDoo is not a church for egotripping .... Unlike other established religions, there is no hierarchy of bishops, archbishops, cardinals, or a pope in VooDoo. Each oum'phor is a law unto itself. ... Neo-HooDoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest .... In NeoHooDoo, Christ the landlord deity ... is on probation. This includes "The Black Christ" and "The Hippie Christ." Neo-HooDoo tells Christ to get lost .... Whereas at the center of Christianity lies the graveyard the organ-drones and the cross, the center of NeoHooDoo is the drum the ankh and the Dance. So Fine, Barefootin, Heard it Through The Grapevine, are all Neo-HooDoos ... Neo-HooDoo borrows from Haiti Africa and South America. Neo-HooDoo comes in all styles and moods. Louis Jordan Nellie Lutcher John Lee Hooker Ma Rainey Dinah Washington the Temptations Ike and Tina Turner Aretha Franklin Muddy Waters Otis Redding Sly and the Family Stone B. B. King Junior Wells Bessie Smith Jelly Roll Morton Ray Charles Jimi Hendrix Buddy Miles the 5th dimension the Chambers Brothers Etta James and acolytes Creedance Clearwater Revival the Flaming embers Procol Harum are all NeoHooDoos .... Neo-HooDoo ain't Negritude. Neo-HooDoo never been to France. Neo-HooDoo is "your Mama" as Larry Neal said ... Africa is the home of the loa (Spirits) ofNeo-HooDoo although we are building our own American "pantheon." Thousands of "Spirits" (Ka) who would laugh atJeho-vah's fury concerning "false idols" (translated everybody else's religion) or "fetishes .... " A dangerous paranoid pain-in-the-neck a Cop God from the git-go, Jehovah was the successful law and order candidate in the mythological relay of the 4th century A.O ..•• "Political leaders" are merely altar boys from Jeho-vah. While the targets of some "revolutionaries" are laundramats and candy stores, Neo-HooDoo targets are 1V the museums the symphony halls and churches art music and literature departments in Christianizing (education I think they call it!). Universities which propagate the Art of Jeho-vah-much Byzantine Middle Ages Renaissance painting ofJeho-vah's "500 years of civilization" as Nixon put it are Jeho-vah propaganda. Many White revolutionaries

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Vincent L. Wimbush

can only get together with 3rd world people on the most mundane because they are ofJeho-vah's party and don't know it ....

"political" level

Neo-HooDoos are Black Red ... and occasionally White ... Neo-HooDoo is a litany seeking its text Neo-HooDoo is a Dance and Music closing in on its words Neo-HooDoo is a Church finding its lyrics ... Almost 100 years ago HooDoo was forced to say Goodbye to America. Now HooDoo is back as Neo-HooDoo You can't keep a good church down! Schmitz, "Neo-HooDoo," has summarized the phenomenon in the following manner: "[Neo-HooDoo] is rather a characteristic stance, a mythological provenance, a behavior, a complex of attitudes, the retrieval of an idiom ... ," ( 127) a " ... piece of Africa given ... then forgotten ... that Reed tries to redeem" (132). 69. On the matter of what symbols "mean," see Caroline W. Bynum's essay, "On the Complexity of Symbols," in Experience of the Sacred: &adings in the Phenomenology of &ligion, ed. Sumner B. Twiss and Walter H. Conser,Jr. (Hanover, N.H.: Brown University Press, 1992), 265-72. With her challenge to students of religion to take into serious consideration the fact that all people are "gendered," that all symbols come from "gendered" users, she argues rather persuasively about the necessity of being open to and clarifying positionality: "It is not possible ever to ask How does a symbol - any symbol - mean? without asking For whom does it mean?" (267). Only a little effort is needed to extrapolate from this argument that of course one should not be permitted to ask what a complex symbol such as "Bible" means without asking for what "gendered" self and for what people, their "gendered-ness" notwithstanding. Such notes were struck in The Postmodern Bible, passim. 70. The term "strivings" here comes from W. E. B. Du Bois's use and meaning of such in his provocative section entitled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" in "The Souls of Black Folk." See The Souls of Black Folks uyW.E. B. Du Bois, ed. and with introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Bantam Classics, 1989), for background and critical discussion and bibliography. 71. On the basis of the total numbers (more than sixty) and the wide ranging diversity of contributors in terms of field and disciplinary as well as ethnic representation, and the generally shared awareness on the part of contributors that this publication may signal another new moment in the collaborative study of African Americans, especially in terms of religion and culture, I am thinking, humbly enough, of the 1925 publication of The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke as an appropriate comparison. But I shall defer final judgement about such comparisons to future readers and reviewers. 72. Here it is clear that not every single African American, but only African Americans as a historical collectivity, should be included in this category. The differences in experiences among African Americans are to be respected in this argument. Some should be included here among the chronically marginal on the basis of historical-genealogical linkage; others on the basis of consistent solidarity and commitment. Such a basis allows many others of varied ethnic backgrounds to be included among the marginal and among those who see and read darkness differently. 73. The possibility of persons of every ethnic background and class being in solidarity with the chronically marginal peoples of the world notwithstanding, there is no more shocking and poignant connection that can be made between marronage and dark peoples than that reported by Richard Price in Maroon Societies, 14. Having drawn upon George Woodbury's book, The Great Days of Piracy in the West Indies (New York: Norton, 1951), Price made the point that in the colonial "New World," especially in the Spanish territories, many "alliances

Introduction: Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures

43

of convenience" were struck, including that between pirates, enemies of the Spanish, and the (blacks as) maroons. Such alliances were sporadic and based on opportunism. Most fascinating is the fact that the pirates, many of whom were slave traders and slave owners themselves, came to use the verb "to maroon" in reference to "the form of punishment meted out [by the pirates] to backsliders from their own numbers." This sub-cultural popular understanding makes rather dramatic the historical and perduring connection in the modern West between marronage and darkness of experience, marronage and dark peopl,es.

PattOn(!

(What comes before, leads to, the weaving together [textus, textura]) (Hermeneutical

Frameworks and Historical-Comparative

Contexts and Backgrounds)

Th(!~tudy of th(!Bibi(! 8~ ~thnogt8~hy8nd ~thnology

-1-

The Bible and Contemporary African American Culture I Hermeneutical Forays, Observations, and Impressions VELMA LOVE

Introduction There were fifteen members in the class, most of whom had registered out of intellectual curiosity and were not quite sure what to expect. The course was titled "African Americans and the Bible: A Seminar on Society, Culture and Sacred Texts." Under the leadership of Vincent L. Wimbush, Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, the seminar was designed to provide a framework for exploring the history of African American engagement of the Bible as sacred text. In fulfillment of course requirements, students were asked to conduct ethnographic research at a cultural site of choice and document the explicit or implicit engagement of the biblical text. Ethnography was the primary methodological tool for capturing the ways in which Scripture symbolizes, for African Americans, "a way of being in the world." In other words, the goal was to begin to document what a people have done to the Bible and what the Bible has done to a people. We did not know at the time that this course would take us from the comfortable and familiar halls of the academy into a close, but distant world. We did not know that the exegetical skills, which we had so laboriously acquired, would be of limited value to us in the vast world of cultural sites, images, sounds and voices representing multiple "readings" of the Bible. In the process of moving beyond the printed text and into Scripture as human activity, many ofus were fascinated with our discoveries. This essay is an attempt to reflect some of those discoveries. I write it with the hope that many readers of Scripture will have the opportunity to seek and find their own answers to W. C. Smith's provocative question, "What Is Scripture?" 1

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Velma Love

Interpretive Sites and Insights We began our study by accepting Smith's assertion that "Scripture is human activity." So from the outset we were engaged in a relational studies approach to examining the Bible as sacred text. 2 To gain an understanding of the comparative phenomenology of scripturalizing we also read the work of Wesley Kort, Walter Ong, H. W. Turner, and Grey Gundaker. 3 From the work of Edwin Gaustad, David Turley, Martin Marty, Donald Mathews, and Nathan Hatch we gained insight into the use of the Bible in the formation of American culture. 4 For a review of the history of African American religion, we turned to Timothy Fulop, Albert Raboteau, Peter Paris, Gayraud Wilmore, and George Simpson. 5 Armed with the historical and theoretical frameworks of these scholars, we somewhat cautiously ventured into the field to conduct a contemporary inventory of the Bible in African American culture. We observed people engaging the Bible through song and story and dance and art and spoken word. We observed people engaging the Bible in the street, in churches, hospitals, clinics, gyms, restaurants, barber shops, beauty shops, prisons, and funeral homes. We found the Bible as an icon on clothing,jewelry, tables, walls, windows, and doors. We found the Bible explicitly and implicitly present throughout African American culture. Many of us sought to analyze our data by examining our material against the tripartite schema proposed by Vincent Wimbush in his application of the term "asceticism" to define the enduring struggle found in African American sociocultural formation and expressed in religious life. Wimbush identifies and defines the following three stages in the ascetic formation of African American culture: (1) flight, through offensive tactics and practices, with a view toward the de-formation of bondage and dominance; (2) construction of an-other worldin-marronage, through both defensive and offensive tactics and practices, with a view toward the mastery of form; and (3) reform(ul)ation from the established site of self- and cultural-ideological view toward critical assessment of orientation of the new world. 6 The term "marronage" is key to Wimbush's schema. As used above, it refers to an ideological space of alienation and resistance. Focusing on the concept of marronage in the above historical schema, Wimbush suggests that biblically inspired artistic expressions in the form of music, literature, oratory, dance, folklore, and the visual arts constitute some of the tactics and practices that can be identified as "arts of resistance" in African American social formation. 7 The data examined by members of the seminar seem to support the validity of this schema. 8 For example, seminar member Robin Owens's analysis of a public speech delivered in 1998 by Sister Souljah, a well-known rap artist, suggests that the use of the biblical character Moses was not unlike the use made of the same character by Martin Luther King,Jr., in a sermon delivered in 1968. Summarizing her work she commented,

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I was able to see the use of rap music and black church rhetoric ... not only as complex windows into the world of a segment of African American culture, but also as a type of performed utterance that imaginatively evoked mental flight and the construction of an other world in marronage. This form of struggle was constructed through the offensive practices of the use of rhetoric and the defensive tactics of survival gained through cultural memory and biblical engagement. (R.O., "Sister Souljah," 19) Tom Dorsey, another member of the seminar, chose as his site Unity Fellowship Church of Brooklyn, New York. He describes Unity as a church in marronage, an "oasis church" founded to help gay African Americans defend themselves against a hostile world. Identifying the Brooklyn church as one of nine Unity Fellowship Churches located in cities throughout the United States, Dorsey points out that the church uses the biblical text to affirm that gay African Americans are part of the body of Christ. The church motto, "God is Love and Love is for everyone," is repeated frequently during the worship service, assuring the congregants that they are in a safe space, a place where they will not be judged (T.D. 's "Unity Fellowship," 4). Applying Wimbush's schema to his research, Dorsey shows that the members of the Unity Fellowship Church have taken flight from an oppressive theological stance that condemns homosexuality and have formed an other world in marronage where they find reprieve. Though this reprieve may be temporary and may represent only a ritual liminality between two oppressive states, during this time the participants are able to experience a "communitas" that fortifies them for their re-entry into a hostile world. 9 The use of the biblical text to construct an other world in marronage was not unusual in the research findings of other members of the seminar. In his description of the "Israeli Church of Universal Practical Knowledge," Marshall Mitchell writes of having observed a "biblical hermeneutic charged with Old and New world racial identities ... polemics against America as a modern 'Babylon,' and millennial predictions gleaned from the pages of the KJV [King James Version of the Bible]." Mitchell comments further, "This is the 'world-in-creation' of a modern religious group in perpetual legal and cultural flight from a despised world toward a future world of salvation and redemption at the hand of God" (M.M.'s "Cultural Inventory," 1). From Mitchell's perspective, the street preachers from the "Israeli Church of Universal Practical Knowledge," better known as the Hebrew Israelites, quoted the Bible to support their stance against a variety of social issues such as homosexuality, women's attire, prostitution, rap music, and alcohol consumption. Prominently displayed and strapped on the waist of the cantor, "the Bible filled its symbolic role as sword ... tucked in the belt of a biblical warrior waging war against an Old World" (M.M.'s "Cultural Inventory," 7). "Flight" was a key theme in the observations and interpretive analysis offered by many of the seminar participants. Choosing African Americans' responses to death as a focus for her research, Marie Case also found this theme prevalent. Case

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examined the portrayal of death in spirituals, observed funeral rites, and visited cemeteries. Placing spirituals in stage one of the Wimbush model, flight, she found "the construal of death as an event to be embraced, informed by the biblical trope of 'Promised Land'" (M.C.'s "Death," 13). In her observation ofa funeral service, Case noted that there was much singing, dancing, and hand clapping. She compared this behavior to similar descriptions of funeral rites in African tribes and concluded that it represented stage two of Wimbush's tripartite model, marronage. Of the two cemeteries she visited, Case placed the "colored cemetery," an African American slave burial ground, in stage one, indicating that it represented the "involuntary presence" of Africans in America and a symbolic link to spirituals that embraced death as a way to construe something other than "this world." The contemporary cemetery, Rolling Green Menwrial, she placed in stage two, marronage. Referencing the work of Grey Gundaker, Case suggests that the sunrise and sunset imagery along with the Bible as icon represents a kind of cross-referencing and intersection of worlds, African and American (M.C.'s "Death," 15). 10 The work of Rubin Tendai, another seminar participant, examined the way in which the Bible is engaged in healing. From the chapel of Harlem Hospital, Tendai observed the Bible in use as a set of "ritual prescriptions for reenvisioning ... and transforming life" (R.T 's "Hospital Worship," 8). He observed worship services in the hospital chapel and found that the preaching included performative use of language with a healing intent, elements identified by Theophus Smith in his discussion of biblical formations in black America. 11 Tendai also notes that his observations were consistent with what Wimbush describes as "a hermeneutic characterized by a looseness, even playfulness, vis-a-vis the biblical text [is] not controlled by the literal words of the themselves .... The interpretation 12 Tendai's research throws into relief what is a retexts, but by social experience." curring theme throughout the research conducted by the seminar participants: that the significant thing is not the text as such, but what social experience has done to the text and what the text has done to social experience. David Sanchez chose the popular artists of Harlem as his contemporary interpreting community. He examined murals, photographs, and 01:?jects;he found in some of them depictions of the Bible as well as many biblical allusions. In cases where the Bible was not directly referenced, he found strong spiritual undercurrents. One example, the "Born Free" mural, depicts a woman in the air in the presence of a white dove (spirit?). Three of the four heroes of the past depicted in the mural were ministers (King, X, and Powell). The purchased art, especially the work of William Johnson, depict African Americans as a faithful/Christian people. Other artistic expressions portray God, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and various saints as Black. Stained glass windows, church fronts, and the wheel of a van all depict the Bible, and in each case the Bible is open. (D.S.'s "Popular Art," 17) Sanchez also found multiple artwork.

allusions to Africa and portrayals

of Africa in the

1. "Colored Cemetery:' Photo: Marie Case.

2. Rolling Green Memorial Cemetery: "The Lord Is My Shepherd:' Photo: Marie Case.

3. Rolling Green Memorial Cemetery: "Holy Bible:' Photo: Marie Case.

4. Stole: ''.Jesus Is My Light." Photo: David Sanchez.

5. Storefront church display: "Open Bible;' Photo: David Sanchez.

6. Stained glass window: "Praying Hands;' Photo: David Sanchez.

7. Stained glass window: "Flaming Sword." Photo: David Sanchez.

8. Mural: "Keep the Faith Baby:' -Adam Clayton Powell. Photo: David Sanchez.

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Recalling Marcus Garvey's "Back to Africa" movement, he proposes that such allusions are an ideological parallel to flight, seeking to de-form bondage and dominance (stage one of Wimbush's model). Beyond flight, Sanchez recognized stage two, "construction of another world-in-marronage," reflected in the photos of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, and Adam Clayton Powell, historical figures who were both creators and perpetuators of black ideologies. He suggests that stage three, "reformulation," is depicted in the "photo of a mural that has a white child walking with his arms around two black children," a reconciliatory image demonstrating a reassessment of the flight and marronage established in stages one and two (D.S.'s "Popular Art," 19). Ideological flight, and the Bible at the threshold of other worlds, was a recurring theme, not only in fieldwork observations and analysis, but in the literature we examined as well. The following selections from the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, provide examples of such: "City Called Heaven": I am a poor pilgrim of sorrow. I'm in this wide world alone. No hope in this world for tomorrow. I'm tryin' to make heaven my home.

13

The above lyrics could be placed in Wimbush's first stage, i.e., flight; however, this could just as easily be seen as the description of one who is at the threshold, in an in-between space, experiencing pain and alienation. A second example, "Walk Together Children," to the contrary, expresses hope and encouragement: Walk together children, Don't you get weary, ... Oh, talk together children, Don't you get weary, There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land. Oh, get you ready children, Don't you get weary ... We'll enter there, oh children, Don't you get weary, There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land.

14

The lyrics of the first song, "City Called Heaven," describe a psychological space of sadness, loneliness, and displacement. Looking forward to a city called heaven where one could be "home" suggests movement from a difficult to a comfortable space. The use of the biblical imagery of "heaven" as a place of peace and contentment reflects an effort to reconfigure the difficult space of alienation and find a space where one could be at home.

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The second song, "Walk Together Children," also describes a threshold space, a space of transition. However, the tone expressed here is one of hope in spite of weariness. The biblical imagery of "the Promised Land" represents the other side of the threshold, the space where life is better. The lyrics provided comfort and encouragement to the enslaved Africans who found themselves away from their homeland having to construct a new home. A similar sentiment is expressed in the following passage in which there has been a departure from one way of life, slavery, but a new way of being in the world has yet to be constructed. Isaac Lane expresses the religious sentiment during this time of struggle in the account of his life in the ministry, "From Slave to Preacher among the Freedmen": After Lee had surrendered and the Confederacy had gone to pieces and Jefferson Davis had become a refugee, our owners called us together and told us we were free and had to take care of ourselves. There I was with a large, dependent family to support. I had no money, no education; no mother nor father to whom to look for help in any form .... For six months we lived on nothing but bread, milk, and water. We had a time to keep alive; but by praying all the time, with faith in God, and believing that he would provide for his own, we saved enough to get the next year not only bread, milk, and water, but meat also. 15 Though the Bible is not explicitly referenced in this account, the reference to prayer and faith in God indicates a biblical source for the courage and tenacity required to successfully re-negotiate interior space and reconstruct exterior space following slavery. A third document that illuminates the liminal space following slavery is the essay, "Of the Faith of Our Fathers," first published by W. E. B. Du Bois in New World in 1900. Speaking of the relationship between religion and Emancipation, Du Bois wrote: For fifty years Negro religion ... transformed itself and identified itself with the dream of Abolition .... Thus when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the freedman a literal Coming of the Lord. His fervid imagination was stirred as never before, by the tramp of armies, the blood and dust of battle, and the wail and whirl of social upheaval. He stood dumb and motionless before the whirlwind: what had he to do with it? Was it not the Lord's doing, and marvelous in his eyes? Joyed and bewildered with what came, he stood awaiting new wonders till the inevitable Age of Reaction swept the nation and brought the crisis of to-day. 16 In the above words, Du Bois has very eloquently described a liminal space, one filled with both joy and bewilderment. He continues with a critique of the church and a discussion of the ethical and moral behavior of Negroes. The concluding paragraph reiterates the state of liminality.

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Du Bois captures the essence of this "in between" state when he writes, "But back of this, still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal." 17 This statement is reflective of a period in which the past has lost its meaning, but a vision for the future has not yet taken shape and form. In his memoirs, Still Life In Harlem, Harris wrote in 1996 of this liminal space, "I felt as though I was walking among the ghosts of Harlem's past, that I was coming here as they had come here, as Langston Hughes had come and Duke Ellington had come, as they all had come ... coming to find peace, coming to gain in Harlem a sense of self and a new way of defining oneself." 18 Harris continues, "By 1925 Harlem was already the center of a certain universe, spinning in an orbit all its own, attracting other worlds to itself with the gravitational pull of an immense black hole." 19 In the period known as the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes wrote, "Standing here on the edge of hell, in Harlem wondering what to do with all that we remember .... "20 The historical examples cited above all describe an interior state of being that is difficult to define. It is a state often characterized by ambiguity and uncertainty. How does the Bible as sacred text speak to such moments? What happens to biblical heroes and heroines when at the edge, on the threshold? Lawrence W. Levine, a well-known scholar of African American social history, has suggested that the Bible served as the only "fixed point" in the lives of enslaved Africans in America. The Bible therefore served to trigger the imagination, providing a vehicle for transcending the harsh reality of life and envisioning a new and different world. 21 In Black Culture and Black Consciousness Levine writes, "Denied the possibility of achieving an adjustment to the external world of the antebellum South ... , they extended the boundaries of their restrictive universe backward until fused with the world of the Old Testament, and upward until it became one with the world beyond." 22 Citing the work of anthropologist Paul Radin, Levine continues to explain the role of religion in the life of the enslaved Africans: The ante-bellum Negro was not converted to God. He converted God to himself. In the Christian God he found a fixed point and he needed a fixed point, for both within and outside of himself, he could see only vacillation and endless shifting .... There was no other safety for people faced on all sides by doubt and the threat of personal disintegration, by the thwarting of instincts and the annihilation of values. 23 If the "ante-bellum Negro" needed a fixed point outside himself, did not the "renaissance Negro"? Then what about the late twentieth-century Negro, the African American? Does transitional life space dictate the need for a fixed point outside the self? Is the African Americans engagement of the Bible in contemporary culture, ultimately, an effort to create such a point? Do sacred texts trigger the imagination, a necessary component of "converting God to oneself'? Is it the process of (re)membering and (re)formation that allows one to move through liminal space?

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The answers to these questions go beyond the seminar and the scope of this essay. However, even our abbreviated attempts to "catch people in the act of scripturalizing," of constructing and reconstructing worlds, of making meaning of life through an appropriation of the Bible as a sacred text, strongly suggest that the Bible often appears during stages ofliminality and transition. This thesis also emerged from my own research work, which focused on sidewalk prophets on 125th Street in Harlem, New York City. I situated my observations on an anthropological framework ofliminality, a concept introduced by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his landmark book, The Rites of Passage, published in 1908. Based on his analysis of studies of religious belief and ceremonialism as well as his observations in various cultures; van Gennep suggested that certain "rites of passage" function to aid in the transitional process from one stage of life to another. He identified three stages of the rites of passage: (1) a pre-liminal stage marked by separation from an existing place, state of being or order of affairs, (2) a liminal phase marked by a time of transition, (3) a post-liminal stage marked by aggregation or return to a stable space. 24 Victor Turner expanded and built on van Gennep's work. Turner refers to the liminal period as an "interstructural situation," defining the liminal state as a transitional one between two fixed points. 25 This concept seems to work well when applied to our observations of persons using the biblical text as an anchor while in a state of transition. One of the most fascinating artifacts among the sidewalk prophecy material collected on 125th Street was a self-published pamphlet, Trials Troubles Tribulations, compiled by Devan Mair. It was purchased for a "donation" of$2.00 from a middleaged, African American woman who was accompanied by an adolescent male who appeared to be her son. The woman made a point of saying the material was there to help people and she only asked for donations toward the cost of printing. The booklet is printed on letter-size white paper folded in half, with an orange card stock cover. On the font cover is the title "WHY ME LORD? (EDDIE'S STORY)."On the back cover is a verse from the Gospel of John: IN THE WORLDYE SHALL HAVE TRIBULATION BUTBE OF GOODCHEER I HAVEOVERCOME THE WORLD. St. John 17 vs 3326 Trials Troubles and Tribulations is a narrative interspersed with "scripturalizing" depicting the life story of a twenty-two-year-old man who encounters one tragedy after another. The story is dedicated to "those who have a reason to ask 'Why me, Lord?' Use of Scripture in this story reflects the engagement of sacred texts in transitional life situations. The theme of"overcoming" is prevalent throughout. This pamphlet, while only fifty-eight pages long, contains 196 scriptural references. The most frequently quoted book is Psalms, with 42 references. There are 14 references to Job and 13 references to Isaiah. Other references cite 28 different books of the Bible.

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The life situations depicted include the loss of a loved one, the critical illness of a child, and a prolonged period of unemployment. In each of these situations the major character, Eddie, experiences moments of liminality. The first situation, marked by grief, is a liminal moment in that it is a state of emotional imbalance. Grieving is a way of renegotiating space, readjusting to a new identity without the loved one. Applying van Gennep's rites of passage model which identifies three states characterized by separation, liminality or transition, and aggregation; grief occurs following the separation from a loved one and the establishment of a new life without the loved one. The Bible is used as a source of inspiration and comfort, an aid to get to the next stage. Particular references for this state include the following: He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him. (Ps. 91:15) 27 He giveth power to the faint: And to them that have no might He increaseth strength. (Isa. 40:29) 28 Cast all your care upon him: for he careth for you. (1 Pet. 5:7) 29 The themes of strength and overcoming, relying on a source outside the self, are consistent with the earlier discussion of ,the role of the Bible in the life of the enslaved Africans. The Bible served as a fixed point in a shifting, frightening, unstable world. During periods of grief the Bible serves a similar function, present at the threshold, offering images, narratives, and symbols to aid in the process of reconfiguring emotional space, reforming identity. The second challenging life experience encountered by Eddie is coping with the critical illness of his son. 30 Illness is a liminal space in that it is a space in between health and healing. In a state of (dis)ease, the patient has been separated from a state of health and has not yet attained a state of healing or wholeness. Timothy Carson addresses this concept in his discussion of hospitalization as a liminal state, suggesting that chaplains or pastors voluntarily enter into the liminal state of suffering with .patients to assist in the transformational process. 31 In this story, Eddie calls the people from his church to come and form a prayer vigil around his son's bed. The biblical references in this story include the following: Hear my prayer, 0 Lord, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day of trouble, Incline thine ear unto me: In the day when I call answer me speedily. (Ps. 102: 1) 32 I waited patiently for the Lord And he inclined unto me and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of a horrible pit,

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Out of the miry clay and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, Even praise unto our God. (Ps. 40:1-2) 33 These two passages when taken together express a plea for help and a response of deliverance. The inclusion of these passages in "Eddie's Story" reflects the popular cultural engagement of sacred texts to move from one interior state to another during times of crisis. Such movement is expressed in the words, "He inclined unto me and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God." The movement is from a state of despair to a state of joy. This same movement happened in Eddie's life; he moved from despair when the doctor informed him that his son had cancer, to joy when the doctor informed him that the cancer was in remission. Between these two states was the liminal phase when his friends gathered for prayer. Gathering for prayer could be considered a ritual performance, the process of which resulted in a mutual experience of "communitas," mutuality or empathetic understanding. Restored to a state of balance, Eddie only experienced a brief respite from his "trials, troubles, and tribulations." He went to work one day and was handed a pink slip informing him that he was laid off from his job. Once again, his life was disrupted. The description of this episode is interspersed with a number of Scriptures, among which include the following: We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed. We are perplexed, but not in despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken, Cast down but not destroyed. (2 Cor. 4:8) 34 Weeping may endure for a night, But joy cometh in the morning. (Ps. 30:5) 35 Again, the Bible is used as a source for sacred texts that offer symbols and imagery to aid in the reconfiguration of emotional and psychological space. In each instance cited above, the biblical quotes are simply presented in relationship to the traumatic events of the hero's life. No other interpretive focus is offered and the larger context from which the passage is drawn is not discussed. This use of Scripture is an indication of what Wesley Kort refers to in his discussion of Scripture, textuality, and cultural practice: Because the texts that constitute a person's scriptures are primary for the world they support, those texts hold the potential to sustain or reconfigure that world when it had in part been disconfirmed or at points found to be unsatisfying or unworkable. Beliefs are inscribed and derived from texts in order to construct or project worlds and to correct or confirm them. 36

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When Devan Mair compiled Trials Troubles and Tribulations, he was obviously operating from the perspective of the "Bible as God's instruction manual." His location on the "textual field" therefore dictates his use of texts as Scripture to reconfigure the world of his major character, Eddie, at every stage of discontinuity in his life. The pamphlet suggests that persons in crisis situations can use the biblical text for comfort and strength to move through crisis to stability, to envision and construct an other world.

Conclusion The examples cited above are an indication of what happens when the interpretive focus is shifted from texts to communities. The African Americans and Bible Seminar provided an opportunity for graduate students of religion to look at the complex process of a people engaging sacred texts from both an historical and a contemporary perspective. Though this work has by no means been conclusive, it has provided a glimpse of when and where Scripture has been important in the lives of African American people. In so doing, it has given some indication of how the Bible has shaped a people and how, by the same token, a people has appropriated the Bible. An exploration of African American cultural appropriations of the biblical text provides a rich and diverse landscape of the complex engagements, both positive and negative, of Scripture in the lives of people. As a case study in Scripture as human activity, the work of students from the African Americans and Bible Seminar has demonstrated the importance of a new orientation, one that understands texts not as the goals, but as tools in the construction and mediation of worlds. Perhaps more than anything else, this project has demonstrated the value of ethnographic work, literature, and modern cultural expressions in studying sacred texts. It has demonstrated an alternative approach to the study of the Bible, one that begins with the present. It is, after all, according to Wimbush, not so much the "meaning of texts, but texts and meaning" that is significant. 37 This work, however tentative it might be, has shown the vast possibilities that exists when one begins the study of the Bible by examining Scripture as human activity in the present day world.

Notes 1. This phrase comes from W. C. Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993). 2. For an extensive discussion, see Smith, What Is Scripture? 18-19. 3. Wesley A. Kort, "Take, Read": Scripture, Textuality, and Cultural Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982), 31-115; H. W. Turner, Religious Innovation in Africa (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979); Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 4. Edwin S. Gaustad, A Documentary History of Religion in America to the Civil War (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982), 57-125; David Turley, American Religi,on (London: Helm

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Information, 1998); Martin E. Marty, Religi,onand Republic:The American Circumstance(Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 136-84; Nathan D. Hatch, The Democratizationof American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 3-185. 5. Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds., African American Religi,on:Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997); Peter J. Paris, "The Bible and the Black Churches," in The Bible and SocialReform,ed. Ernest R. Sandeen (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982); Gayraud S. Wilmore, African American Religious Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989); George E. Simpson, Buzek Religions in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 1-20, 281-320. 6. Vincent L. Wimbush. This paradigm was explained in an unpublished document, "' ... Rollin' through an Unfriendly World ... ': African Americans, the Bible and the Ascetics of Socio-Cultural Formation," distributed to members of NT339 at Union Theological Seminary, New York City in the Fall of 1998. It has been revised and expounded upon in the introduction to this volume. 7. Ibid. 8. This essay refers to the work of the following students who participated in the African Americans and Bible Seminar at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, in the fall of 1998: Robin L. Owens, "The Voice of Sister Souljah," Tom Dorsey, "Unity Fellowship Church Site Visit," Marshall Mitchell, "African Americans and the Bible Cultural Inventory Research Project," Marie Case, "Death the Final Project," Rubin Tendai, "Wednesday Noon Worship Services at Harlem Hospital," and David Sanchez, "The Popular Art of Harlem." These essays are on file in the African Americans and the Bible Project Office, Union Theological Seminary, New York City. · 9. Here the concepts of "liminality" and "communitas" come from Victor Turner, The Bitual Process:Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). 10. Here Case cites Grey Gundaker, Signs ofDiaspora,Diasporaof Signs: Literacies,Creolization, and VernacularPracticein African America (New York: Oxford Press, 1998). 11. Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture:BiblicalFormationsof Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 12. Tendai cites Wimbush, "The Bible and African America: An Outline of an Interpretative History," from Stony the Road We Trod:African-AmericanBiblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991). 13. Henry Louis Gates,Jr., and Nellie Y McKay, eds., TheNortonAnthof.ogyof African American Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 8. 14. Ibid., 9. 15. Milton C. Sernett, Afro-AmericanReligiousHistory:A DocumentaryWitness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985), 232. 16. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Of the Faith of the Fathers," reprinted in Sernett's documentary collection, 316. 17. Ibid. 18. Eddy L. Harris, Still Life in Harlem:A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 96. 19. Ibid. 20. Langston Hughes, Poetry and Reflections, performed by Langston Hughes, sound cassette, British Broadcasting Co., 1980. 21. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Cultureand Black Consciousness(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 32. 22. Ibid. 23. From Paul Radin, "Status, Phantasy, and the Christian Dogma," in "God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Negro Ex-slaves," ed. A. P.

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Watson, Paul Radin, and Charles S. Johnson; Fisk University, Nashville, 1945, unpublished, as reported in Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 33. 24. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), vi. 25. Timothy Carson cites Victor Turner, Forest of Symbols in Liminal Reality and Transformational Power (New York: University Press of America, 1997), 3. 26. Devan Mair, "Trials Troubles Tribulations: Why Me Lord? (Eddie's Story)" unpublished pamphlet. 27. Ibid., 16. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Carson, Liminal Reality, 69-74. 32. Mair, "Trials," 119. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 38. 35. Ibid., 47. 36. Wesley A. Kort, "Take, Read, "3. 37. This was Wimbush's argument throughout the seminar. Now see his development of this argument in the Introduction to this volume.

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The Bible and Contemporary African American Culture II Report on a Preliminary Ethnographic Project JAMES

M. SHOPSHIRE,

VICTORIA

IDA ROUSSEAU MUKENGE,

ERICKSON, AND HANS

A.

BAER

Introduction: The Process and Overall Design Games M. Shopshire) The Contemporary Inventory Project, one part of the interdisciplinary African Americans and the Bible Project, was intended, according to Project Director Vincent Wimbush, "to establish the complex, multifaceted interaction of contemporary African America and Bible/Sacred Texts as warrant and springboard for research that is comprehensive, collaborative, and multidisciplinary (historical, social scientific, phenomenological, comparative, cultural-critical, aesthetic)." Because of the interdisciplinary focus of the African Americans and the Bible Project, the social sciences seemed the appropriate place to begin an inventory of the cultural and structural factors that come into play in African American engagements of and with the Bible. Since our original hunch was that the Bible's impact on African Americans is wide and varied, ethnographic inquiry was chosen to provide both a focused and an open-ended working inventory of pre-textual, con-textual, and sub-textual interactions of African Americans and the Bible. Valid and reliable methods of the social sciences were employed to take the inventory. These are summarized by those with expertise who designed and worked closely on the execution of the inventory part of the project. Professor Ida Rousseau Mukenge provides an overview of the methodologies used; a summary of process and procedures in data collection is provided by Professor Victoria Erickson; Professor Hans Baer provides the theoretical considerations and preliminary analysis; and finally, I offer conclusions, implications and suggestions for further research. Approximately one year was devoted to development of a coordinated strategy of multidisciplinary study of African Americans and the Bible. It became clear early in the process that a carefully planned social scientific inventory should be a central component of such a multidisciplinary project. Several sessions with a group of

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approximately fifteen social scientists led to the recommendation to do an inventory employing ethnographic methods as a means of gathering contemporary data on the ways African Americans engaged and were influenced by the Bible. The Project Director, Vincent Wimbush, called on the social science group to bring strategic thinking to identify pertinent community contexts for the inventory. The inventory was national in scope. Social science consultants recommended a wide range 0f sites in which the researchers would be immersed for the purposes of observing and interviewing African Americans' engagement of the Bible in language, symbolic and physical expressions. The initial conceptualization of contexts is presented in the following graphic.

Sitesfor Study of Engagementsof the Bible INSTITUTIONS/ORGANIZATIONS Historically Blackcollegesanduniversities Predominately whitecollegesanduniversities Christian schools,publicschools,andprivateschools Localchurchcongregations BlackGreekletterorganizations Benevolent andsocialorganizations Politicalorganizations SOCIALIZATION CONTEXTS CROSS-GENERATIONS AND CROSS-GENDERS

POLITICAUECONOMIC CONTEXTS Black-owned businesses Politicalrallies Civicspeeches Publicprayers Shopping malls Marketplace Barberandbeautyshops Protestmovements

Retirement communities Nursinghomes Singlefamilies Extended families Nuclearfamilies Nontraditional households Community centers Shoppingmalls Childcarecenters CULTURAL CONTEXTS ANDEXPRESSIONS Massmediaoutlets(BET,MTV) Majornetworks andradiomarkets Movies Magazines andnewspapers Clubsandnightspots Bluesandjazzfestivals Sportsevents Gospelsingingevents Rapandhip hopevents Parables andsayings

A number of regional teams and supervisors were identified to collect and compile data and work with the team to draft findings for the region. Team supervisors, who were faculty members at regional seminaries and colleges, were

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James M. Shopshire, Ida Rousseau Mukenge, Victoria Erickson, and Hans A. Baer

charged with recruitment of researchers, most of whom were students. The regional supervisors were responsible for site selections in consultation with student and other researchers. A concerted effort was made through the supervisors to choose a wide variety of sites to validate and strengthen conclusions drawn in the inventory pertaining to African Americans and the Bible. Several training and orientation meetings were held with students in the regions and an immersion weekend planned that allowed all of the regional teams to be in the field at the same time. Despite the dynamic changes that inevitably take place in different parts of the country, it was anticipated that this temporally coordinated cross-sectional immersion would produce rich insights in the various ways that the sociocultural context of African American life is influenced by the Bible. There was also a concerted effort to identify some of the biases and limitations that would affect the effort. First, most of the "observers" or "field-workers" to the call for the African Americans and the Bible Project were situated in seminaries in highly urbanized areas. It was predictable, then, that experiences of African Americans in urban areas would be more heavily represented than those of African Americans in suburban and rural areas. A related issue was the decision to focus on the venues most easily accessible. This was not intended to deny the importance of looking at African Americans in other areas, but rather a realistic response to a limited time frame. More time would have afforded both broader scope and deeper analysis. Obviously, additional studies will be needed to fill the gaps and move beyond the structural limitations of this effort.

Method: A Review (Ida Rousseau Mukenge) A variety of data collection techniques were used to identify the contexts and record the various ways that African Americans engage the Bible and other sacred texts. Participant observation and ethnographic interviews constituted the primary research techniques. The Southeastern, Midwestern and Western teams used observation exclusively. One site in the Northeastern region used the interview exclusively. Another in the Northeast used a combination of observation and interviews. The inventory project began by training assistant researchers in the mechanics of observation and interviewing as data collection tools. The objectives were: (1) to stress to the researchers that they were to provide through their observations a "snapshot" of how African Americans engage the Bible in as many types of contexts a possible; (2) to emphasize the importance of reporting rather than ad hoc interpretations; (3) to keep attention focused on the Bible, rather than on religion itself; and (4) to reiterate the importance of respecting the sacred traditions and sacred places of other people. An extensive set of guidelines and instructions were used in training the "participant-observers" (see Appendix, p. 77 below).

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The Bible and Contemporary African American Culture II

Tentative Interview Tips and Guidelines Individual and group interviews were conducted with prisoners at one site in the Northeast region. The following are the suggested questions used in conducting those interviews. 1. What are your recollections

of your earliest exposure to the Bible?

2. How would you characterize your views on the Bible during your teenage years? 3. During the early years of your incarceration, did you ever turn to the Bible for comfort, direction or guidance? What passages or stories did you turn to, if you can remember? 4. Early in your incarceration, do you recall a particular sermon preached by the chaplain that inspired you? Did other prisoners refer to parts of the Bible for guidance or support? 5. Have you ever participated in a Bible study group? If so, at what facility? What impact did it make on your reading of the Bible? 6. Has your incarceration impacted the way you read and interpret Can you think of an example that illustrates how? 7. In your experience, by prisoners?

is the Bible viewed as an oppressive or a liberating

8. Have your views or commitment friction with other prisoners? 9. To what extent sacred texts?

the Bible?

do Christians

to biblical principles

and Muslims interact

ever led to conflict or

about

their respective

10. What other faith traditions represented in prison have some interaction the Bible? How do they view the Bible? 11. Do you see biblical themes reflected in popular music? If so, what do you think of this?

book

with

culture, e.g., movies, dance,

Regional Supervisors and Teams After initial training, four regional teams were organized to identify significant and wide-ranging cultural phenomena pertaining to the Bible during one weekend. They coordinated the gathering of data to identify ways the Bible influences various contexts and to assess the similarities and differences that extend across the geocultural and social landscape of Africans in America. Teams were organized for the Northeast region in New York and Philadelphia; the Midwest region in Chicago; the Southeast region in Atlanta; and the Western region in Los Angeles. Table 1 on the following page is a statistical summary, by region, of the students, research supervisors, and other participants in "Immersion '98."

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James M. Shopshire, Ida Rnusseau Mukenge, Victoria Erickson, and Hans A. Ba,er

Table 1 Statistical Summary of Student Researchers, Research Supenns