Dance Theatre of Harlem

This chapter explores the women of the Dance Theatre of Harlem company and the radical acts of resistance they executed to subvert ballet’s dominant white normative culture: from the debated act of women wearing flesh-tone tights and pointe shoes, to joining the picket line in the country’s first strike by unionized dancers, negotiating gender-based, color-biased casting, and women performing ballet in natural hairstyles as an act of defining black female agency. The chapter illuminates how the black ballerinas of Dance Theatre of Harlem existed within the American social structure of white racist values against black female bodies performing ballet and the radical acts that emerged.

Beautiful places and recreating humanity in South Africa

The article investigates the connection between beauty and justice, by exploring everyday aesthetics through ordinary life, specifically the very concrete reality of contemporary urban South Africa. On the one hand, it delves beneath the statement that apartheid is ugly, by exploring the ugly spaces apartheid created, the devastation of an aesthetic built on segregation, and the distortions of whiteness. It also seeks to explore a theological aesthetic that starts from the ordinary life lived in particular places, arguing that beauty in particular places must be interwoven with humanness in all places, and proposing a theological aesthetic that gives priority to the voices silenced in particular places. Through this, beauty and justice are intimately interwoven in the ongoing work of disruption and transformation of a white racist place.

Blues Feelings and “Real Bluesmen”

This chapter seeks to do two different things: deconstruct the concept of the “bluesman” as a trope of blues authenticity and, on the other hand, explore the surprisingly variegated group of emotions—blues feelings—that generate, and are represented lyrically by, blues songs. It must be remembered that pre-war southern blues players like Robert Johnson were essentially songsters, human jukeboxes, whose ability to evade a life of badly-recompensed cotton sharecropping depended on their ability to perform a far wider range of material, for both whites and blacks, than the cliches “deep,” “dark,” “tortured,” and “primitive” allow for. Black record buyers, according to scholar Elijah Wald, were attracted to blues not by the race-based grief it sounded, but by its “up to date power and promise.” While agreeing with elements of Wald’s revisionism, this chapter argues that race-based grief, powerfully evoked by B. B. King’s memories of how stricken he was at the witnessed aftermath of a lynching, is retained in the music as an evocative “cry” that moves audiences. A fuller appreciation of the music comes when we find a way of synthesizing these two perspectives, both of which emerge out of a sustained struggle against white racist domination.

What Does a Terrorist Sound Like?

This chapter explicates how microcultural practices that appear overtly flattering—“you speak English so well,” “you speak good English,” or “you’re so articulate,” for example—(re)produce racist meanings and (re)enforce racializing regimes. Bringing together race theory with the language ideological literature in linguistic anthropology, the chapter describes processes of raciolinguistic exceptionalism—whereby exceptionalism occurs through white racist evaluations of, and ideologies about, both language and race—to consider how ideas about minoritized groups and their speech serve to reinforce racist narratives about Asianness, blackness, indigeneity, Latinidad, etc. The chapter argues that raciolinguistic exceptionalism is sinister in that it is simultaneously exceptionalizing and homogenizing, while remaining provisional, that is, dependent upon one’s most recent performance. Its analysis further shows that processes of raciolinguistic exceptionalism take form differently across racialized groups with histories shaped by varying processes of domination, enslavement, settler colonialism, occupation, racial segregation, and other forms of global, racist capitalist exploitation.

Kessler v. Bellamy

This chapter explains how Charlottesville became the epicenter of the national debate over Confederate monuments. It discusses the colourful sideshow battle between Wes Bellamy, a local African American teacher, activist, and political leader, and Jason Kessler, Charlottesville's emerging alt-right supremacist man-on-the-scene. Kessler was offended by Bellamy's crusade against the Robert E. Lee statue and created a crusade of his own to remove Bellamy. Kessler searched Bellamy's Twitter account for embarrassing posts and published several of Bellamy's tweets on his own blog to call for Bellamy's resignation or removal from office. This chapter narrates the events of December 2016 when Kessler launched a petition drive demanding that Bellamy resign or be removed due to anti-white, racist and pro-rape comments.

Colonizing cuts of labyrinth mythology, a tangling parable of white sensibilities

This article demonstrates the way wounds, and affects generally, are figured by the writing of history. It traces patterns of thinking about the labyrinth primarily in histories, theories, and myths of the past 150 years to demonstrate how the labyrinth has been cut by colonization. From the Mycenaean colonization of Indigenous Cretans (inaccurately named “Minoans”) to the emergence of white feminism and its present day practice, figures of the labyrinth iteratively cut history to perpetuate the un/common loss of colonized communities and to enact white racist sensibilities of exclusion. Entangling Karen Barad’s cutting together-apart and Kent Ono’s colonial amnesia, colonizing cuts are constitutive exclusions that wound and exclude colonized communities from history and world making.

Turning Theology: A Proposal

Drawing out Stephen Bevans’s thesis that Christian theologizing has never been an exclusively European project, this article proposes that theologians working within the context of the United States turn their theological praxis to consideration of persons in all our splendid, impoverished, joyous, sobering, and diverse humanity. The article accords particular attention to cultural pluralism and interculturality along with transdisciplinary methods of theologizing. Given the violent public activity of white racist supremacist groups and individuals along with the barrage of racist verbal assaults and tweets by high-ranking officials, theology’s active and public defense of human persons has never been more necessary.