Black Life/Schwarz-Sein: Inhabitations of the Flesh

The chapter focuses on the complex ways gender and sexuality function in the barring of Black flesh from the category of the human-as-Man by investigating inhabitations of the flesh that bring to light the relational, borderless being-in-the-world of Black Life. The chapter does this by looking to examples from literature and music that render the constitutive ungendered displacement of Black Life from origin and belonging habitable. The chapter also considers how Black Life must be cordoned off from the most fundamental parts of human life in order for it to resemble “life.”

Bodies That Speak

This essay argues that the “queer prophet,” a figure that emerges from combining certain biblical features of prophecy with queer (especially queer of color) performance theory, can spark resistance to global capitalism’s tactics of discipline and fragmentation. I propose understanding prophecy as bodied acts, often baffling even to the prophet, that have transformative potential in relation to the current order, but that require reception and mediation (and thus relation) in order to actualize that potential. Such resistance depends on respatialization and retemporalization in order to create contiguity or alliance between the different, the formation of a “we” as a result of such contiguity, the identification of the salient processes (or quilting points) of global capital, the utterance of demands indexed to the transformation of such salient processes by the “we,” and, in the processes, the development of “our” ability to believe in an impossible and unimaginable future.

Nat Turner’s Orientation beyond the Doctrine of Man

Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave rebellion. The task of interpreting the meaning of Nat Turner and the Southampton slave rebellion—highlighted by William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the debate that ensued after its publication—discloses the persistence of Sylvia Wynter’s category of “Man” as a descriptive statement of the human within colonial modernity. This chapter opens up the need to re-visit Nat Turner, and to see how his life and worldview reveal possibilities beyond Man. It argues that religious practices and theological epistemologies can present an alternative to Man and that Nat Turner’s life and thought show one way such practices and epistemologies have been actualized beyond the doctrine of Man.

Where Life Itself Lives

Sylvia Wynter’s work seeks to expose Man as an arbitrary conception inherently linked to racism and too often mistaken for the human as such. She also offers a more capacious model for being human—one that is culturally specific, relational and dynamic. This constructive dimension of her work is especially evident in her novel, The Hills of Hebron, for the literary genre is consonant with her argument that communities invent genres of being human from their local histories, the specificities of landscape, religious visions, and creative practices. This essay examines the contribution of the novel to Wynter’s broader project of deconstructing the doctrine of Man.

African Humanism: Between the Cosmic and the Terrestrial

This chapter explores the anthropocentrism of African indigenous religions, with a focus on the religious traditions of the Yoruba peoples (south-west Nigeria). In doing so it hopes to disclose an alternative vision of the human to that of what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man,” the figure at the heart of colonial modernity. While the humanistic orientation of African indigenous religion could be understood in a Feuerbachian sense, this chapter argues that such an approach fails to address the Eurocentric assumptions in Feuerbach’s anthropological analysis of religion. Drawing on ritual studies and recent efforts to rehabilitate the idea of “animism,” the chapter goes on to sketch what it calls an “animist humanism.” The aim here is to articulate a religious anthropocentrism that indicates how thinking with African indigenous religions might enable us to think beyond the doctrine of Man.

Enfleshing Love: A Decolonial Theological Reading of Beloved

This chapter draws on Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved to unsettle meanings of freedom, love, and subjectivity. It uses a decolonial political theological perspective that pivots on two paradoxical aspects of Christianity: its entanglement with the colonial anthropological deformation that Sylvia Wynter refers to as “Man” and its commitment to justice as social transformation inspired by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In reading Morrison’s novel, Copeland leaves the reader without a tidy conclusion that returns to an affirmation of Christian tradition. Prioritizing black existential pain that pervades Morrison’s work, this chapter offers the most sacred identity of the human person, which it argues is realized in enfleshing love, as a site for unsettling modern/colonial anthropological distortions.

Life beyond the Doctrine of Man: Out of This World with Michel Henry and Radical Queer Theory

This chapter considers the meaning of life beyond the doctrine of Man in the context of a total rejection of this world within the work of the French philosopher Michel Henry and in recent developments in radical queer theory. This means that the reflection on life starts from a position of negativity and a rejection of the so-called “logic of inclusion” as a response to situations of oppression: one does not find life or liberation through access to or participation in the world of Man. Searching for alternative ways to conceive of a notion of “life,” this chapter connects Michel Henry’s understanding of “flesh” as the incarnation of life beyond the world of representation with radical queer theory’s critique of Western modernity’s orientation toward an ever better future. Authors such as Judith Halberstam, Leo Bersani, and Lee Edelman reveal the creative potential of a queer life in the absence of a future.

Introduction

This chapter introduces readers to the struggle of decoloniality in relation to being—that is, in relation to how the human person is constructed in colonial modernity. It begins with outlining the way Sylvia Wynter has taken up this project and how essays in this volume engage Wynter’s work. It then turns to the function of religious cosmologies within projects of unsettling Man, while introducing essays in the volume that engage instances of how this project has been lived out in relation to religious cosmologies. Finally, it introduces the intersection between biopolitics and the project of unsettling Man in the service of introduction three essays that start from the effects of exclusion and oppression on concrete human bodies that have, through this oppressive logic, been reduced to bare flesh: bodies that are being deprived of a place in “the world”—that is, of meaning, of representation.

Mystical Bodies of Christ: Human, Crucified, and Beloved

As one way to contribute to the decolonization of Christian theology, Prevot seeks to reexamine and reformulate the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ. He argues that, in addition to referring to the church and the sacrament of the Eucharist, the idea of a “mystical body of Christ” may be understood in a more decolonially significant way to refer to each human body insofar as it is united with Christ’s humanity and especially to each crucified body, including the bodies of black, indigenous, and female victims of colonial modernity. By virtue of its humanity and its suffering, each of these bodies is a mystical body of Christ. Moreover, Prevot contends that the idea of a spousal union of bodies in freedom and love (the two becoming one flesh), which has similarly been employed to symbolize the church, may also be interpreted in a more decolonially significant way as an indictment of the sexual coercion and objectification endemic to colonial modernity and as an affirmation of the divine loveliness of darkly colored, variously shaped, and otherwise marginalized bodies which this violently colonized world deems ugly or undesirable.

Not Your Papa’s Wynter: Women of Color Contributions toward Decolonial Futures

This chapter focuses on two important contentions in the work of/on Wynter: First, there is a productive engagement with her understandings of feminism, gender, and patriarchy as they pertain to the overrepresentation of Man and in its relation to women of color and decolonial feminisms. Second, the authors examine her articulation of the studia humanitatis as a critical site for transformation and liberatory imagination. The chapter explores how Wynter’s critique of mainstream liberal feminism has provided a language for dismissing the work and political concerns articulated by women of color, while highlighting the deep resonances between Wynter’s project and the contributions made by women of color and decolonial feminists. In addition to a long history of taking back the “Word,” women of color have consistently sought to create new value systems and build relations anew beyond those established through colonization and slavery and beyond those that serve to bolster “Man.”