Abstract
J. Kameron Carter's The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song is a timely and daring book that troubles the academic study of religion using an “an-archic” study of blackness as religion. Both critical and visionary, Anarchy goes beyond lamentation of what Carter describes as the catastrophe of modernity and cuts a path through it. Concerned fundamentally with what religion is (15), he troubles the modern (re)invention of religion and argues that a “black study of religion” confronts it at the core of its collusion with racial capitalism. Drawing on the Black radical tradition and Black feminism, Carter applies black studies to interrogate what W.E.B. Du Bois saw as a religion of “whiteness”—an imperial disposition in the West rooted in a belief in its right to ownership of the earth (3). The psychological wages born by everyone touched by this belief system requires a radical reimagining of matter (135). Following the thought of Gayle Jones, Carter's reading is a simultaneous act of refusal and fugitivity—Black matter's “indivisible swerving” that refuses to be captured by and within the logics and linguistics of settler colonialism. The author points, instead, to Black religious anarchy or resistance as “cross-cultural poetics in fugitive refusal of the logics of the state and reigning logics of the hu/Man” (108).
A core interlocutor within Anarchy is Charles H. Long. Carter builds on Long in two essential ways: his provocation to confront Religionswissenschaft and the manners in which it has partnered with empire and colonial expansion, and second, in the way he represents Black religion as an alternate cosmology and an “an-archic” disruption of the archē of religion framing the modern social order (8). The invention of the individual encourages a sense of separability in the world at the heart of antiblackness—the real religion of the West. This religious orientation becomes a manner of individuating and seeing the world through ownership and extraction—or the “blackening” of matter. Thus, the essential archē of modernity is a racially gendered orientation to religion and secularity. Reading religion through the anarchy of Black religion, therefore, provides a way to address the heart of religion in the West.
Anarchy is a critique of the religion of antiblackness. Even more, the author aspires to promote vocation, “the spiritual vocation of the black radical tradition,” which is an anarchical imagining of a we-ness and new socialities beyond the “I” of the individuating work under cold calculations of the capitalist order (20). Here, the spiritual becomes a material vocation through a study of Black radical cosmology and sacrality found in possibilities beyond the racial capitalist structuring of the world. Ultimately, religion must be done away with. Carter is most incisive when working his vision through the mathopoetics of Black religion and in the spirit of Long correlating the arithmetic of ellipse and the grammar of ellipsis—the creative interior of the left out (77, 92–94). Calling the project a “sacrilegious prayer book,” the author looks for religion beyond traditional and institutional expressions of the sacred to retrieve alternate cosmologies of the Black Atlantic that have historically operated alongside and in critical conversation with modernity—a radical prodding at its inconsistencies and its il-logics about the world with the simple proposition that Black consciousness has never bought into the lie.
The book is organized into two parts: chapters 1 through 3 and 4 and 5. Responding to what Carter describes as the catastrophic cosmology of the “modern (re)invention of religion,” chapters 1 through 3 illuminate how Black feminist thought, African and African diasporic cosmologies, queer theory, and ecotheologies have risen in contestation to the religion of antiblackness. Drawing heavily on the theoretical interventions of Kara Keeling and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, he shows how a blackening of the world is a function of (en)gendering and sexuation that “stitches” processes of racialization and political economy (31). Chapter 4 aims to use Charles Long's thought beyond conventional uses around showing religious variety to think about Black religion, ironically as something other than “religion” while working within it as a category (45). Turning to Nathaniel Mackey's “practice of the poem” in chapter 5, he deepens his understanding of Long's poetics of religion. Carter's contribution is a theoretical intervention centered on using Black studies to offer an alternate vision for engaging in the study of religion and the study of Black religion. Like Masuzawa, Nongbri, and Smith, Carter points to religion's anthropological origins to make room for new beginnings. Ultimately, he demonstrates how a Black study of religion emerges as a manner of being entangled and caught up together—existing in “entangled togetherness”—inspiring alternative ways of being in the world and being “with” the earth (18).
