Blackness, Religion, and The Social Repr

While conversations about social life and social death are endemic to contemporary black studies, the work of black scholars of religion often encourages us to consider the textures of everyday life in terms that are not reducible to “social life” and “social death.” At the same time, theories of everyday life and social reproduction tend to leave out the singularity of antiblackness and racial slavery as they constitute the material shape of the everyday in the aftermath of 1492. This course aims to illuminate and approach various gaps in theorizations of religion and blackness in the social reproduction of everyday life by reading between black and Marxist feminism, history and anthropology, religious and cultural studies. The class will consider how racial slavery, racial blackness, and antiblackness shape the constitution of everyday life in and through the erotics and economies of religious sense and signifying.