Lloyd - Race and Political Theology

R ACE AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY

Edited by Vincent W. Lloyd

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the Edgar M. Kahn Memorial Fund and Syracuse Universitys Department of Religion.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Race and political theology / edited by Vincent W. Lloyd.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7314-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8047-7315-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8047-8183-1 (e-book)

1. Political theology and race. I. Lloyd, Vincent W., 1982 editor of compilation.

BT83.59.r33 2012

201'.72089dc23

2011040053

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/15 Bembo

Contents

VINCENT W. LLOYD

VINCENT P. PECORA

CHRISTOPH SCHMIDT

J. KAMERON CARTER

JONATHON S. KAHN

COREY D. B. WALKER

GIL ANIDJAR

DANIEL BOYARIN

BONNIE HONIG

MARTIN LAND AND JONATHAN BOYARIN

GEORGE SHULMAN

Contributors

GIL ANIDJAR teaches in the Department of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His books include The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy ( 2003 ) and Semites: Race, Religion, Literature ( 2008 ).

DANIEL BOYARIN is Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ ( 2012 ).

JONATHAN BOYARIN is Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. His publications include The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe ( 2009 ) and, with Martin Land, Time and Human Language Now ( 2009 ).

J. KAMERON CARTER is Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School. He is the author of Race: A Theological Account ( 2008 ) and The Secular Jesus: Political Theology from Columbus to the Age of Obama (forthcoming).

BONNIE HONIG is Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Her publications include Democracy and the Foreigner ( 2001 ), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy ( 2009 ), and Antigone, Interrupted (forthcoming).

JONATHON S. KAHN is Assistant Professor of Religion at Vassar College. He is the author of Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois ( 2009 ). His research focuses on race, religion, and democratic theory.

MARTIN LAND is Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Hadassah College in Jerusalem and president of the International Association for Relativistic Dynamics. He is the author, with Jonathan Boyarin, of Time and Human Language Now ( 2009 ).

VINCENT W. LLOYD is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. He is the author of Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose ( 2009 ) and The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology ( 2011 ).

VINCENT P. PECORA is Gordon B. Hinckley Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Utah. His publications include Households of the Soul ( 1997 ) and Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity ( 2006 ).

CHRISTOPH SCHMIDT teaches in the Department of German Literature at Hebrew University and is a Fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His most recent books are The Theopolitical Moment: Twelve Perspectives on the Eschatological Problem of Modernity (in German, 2009 ) and The Return of the Dead Souls (forthcoming).

GEORGE SHULMAN teaches political theory and American studies at New York Universitys Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is the author, most recently, of American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture ( 2008 ).

COREY D. B. WALKER is Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America ( 2008 ) and editor of Theology and Democratic Futures, a special issue of Political Theology.

I NTRODUCTION

VINCENT W. LLOYD

The French prime minister looked like a communion wafer dipped in shit. It is hard to understand Aim Csaires description of Georges Bidault as anything but a metaphor that troubles the core of political theology, the homology between political sovereign and God. In light of the colonial massacres of nonwhite populationsBidault led the Fourth Republic at the start of the Indochina War and was foreign minister during the Malagasy Uprisingthe French sovereign is profaned, grotesque. In Csaires characteristic reversal, he inverts the civilized and the savage, locating howling savagery at the heart of Europe. But the image is equivocal; savagery mimes civilization, and paganism mimes Christianity. The image suggests the possibility of cleansing, purifying, and returning to the sovereign who properly looks like a communion wafer, like the Body of Christ.

Csaires is a political theology from the perspective of the nonwhite, from the perspective of negritudeoften euphemistically left untranslated instead of exhibited in its intended ugliness: niggerness. Race as color, as ideology, as institutional logic, as resource, as imagination is joined with religion as symbol, as practice, as ethos, as resource, as imagination, joined by Csaire in political critique. Discourse on Colonialism, Csaires 1950 prose-poem, opens by declaring Europe to be spiritually indefensible. The opposition of Europe, civilization, and Christianity to non-Europe, savagery, and paganism is unsustainable. Csaires target is more than false consciousness; for him, Christianity is more than symbol or belief held superficially. Christianity is also an ethos, a set of virtues and values. To be a good Christianto be among the virtuous young men educated by the Jesuit Fathersis to be a good bourgeois, and this is to have the habits that make for a successful colonial administrator. Missionaries are among the most virulent racists, Csaire suggests.

After studying in France, Csaire returned to his home in Martinique and wrote his autobiographical poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. It was an impossible return. In the poem Csaire describes himself, seeing his land again, as a lone man imprisoned in whiteness, finding his home a place of fear and hunger and exhaustion, the morning slowly vomiting out its human fatigue, a place where neither the teacher in his classroom, nor the priest at catechism will/be able to get a word out of this sleepy little nigger. Yet childhood memories of foolish and crazy stunts along with the bread, /and the wine of complicity remind of youthful communion, since lost, perhaps educated away. And there was Christmas, with joys and dreams and tastes and smells and laughter and gossip and song: Alleluia, Christ is risen. It is ecstatic song that moves from voices to bodies to spirits, the hands, the feet, the buttocks, the genitals, and your entire being liquefies into sounds, voices, and rhythm; it starts pulling the nearest devil by the tail, muting laments and fears.