Pentecostalism and/as Blackness – A Diasporic Conversation

Pentecostalism is an articulation of Black diaspora, because it is an enspiriting or enfleshing – a moment of reimagining and reanimating conjuncture as racialized Black bodies are undone and redone through movement – social, religious and political.  Because Pentecostalism articulates and enunciates this disfiguring configuration of racialized Black bodies, geographies, epistemologies, and ontologies – new potentialities and possibilities emerge for analysis. There is now a critical mass of Black descended scholars who have drawn upon this motion that I poetically describe, but until quite recently, have not been brought into conversation with one another. From Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, to Ogbu Kalu’s Tembisa, to Nimi Wariboko’s charismatic city, to Robert Beckford’s outernational to Keri Day’s Azusa reimagined, Pentecostalism as Blackness narrates the possibilities of a re-ordering of the world, about the aspirations for the already, but not yet postcolony.