The Way of the Black Christ as Disidentification and Queer Failure: Christology After James H. Cone

This paper suggests a recalibration of Cone’s Black Christology. Drawing insights from queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam, it rereads Cone’s Black Christology and then argues that the way of the Black Christ is that of disidentification and queer failure. This is to say, that by assuming flesh, the eternal Word not only fully assumes the conditions of the oppressed but also the entirety of the fallen human condition. In his queer way of being in the world, even unto the point of death on the cross and in his exaltation, Christ addresses the powers of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy that oppress as well as our complicity with those powers. In this way of disidentification and queer failure, the Black Christ is truly for all Black people. This Black queer engagement thus critically retrieves Cone’s Christological perspective while at the same time pushes his thought in new directions.