What would happen if Pentecostalism was understood as Black religion, Black practice, Black sociality, and Black geography? And further, what if this Blackness was always both ante, that is before, and anti, that is against the very discursive structures that brought racialized Blackness into existence? It is a compelling, elegant but often dismissed thesis.
Blackness is the critical examination and interrogation of the violent expropriation, enslavement, extermination and erasure of Black bodies, geographies, epistemologies and ontologies. Blackness not only critiques these structures, but Black critical thought imagines otherwise – diaspora – which moves within and without enclosure.
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.
This act of interpretation is an attempt to read the political, cultural, social and geographic disruption of Pentecostalism as Black speech. This is so not only because early 20th century US newspaper accounts of Pentecostal revivals described speaking in tongues as “Afro-patios-creole,” but more deeply because these mutually indwelling signifiers mark disorder and unintelligible speech, an interruption speech as articulation of order.
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.