This session engages in both material and textual archives to investigate the processes of religious transformation. The first paper reads Toni Morrison’s Paradise as a vision of worldmaking through black maternal religious practice. It read Morrison’s own writings to theorize how regard, and self-regard specifically, emerge as religious practice of attunement, care, and attention. The second paper will seek to depict one element of the religious identity of T.S. Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party. The author shows that the play is hybrid, combining elements of Eliot’s earlier philosophy, Christian love theology, mysticism, and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. The third paper considers the material and textual-archival legacy of Nellie Mae Rowe. Through readings of Rowe’s work and oral histories, the paper demonstrates how Rowe utilized acts of religious creation to invite audiences into practices of improvisation, play, and imagination amid the social realities facing rural Black Southerners in the late twentieth century.
I read Toni Morrison’s Paradise as a vision of worldmaking through black maternal religious practice. Employing character analysis, I trace how material and somatic practices are religious actions of coming into voice, or as I argue, processes of self-regard. I argue that in Paradise, regard emerges as a central fulcrum of transformation. I read Morrison’s own writings on self-regard alongside political theorist Wairimu Njoya to theorize how regard more broadly, and self-regard specifically emerge as religious practice of attunement, care, and attention. Finally, I (re)turn to Morrison’s initial address thirty-one years ago, and the ways in which her plenary took root. I place womanist ethicist Katie G. Cannon’s reflections on Morrison’s address in conversation with the practice of regard. Black women’s reproductive labor is one of the sites of ultimate religious reflection; a place where questions of justice, right relationship, possibility, harm, evil, accountability, desire and agency are enfleshed.
This paper considers both the material and textual-archival legacy of Nellie Mae Rowe. Examining Rowe’s references to Africana religions, her ideologies of motherhood and childhood; and her apocalyptic and visionary theories, I argue that the artist conceived of her artistic practice and playhouse as a ministry and a sanctuary respectively. Through close readings of several pieces from Rowe’s canon of work as well as extant oral histories, I demonstrate how Rowe utilized acts of religious creation to invite audiences into practices of improvisation, play, and imagination amid the ongoing social realities facing rural Black Southerners in the late twentieth century, such as gentrification, segregation, white supremacist violence, and poverty.
This paper will seek to depict one element of the religious identity of T.S. Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party. I wish to show, by focusing on the influence of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in a play with obvious Christian theology and imagery that the play is undoubtedly hybrid, creatively combining as it does elements of Eliot’s earlier philosophy, Christian love theology, mysticism, and various sources from Indian thought and practice. Further, I wish to suggest that the play itself implies a model of intersubjectivity and poetics that is partially derived from the Indian text. In this, Eliot’s play is an incipient comparative theology that takes as its starting point the kind of detachment and contemplative attention that it also demands of its audience in the act of experiencing the play. Eliot’s play, far from reflecting a strictly orthodox Christianity, aims to re-signify the tradition through the dialogical tension it embodies.