Black Religion and Critical Theory Colloquium: Panel I

ANNOUNCER: Harvard Divinity School. Black Religion and Critical Theory Colloquium, panel 1. October 5, 2023 DAVID HOLLAND: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this event that we've all been looking forward to, the Black Religion and Critical Theory Colloquium. My name is David Holland. I'm the interim Dean this semester at the Harvard Divinity School. And it's my pleasure and honor to extend to our faculty, our students, our friends, our graduates, a very warm welcome to today's colloquium. This has been a wonderful event to watch come into formation and to see the lineup for today take shape in both panels, the series of scholars that promise to enrich and challenge and elevate us as teachers, as scholars, and as community members. So thank you in advance to those who will be participating. My primary job today is to thank my colleague, Ahmad Greene-Hayes, who has really been the driving force behind this and who has poured both his intellectual acumen and his organizational energy into making this happen. So could we please give Professor Greene-Hayes an applause. [APPLAUSE] And with that, I'll hand the lectern to him. Thank you so much. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: Thank you, Dean Holland, those introductory remarks. Good morning, everyone. - Good morning. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: It's very lovely to see all of your faces in the room. As the Dean said, I am Ahmad Green-Hayes, assistant Professor of African-American religious studies here at Harvard Divinity School. And I'm excited to welcome you to the Black Religion and Critical Theory Colloquium. Before I say a few brief words about this gathering, I wanted to begin with a word of thanks. Again, thank you to Dean Holland for the remarks and thanks, of course, to our outgoing Dean, David Hempton in his absence, who believed in the vision for this event and supported its execution from the start. I'd also like to thank Marlon Cummings, Madeline Scott, and my current faculty coordinator Soo Min Kim, along with the entire staff of the Office of Academic Affairs and IT for all of their assistance with making today possible. Gratitude as well to graduate assistants Stephen Harris and Ramin [INAUDIBLE] for their logistical support and to my colleagues in the area of Black religion, professors Tracy Hawkes, Terrence Johnson, and Jacob Olupona for their continued support. The Black Religion and Critical Theory Colloquium is a new endeavor here at Harvard Divinity School that seeks to bridge connections between the critical study of Black religion and studies of race, gender, and sexuality in critical theory and philosophy, among many other fields. The aim of this gathering is to support research and sustained dialogue about the ways in which religion and race are co-constitutive and function as governing categories of analysis at the helm of both religious studies and Black studies, respectively. This colloquium is designed to incite intellectual exchange among leading and emerging scholars and to suggest new directions for future research and teaching. Those invited have been encouraged to consider the following queries. What insights does religious studies offer Black Studies, and what insights does Black Studies offer religious studies? What is the relationship between non-being and religion and theology? How does critical theory inform or complicate the study of Black religion and vice versa? These queries emerge, in part, from a number of pressing debates in the fields of Black Studies, religious studies, and critical theory, specifically around the interrelation between the ontological and the theological, the making of man or the human as a product of modernity and of the new world regime, the multiple competing and interlocking forms of relation produced by the plantation and the transatlantic slave trade-- --the problems of the archive as both a site of terror and possibility in the afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and dispossession, the relation among man, animal, and planet, concerns which continue to animate debates around the Anthropocene climate, the state of the world as we know it, and other pressing concerns about research and scholarship that might work in the service of the slave and her descendants. These are rich theoretical debates that span several fields and invite us to contend with the limits of disciplinary bounds and to break new ground by engaging across methodological orientations, specifically as it relates to the philosophy of religion, theology and ethics, history, ethnography, political theory, queer and trans studies, and other methods, which our respective speakers interrogate in their own work. It is my hope that this will be the first of many gatherings here at Harvard Divinity School under the banner of Black religion and critical theory. And we are very pleased that these illustrious scholars and thinkers have agreed to grace our campus for the inaugural iteration of this necessary and timely event. Thank you all for being here. I won't belabor the moment. I will only begin by-- we'll have two panels. Let me pause. We'll have two panels today. The first will include Cecilio Cooper and Joseph Winters. Our third speaker, unfortunately, Professor J Cameron Carter, cannot physically be with us due to a flooding issue at his home. And so he sends his regrets. We've been trying all morning to try to get him here virtually. But unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case. But we are working to reschedule to have him here at Harvard Divinity School. Our second panel this afternoon will feature Dr. Carrie Day, Dr. Joy James, and Paul Anthony Daniels. So we'll begin with the first panel. I will read the bios of our two panelists here first. We'll also have a break in between the two sessions. And then we'll have an afternoon second panel and then end for the day with closing community conversation. Cecilio M Cooper is a 2023-24 Folger Institute long-term research fellow. They've previously held postdoctoral fellowships at NYU as well as the University of Michigan. Via Black critical thought, they broadly address debates around gender, political theology, cartography, iconography, and science studies. Their first book manuscript examines the occulted role Blackness and darkness play in cosmological constitutions of subsurface space by engaging the visual cultures of alchemy and demonology. Cooper's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, John Carter Brown Library, Yale Center for British Art, and Folger Shakespeare Library, among others. They completed the PhD with distinction in African-American studies and a graduate certificate in critical theory from Northwestern University. Their talk today is entitled Epicinity in Infernal Iconography. Our second speaker is Dr. Joseph Winters, who is an Associate Professor in Religious Studies and African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He holds secondary appointments in English and gender and sexuality and feminist studies. Winters' interests lie at the intersection of Black religious thought, Black studies, and critical theory. His research examines the ways Black literature and aesthetics develop alternative configurations of the sacred piety, Black spirit, and secularity in response to the religious underpinnings of anti-Black violence and coloniality. His first book, Hope Draped in Black, Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, was published by Duke University Press in 2016. Winters is currently finishing a second manuscript titled, Disturbing Profanity, Hip-Hop, Black Aesthetics, and the Volatile Sacred. His talk today is entitled, Profane Ruptures, Blackness, Religion, and World Deformation. If we could begin by giving these two scholars round of applause. [APPLAUSE] And before I take my seat, I do want to call your attention to the program. At the bottom of the first page, there is a QR code where you can scan from your phone. And your questions will be curated by our graduate assistants, so at the conclusion of the presentations, we'll have a Q&A and open conversation. Thank you. Dr. Cooper. CECILIO M COOPER: Hello, everyone. It's lovely to see you. I am so appreciative that I've been given the opportunity to share my unusual research with this especially curated audience. It's a treat to be able to think deeply about questions of religion as well as Black critical thought among people who are invested in being rigorous and generous. And I'm so appreciative of the organizers in front of and behind the scenes for affording this opportunity for us to gather and use our imaginations. And with that, I'll begin. Fantastical depictions of subsurface space constitute arresting scenes of late medieval and early modern cosmography. The idea of an umbris subterranean domain for the deceased isn't exclusive to monotheistic scripture. Hades, for example, doubles as the name for another well known afterlife terminus rooted in polytheistic Greco-Roman traditions, as well as its ruler. The German Tannhauser legend chronicles a knight's renegade voyage to Venusberg, which is where he rendezvoused with the love goddess Venus deep within her mountain home. Arguably, none of the varied interpretations that exist of underworlds in Western thought have become more recognizable than those of Christian hell. Its infamy as the cardinal carceral space for the damned inspired artists to create canonical and terrifying spectacles. In the wake of Dante's indelible influence, visual portrayals of hell took on a distinctly cartographic and morphological tenor. This included vivid attempts to systematically map hell as a layered expanse occupied by taxonomically distinguishable elements. Now alongside these attempts at taming diabolical disarray the vertically oriented lines of order, another set of complementary set of hellscapes accentuated globular properties and theriomorphic physiognomies. So in this painting detail on the right, the devil writhes in anguish after being overtaken by the pale archangel Saint Michael. The rows of spiked white teeth on the humanesque bat hybrid's head are salaciously echoed on both its groin and the phallic snake slithering from the same opening. The suspenseful episode from the Book of Revelations is a highly aestheticized announcement of castration anxiety that was provoked by a melanated anti-hero. The glowing red spheres of its puplied eyes similarly repeat as a pair of protruding nipple adornments on an armored breastplate. In keeping with racially-coded spatial and chromatic symbolism, the Black creature is relegated to the bottom right corner of the composition, white trumps Black, and sacred vanquishes profane, an all too familiar refrain. The conflation of consumptive orifices, sex, gender indeterminacy, and dark monstrosity shown here are recurring themes throughout hellmouth imagery. Mouths are charged sites of logocentric emittance and eroticized thoroughfares for supernatural power. They are penetrable vehicles for prayer and Eucharistic intimacy, while also inviting abyssal descent, damnation, and demonic possession. Medievalist scholar Nancy Cacciola notes that quote, "Medieval artistic portrayals of death presents striking parallels with portrayals of exorcism. In both cases, the spirit is shown exiting through the mouth." End quote. A quest for symmetry between the macrocosm and microcosm structures the scalar dimensions of demonic possession. Malevolent spirits threaten corporeal integrity by wantonly invading individuated body territory so that these atomized conquests correlate to the broad scale triumph over the entire subterranean domain of hell. J Lorand Matory incisively states that, quote, "Afro-Atlantic sacred ontologies both belie the isomorphism of the body with the person, and concomitantly, the isomorphism of territory with community." End quote. Body schemas are territorial configurations that doubly index sizable geographic territories and smaller ones within immediate reach of a single, sinful host's skeleton. Individuated cases of possession resemble wars of possession ala Antonio Gramsci, meant to hasten protracted wars of maneuver over global dominance. Occult iconography, in concert with texts, corporealized infernal territorialization in disconcerting ways. Disembodied hellmouths and bipedal arch demons conjure up carnality as a conduit for caliginous perdition. European portrayals of these figures have often been perceived in attendant scholarship as anthropomorphically female, and so corroborating beliefs that women were especially susceptible to demonic possession. Alongside images of long-haired serpents, Cacciola related analysis of another type of gestating/digesting satan imagery circulated in 14th to 15th centuries frescoes in ways that are indicative of this tendency. "Rather than a clear-cut gender normative visage, these squatting, hirsute figures seem to take a more conspicuously aberrant compound male-female form. In both Giotto's fresco in Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and Buffalmacco's fresco at the Cemetery of Pisa, a horned creature seems to excrete or consume smaller pale bodies from an orifice below its belly. From murals to illuminated manuscripts, intentional ambiguity around this being an alimentary, reproductive, and/or scatological act, is a hallmark of these colorful hellscapes. Moreover, the boundaries limning interiority from exteriority are troubled by the infernally porous body that interpenetrates its environment, absorbing and expelling elements of its surroundings." End quote. There are no visible phallic or mammary features on the archdemon to shore up speculations as to exactly what anatomical labels should appropriately be used to describe its groin opening. The indeterminate sex gender characteristics of the gestating/digesting Satan were intrinsic to the visual grammar used to convey that evil is most rarely expressed as disorder. Cacciola eschews any mention of the gestating/digesting Satan as possibly serving as a hermaphroditic figure in order to advance her claims about white cisgender women suffering as the quintessence of the feminized demonic. However, I interpret these diabolical figures not only as emblematized demonic cis femininity but perhaps more accurately signifying a distinctly dark, demonic obscenity. In linguistics, the term epicene describes nouns that fall below the threshold of sex differentiability. For example, the singular pronoun "they" is considered gender neutral because it is used with morphological consistency for reference of any gender. Because of its applicability as a plural noun, "they" also has political purchase for trans, intersex, genderqueer, BI gender, and non-binary persons because it can also signal the plurality of fluctuating gender expressions possibly co-existing within a single individual. Epicine then reminds us that gender is legion, that multitudes can reside in one. The gender mix representations of the gestating/digesting satans resonated with submerged perceptions of the fallen angel as an intersex, or even polysex Satan, rather than an exclusively male entity. Unequivocal distinctions parsing male from female as upheld by dyadic Aristotelian schema are instead collapsed within its beastly, androgynous frame. Its hybrid form was more compatible with the Galenic model. According to [INAUDIBLE] quote, "Intersex bodies were perceived as composed of both male and female elements, located between genders as it were. The understanding of sex is what we could term bimodal rather than dimorphic." End quote. Still, what is clear is that this version of Satan cannot squarely be situated among the reference for a man with a capital M, which is a cisgender masculine placeholder around which Judeo-Christian/theological sovereignty orbits. I point to this diabolically epicene motif in early Modern Art because it is a noteworthy antecedent to Baphomet iconography, which has proliferated since the 19th century. Michael Knowles inflammatorily advocated for the eradication of transgenderism in public life entirely in the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, held at the Gaylord National Harbor Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. He then took an even more apotropaic stance by explicitly framing the quote, "transgender agenda" as quote, "really demonic stuff." And this all happened on his solo show that you can catch on YouTube. This incipient trans eradication campaign is part of an intensifying wave of organized aggression towards transgender people in the United States and Britain. The Daily Wire commentator went on to invoke Eliphas Levi's rendering of Baphomet as a quote, "trans depiction" that portrays a quote, "man and a woman, kind of, blended together in a really grotesque way." End quote. So from this right-wing pundit's perspective, the mounting appeals for the civic recognition of transgender persons amounts to spiritual attacks on man's sexual nature and sexual difference and complementarity. Despite his distinctly anti-feminist invectives, the practicing Roman Catholic Knowles makes strange annihilationist bedfellows with feminists from Zionist lesbian separatists to gender-critical evangelicals on the issue of transness. Predation terrafism denounces transfeminine people, according to Heike Schotten, as impostors hellbent on sexually assaulting and replacing authentic cis women. Transmasculine people, by this thinking, are likewise charged with apostatically defecting from and destabilizing sapphic sisterhood. These religiously inflected trans-antagonistic dispositions are animated by a quote, "extinction phobia," which is a terrified anxiety about the ability of the demonized other to eradicate oneself and one's people. Citing ancient precedent, Knowles further deploys diabolizing rhetoric by suggesting that the dysmorphic discord between body and interiority thought intrinsic to trans self-actualization might actually be caused by diabolical entities. Demonic possession describe these cases when malevolent spirits threaten corporeal integrity by wantonly invading personal body territory. So due to their unruly nature, Knowles thinks these supernatural miscreants comprise a compelling facet of gender-based spiritual warfare as well as rhetoric. Art, literature, and media trafficking in satanic feminist traditions audaciously reclaim the insurgent energy inhabiting demonic figures like Baphomet from the religious right's quest for exorcism. As an individuated occult figure, Baphomet functions as an infernal androgynous foil to the archetypal cisgender heterosexual dyad, Adam and Eve, from Judeo-Christian exegesis. Trans and non-binary pagans of many stripes embrace Baphomet as a gender non-conforming emblem of their disidentification from Abrahamic faiths and compulsory cisgenderism. Described as the fallen deity that the Knights of Templar were accused of apostatically venerating, Baphomet is a bearded, cloven-hoofed idol with wings. Baphomet operates as a demonic progenitor of evil in the sublunar world while simultaneously embodying within a single form, how human-nonhuman, animal offspring might appear as a result of witches of any gender copulating with demons. Baphomet is imbued with the epicene darkness in ways that have been most readily recognized as having chromatic or esoteric significance. In early 2018, conservative British pundits lambasted Black transgender model and activist Munroe Bergdorf for her issuing anti-racist critiques and publicly displaying her witchcraft practices in social media. She was consequently asked to resign from the labor party's LGBT advisory board. What was her crime? A statue of Baphomet sat as the idolatrous centerpiece of her pagan altar. Baphomet appeared again that year across the pond as the star of a US-based conflict this time. The Satanic Temple sued Netflix series, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for copyright for its goat-headed statue of Baphomet with children. Baphomet, also known as the sabbatic goat, [NON-ENGLISH],, or the scapegoat, is a supernatural figure sporting similarly incredulous attributes like the first demon on the first slide, crushed by Saint Michael's, who's got wings, a breastplate, and so forth. The symmetrical cross-legged pose with right arm raised upward and left hand pointing downward is mimicked on the devil, justice, and magician tarot cards, in the Rider-Waite deck. Ishmael Reed describes Baphomet as the Black guy the Knights of Templar were accused of worshiping. The Church of Satan's establisher, Anton Szandor LaVey, declared that Baphomet quote "represents the power of darkness combined with the generative fertility of a goat." So despite being regularly portrayed chromatically as Black or very dark, Baphomet has not been discussed as a racialized figure in attendant scholarship. LaVey's rendition of Baphomet supported ongoing efforts to recuperate the devil from being a maligned emissary for evil. Accentuating the figure's identification with Lucifer as the light bringer could overshadow its more nefarious common sense associations with Satan as the Prince of Darkness. Central to the esoteric dogma of magic is the concept of astrolite, which was an essentially agnostic implement for transformation. It was an invisible and malleable vehicle for communicating intentions when its complementary feminine and masculine currents were properly manipulated. While a vibrant force subject to use for maleficent ends, LaVey found that alchemist and socialist revolutionaries alike demonstrated how astrolite could also be wielded for the greater good. Baphomet presides then over worldly and other worldly affairs as astrolite incarnated as opposed to an evil emissary. Infernal obscenity was one means to which LaVey and his supporters conveyed the equilibrium of opposites as a tenet central to magical doctrine. Alexandra James, frontwoman for the band Twin Temple, compellingly remarks that Baphomet is technically a goddess but also a god, an intersex deity, who represents the transcendence of binary forms dissolving in the coming together of self. According to Per Faxneld, a religious historian, satanic feminism champions Lucifer as a liberator of women rather than a duplicitous agent of Eve's downfall. The feminist impact of this vein of occult icons endures centuries later as epicene demons still signify the harmonious collapse and integration of sex, gender duality, as well as other dichotomies of social, political, religious, and philosophical import. And towards a conclusion. We presently sit at a juncture when camouflaged retrenchments endorsing the singularity of antipodal Black femininity and femaleness have become irrevocably implicated in cis aspirant trans antagonisms. My use of cis aspirant means to acknowledge both the impact of anti-Black ungendering processes and the unmet Black desire for cis gender capacities. This paper instead foregrounds that epicinity as an undertheorized mode through which Blackness is incessantly demonized. I now only appreciate how the liberally charged dynamics around depth, dimension, descent, and dominion percolate key subsets of occult iconography. Critically attending to overlapping genres of religious imagery further reveals how the inscrutably polymorphic figures they contain flagrantly emblematized demonological volumetrics while perverting potentials often regarded as exclusively grounding cis heteronormative eroticism as well as dimorphic reproduction. Moreover, in plotting late medieval and early modern scenes of diabolical darkness within the durational scope of Black visual culture, troubles to me contemporary attempts at disavowing how they indispensably fuel racialized anti-trans mobilizations. The idea persists that the vilification of fluctuating sex gender excess is a phenomenal tendency that exclusively indexes a monstrous cis femininity and nothing else. The maligning epicinity, despite its clear extra dimorphic and quaquaversal manifestations, is misrecognized as a low level auxiliary feature of cis women's oppression. However, I aim to counter these tendencies by foregrounding epicinity as a racialized mode of sexuated debasement meriting study in its own right. Suggesting that cis femaleness, including Black cis femaleness or cis female aspiration, is so capacious that can absorb any and all facets of gender objection, is not motivated by an innocent desire for accuracy. This critical stance is also an unfortunate outlet for cis-centric trans antagonisms articulated in a distinctly Black tone. It works to subdue, silence, and sideline any Black analysis of gender that would destabilize the transphobic gatekeeping upholding cis over trans, which undergirds the paradigmatic scaffolding of white over Black. Insisting that the exhaustive viability of Black cis gender positionalities be singly funneled through cis aspirant appeals is, to put it plainly, transphobic. Its enthusiastic embrace of a two-sex model puts Black studies in closer alignment with supposed competing schools of thought that some of us would like to readily admit. I began with religious depictions of inscrutably sexed infernal figures in early modern art as an effort to contextualize how demonization of epicinity shapes pejorative regard for transgender people today. Critically examining, invigorating, and even embracing adversarial positions is one familiar way that oppressed constituencies navigate lethal structures without necessarily conceding wholesale to the temptations of respectability, recognition, and/or incorporation. My very sincere wish is that whatever cross-fertilizations that might newly emerge between Black studies and religious studies, that they lean toward Black trans people's well-being rather than our continued erasure and demise. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] JOSEPH WINTERS: Good afternoon. Again, I want to thank Ahmad. I thank all of you, Harvard Divinity School and all the other panelists, whose work I've learned much from. So I just want to talk a little bit about how I'm thinking about this intersection of Black studies and Black religion and just give a slice of my research and then how I think it connects with some of the other panelists. So my project is motivated by two underexamined tendencies within academic discourses. One involves drawing a stable contrast between the religious and the secular, a division that is operative in genealogies of coloniality and anti-Black racism that ignore or diminish the religious logics and grammars that underpin these arrangements. Following the research of authors like Sabah Mahmud, Talal Asad, [INAUDIBLE] Alnajjar, I take it that secular secularism is not the opposite of the religious, but a mechanism by which Western liberal regimes have regulated the practice of religion and managed populations through normalized conceptions of the religious, proper Christianity, and so forth. The second related tendency often separates the field of Black studies from Black religious thought. This split creates a predicament where the religious and Black studies is either marginal, undertheorized, or reducible to the Black church or Afro-Protestantism, as some might say. Similar to the recent work of scholars like J Cameron Carter and Cecilio Cooper, I hope to bring greater attention to the ways that Black Studies provides a criticism of religious grammars that have shaped and sanctioned imperialism, coloniality, and anti-Blackness. I also pursue how authors and artists within Black intellectual and aesthetic traditions provide alternative conceptions of the sacred, spirit, and secularity in ways that, hopefully, are more open to the opaque, the unruly, and the errant. So one author who I've been thinking about for a couple of years-- I did not know how I would be thinking this much about this author-- is Mircea Eliade. I was constantly teaching these theorizing religion courses, and I was thinking about Eliade. And I kept coming across these passages where the sacred is being defined over and against certain kinds of qualities. And I'm reading it alongside Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, Frank Wilderson, and others, Cooper's work. And so I'm like, there's something here. So I want to suggest that reading Eliade, even though he's been dismissed or criticized for being a historical-- at times, for being apologists for like Christian theology, that there are unintended insights-- there are unintended insights in his work that, I think, are really important for Black studies. To begin to understand this 20th century Romanian philosopher of religion and his formulation of religious experience, it is helpful to consider his tribute or shout-out to Rudolf Otto's work, particularly the latter's description of the Holy as a mysterium tremendum, or this terrifying and awe-inspiring-- terrifying and awe-inspiring power. Even though Eliade claims to have different aims than Otto's inquiry into the irrational and non-conceptual aspects of the sacred, he accepts the Otto-inspired claim that quote. "The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from natural realities." End quote. Consequently, quote "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane." End quote. The language of the Holy other, of absolute alterity, underscores the vertical and qualitative difference between the sacred and the profane, a quasi-ontological difference that is manifested through various hierophanies. The appearance of the divine exhibits to human subjects a profound power that also reveals the insignificance of the human and the natural world apart from the powers that created that world. And yet, Eliade insists that in order for a hierophany to show itself and to be experienced by human, this appearance must occur through the ordinary world, through trees, symbols, rituals, myths, animals, heroic figures, and so forth. As Eliade puts it, "We are confronted by a mysterious act, the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world in objects that are integral part of our natural and profane world." End quote. Therefore, when Eliade speaks of the division of the sacred and profane as an abyss, we should be reminded that religious experience constitutes a bridge over and within that abyss. In other words, his tendency to describe these two modalities of experience as completely different is in tension with an assumption of an a priori communicability between these two experiences or planes of the sacred and profane. Thus, Eliade can sum up toward the end of the book, "Whatever the historical context in which it is placed, Homo religious always believes there is an absolute reality, the sacred which transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real." While the transcendent can only be actualized to the imminent, Eliade maintains that without the appearance of the Other, big O, humans would not even be able to distinguish between the religious and non-religious. To put it differently, the eruption of the hierophany makes the sacred-profane demarcation possible in the first place. It enables humans to set apart certain spaces or objects as more significant than others. Consequently, for the religious person in touch with the sacred, space is not homogeneous. He experiences interruptions, breaks in it. Some parts of space are qualitatively different from others. So it's almost like he's saying, without those hierophanies, one wouldn't even be able to make those kinds of distinctions between the sacred and profane. According to Eliade, religious people affirm a fundamental nonhomogeneity regarding space being an experience. They live according to a constituent of opposition between space that is meaningful and coherent and parts of the world that are amorphous and without form. The preservation of space that is meaningful and that participates in the really real wards off the chaos associated with homogeneous space, with profane existence, or with life that does not involve stabilizing interruptions and separations. This is because religious demarcations between the structured and the chaotic repeat and participate in the original acts of creation that instituted the world. For Eliade, a world is made possible by establishing limits, fixed points, and central axis within and against a formless expanse. A world is what is carved out from an undifferentiated region, enabling religious people to mark and identify the separation between two disparate kinds of spaces and modes of being. Consequently, to build a home, to construct a city, or settle a territory is analogous to founding a world, as those endeavors establish a paradigm for orientation. These activities enable humans to communicate with the gods and imitate the work of divine creation. Here, we should pause and think through the recurring frictions and ambiguities in Eliade's formulation of the sacred. On the one hand, Eliade continues to make strong contrasts when juxtaposing sacred and profane existence, particularly regarding the kinds of qualities, dispositions, and capacities that each modality affords. For religious persons, the sacred provides access to the real at once, power, efficacity, the source of life and fecundity, whereas profane life is stuck in illusion and threatened by irrelevance. Re-enacting the work of the gods enables humans to dwell in the world as a home, as a stable abode. To the contrary, for the irreligious person, there is no longer any worlds. There are only fragments of a shattered universe. Without perpetual contact with divine creation or the powers of world production, one barely lives and cannot quench what he calls the ontological thirst or fully participate in being. For Eliade, to some extent, religion signifies man's quest for being, which we should think about that and what the condition of possibility is that. He reminds the reader that profane existence is never found in its pure state. I'm sorry. And yet, this complete separation between sacred and profane existence never really holds for Eliade. He reminds the reader that, quote, "Profane existence is never found in its pure state. Therefore, even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of religious valorization of the world." For instance, he says, "non-religious people might treat certain places like a birthplace as unique and exceptional. They may distinguish certain experiences as being different in time than the typical interactions that comprise ordinary life. Citizen subjects within a particular nation-state are often educated to think of certain places, events, legal documents, and foundational figures as if they are sacred, as if they almost represent quasi-transcendent phenomena around which social life is organized and solidified. Eliade is invested in delineating what he calls crypto-religious examples to show that even in a disenchanted world, vestiges of religious man will always remain. In the same way that Eliade refuses the possibility of purely profane space, and by implication, a purely sacred space, he broaches the language of the threshold to describe the passage from one realm to another. Using the example of a door located between the street and the inside of a church or a temple, Eliade writes, "The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds, at the same time, the paradoxical space where the worlds communicate, where passage from one-- from the sacred to the-- sorry, from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible. The threshold, which is an object of great importance, is simultaneously the interval at which differences between two things are most amplified and when a kind of crossing and boundary blurring occurs." To put it differently, the threshold is a limit that brings into focus both contrast and intimacy. It acts as a border that separates entirely different spaces while allowing for movement and transition between these two spaces. Without the threshold, this border, and opening, communication between the gods and humans would be impossible. Even though Eliade prioritizes the appearance of the divine as the foundation for religiosity and world-making, one could say that the threshold is the condition of possibility for religious experience. It enables the eruption of the sacred to be manifested, actualized, and experienced within the profane world. It is the occasion for contacts, touch, relation, interaction, and passage. And while the threshold often retains its function as a border between the two realms, we should keep in mind the paradoxical nature of this in-between position. One way to flesh out the implications of the threshold and concomitant concepts of separation and contact is to think through Eliade's brief allusion to the religious underpinnings of colonial encounters or his description of the world-instituting or world-establishing sacred as being implicated in settler colonial projects. Recall that, for Eliade, a world is defined against a formless space, or space that is undifferentiated and without stable borders and limits. The religious person inhabits a well-defined world, according to Eliade, that is part of a broader cosmos. Anything that is on the other side of that established world is indeterminate, unknown, foreign, and so forth. And yet, a kind of transformation can happen for Eliade when inhabitants of an ordered world cross over and consecrate the quote, "unknown space that extends beyond its frontiers." End quote. Possession of land accompanied by ritual and building altars is equivalent to converting chaos into form and extending the order-instituting work of divine creation. As Eliade puts it, quote, "An unknown foreign and unoccupied territory, which often means unoccupied by our people, still shares in the fluid and larval modality of chaos. By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos through a ritual repetition of divine creation. Settling unknown territory entails a certain imagination of that territory as devoid of form, life, stability, and in need of some kind of external imposition of structure and organization." The pursuit of settlement also assumes that the threshold between our world and their world is fluid and permeable, even as that fluidity can become the occasion for dispossession in the name of a rigid contrast between the world and wilderness or sacred and profane, exemplified for Eliade by the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas taking possession of foreign territory for the colonizer as a form of renewal and giving new life to regions and peoples considered not quite alive. One might consider this connection between the consecration of space and the colonial occupation of land as a dynamic that is no longer prevalent in a modern secularized world and a world organized by nation-state sovereignty, militarism, and the operations of capital. It might seem that Eliade's religious lexicon is outdated. This suspicion is compounded when Eliade makes distinctions between traditional and modern societies, designating to the former myths that involve god-slaying monsters and dragons of the underworld prior to creation. The renewal of the world for traditional religious societies, he tells us, required the repetition of the victory of the gods over the forces of darkness, death, and chaos. Yet, Eliade reminds the reader that modern day modern subjects are very much committed to constructing boundaries to hold at bay beings, populations, dangers, and desires that threaten to bring about ruin, disintegration, and death. He contends that a religious conception of the world remains in collective anxieties about the, quote unquote, "civilized world being inundated with those chaotic forces from within and elsewhere." Here, we might think of the kinds of discourses that mark migrants from Haiti, Central America as a peril to US safety and border maintenance. For Eliade, the enduring opposition between a coherent world and disorder indicates trepidation at the prospect of quote, "the abolition of an order, a cosmos, an organic structure, an immersion in the state of fluidity, of formlessness, in short, of chaos." For Eliade, religiosity persists in humanity's need for order, the desire to inhabit a world that provides structure and orientation and a certain kind of thirst and quest for being. Those qualities that might violate or profane this attachment to order, darkness, formlessness must be contained, eliminated, or incorporated into a well-ordered cosmos. OK. You probably want to-- why all this Eliande? Let me try to just cover this, break it down for what. So I think, for me, there's at least four or five things that I'm really interested in. Eliade has this moment where he says something like, settling, settling territory, settling territory. He was thinking again about Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors. And it's not always clear that he's-- I mean, he's giving descriptions, phenomenological descriptions. It's not always clear if he's endorsing or not. But settling territory is like founding a world, he says. And that founding of a world is almost like participating in the work of the gods, participating in cosmogony, participating in the creation of the world. So world-making is what, for Eliade, connects humans to the gods. It is a kind of sacred practice of becoming divine. World built in this one too, world-building, which we could think about in terms of cosmos, order, organic structure, is opposed to the virtual, the fluid, blackness, the aquatic, the monstrous, or what he says, that which is yet to acquire a form. So we can think here-- I think here was like Cooper's work, it would be that the sacred in some way, not only defined against darkness but also the underworld, the chthonic. The threshold is a space where contrast break down, where there's a moment where something breaks down, where the contrast between sacred, profane and between order and chaos actually has to undergo a certain kind of fluidity. And yet, that also becomes the occasion to reintroduce and reestablish certain kinds of binaries and demarcations. If Eliade's description is right, then we might see coloniality, settler colonial regimes, as religious ceremonies, as sacred economies. So two authors that I try to think in conversation with Eliade are W.E.B. Du Bois and Sylvia Wynter. I won't go too much-- I want to have time for conversation. But consider Du Bois' 1920 essay, The Souls of White Folk in which the philosopher-sociologist and activist refers to whiteness as a religion, rejecting the notion that whiteness is reducible to pigmentation. Du Bois describes a belief-- describes it as a belief system, one that includes the presumed superiority of white peoples over non-white peoples and a devotion to, quote, "ownership of the Earth forever and ever, Amen." End quote. In this essay, he talks about whiteness as belief, fantasy, desire, but also as a religion. Here, Du Bois implicitly refuses any durable distinction between belief and practice. In fact, belief in whiteness is directly connected to property ownership and the operations of expansive capitalism. Whiteness is a belief system that propels and legitimates the conversion of opaque regions and populations into the property of European and American imperial endeavors. Within this religion of whiteness, the agents of European civilization can treat themselves as, what he says, Superman and world-mastering demigods. Or in Eliade's language, they can imitate the gods by occupying, settling, and governing foreign territories or territories rendered opaque, fluid, and so forth. Du Bois' interpretation of Western imperialism in religious terms nullifies linear secular narratives that would describe modernity as a progressive shift away from the significance of religion. For Du Bois, the religion of whiteness is the nation's life. It holds and binds. You can think of here the term "ligare", meaning to bind and to tie. It holds and binds the nation together even as this life is predicated on death-producing rituals. Jamaican philosopher and critic Sylvia Wynter continues these lines of thought in her description of Western man or the dominant representation of humanity unduly defined by whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, and property ownership. According to Wynter, Western man has been constructed over and against non-Europeans, Native Americans, and Black people. What is crucial for her is this bifurcation between Western man and his racial others. Being an extension and re-expression of previous theological demarcations, racial and colonial hierarchies are updated versions of the kinds of invidious distinctions made between the redeemed, the unredeemed, the Christian, the infidel, uninhabitable and inhabitable land, and spirit and flesh. And each of these binaries are ways of carving up the Earth and the planet. The first term in the binary represents symbolic life, while the opposing term signifies death. These divisions are re-articulated, for instance, in Darwin's notion of natural selection, according to Wynter, where some species and groups are fit for preserving life, while others are selected for erasure. Although Wynter tends to accept a rather conventional, at times, understanding of secularization, she uses language like de-godding and so forth. Where modern scientific frameworks replace theocentric paradigms, she contends that what remains across this transition is a sense of planetary nonhomogeneity. And I think this is interesting, the sense of carving up the world in terms of symbolic life and death. This is precisely how Eliade talks about the sacred and the religious in terms of nonhomogeneity. There's certain kinds of spaces that have to be set apart as more coherent, more life-giving than others. So I'm not saying that they're talking to each other. But for me, they're talking to each other. If Eliade claims spatial nonhomogeneity. Is the hallmark of religious experience in the making of sacred space, then we might say that Western man, according to Wynter's analysis, is a religious figure. Consequently, any criticism of man and the imperial agendas attached to this prevailing conception of the ideal human must include a critical engagement with religiosity, theology, political theology, and grammars of the sacred. Just real quick. I mean, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about in terms of Eliade's notion of what I'm reinterpreting as the world-establishing sacred or the world-making sacred, I've been thinking a lot about contemporary Black studies, including the work of Tyrone Palmer who thinks a lot about-- in a very important essay, in Otherwise Than Blackness, Palmer contends that affect theory works with some guiding assumptions, universal relationality, and a certain kind of universal access or openness to the world. As Palmer points out, "The world, the Here world, has many different connotations we can think about in terms of an ordered whole, a field and horizon of possibility, the paradigmatic operations by which reality is structured, positioned, and rendered sensible" end quote. We can think about how-- that these various notions of the world are defined or organized through a certain kind of abjection of Blackness. Now I will say this. It's not always clear to me what the relationship is between Blackness and Black people, Blackness, Black people, Blackness, queer others, trans persons. I want to think about the relationship between Blackness and certain kind of racial, gender, sexualized others, not necessarily always a kind of, not simplistic, but a one-to-one relationship between Blackness and Black people. We can talk about that. But I need to think more about that. But the idea here is that there's the assumption that-- particularly, western philosophy and epistemes make about this universal access to the world denies the ways in which relationality is made possible by nonrelationality, antagonism, and a certain abjection of Blackness. And I think that a conversation with Eliade is helpful here, Blackness being associated with the opaque, that which is opaque, unformed, monstrous, and so forth. And I also just want to think-- I'll end here with-- I want to think also with somebody like Frank Wilderson, who in the latest book Afropessimism, has this line where he says, Afropessimism offers a critique of the world without redemption except the end of the world. So those [INAUDIBLE] we should be thinking about the relationship between the apocalyptic and redemption. But as I take it here, part of what he's suggesting here is that the renewal of the world is always predicated on the perpetuation of certain kinds of suffering, particularly anti-Black violence and suffering. But I also take it here that when he's talking about the end of the world, he might be also getting at, which I think, Tyrone Palmer is taking from him, the end of our very commitment to something like world. And yet, I'm going to end with attention because I don't really know. I think with my political commitments, I think that something like construction is necessary. What might it mean to think-- what might it think-- I'll just leave it on this. What might it think-- what might it mean to think world in relationality that is always cut, such that our very appeal to something like world of relationality is always traversed in some way by cuts and ruptures and wounds. I'll leave it there. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: That's great. Thank you. We're on. Thank you so much to our two presenters for these really prolific opening papers to get us started. There's a lot on the table, I think, for consideration. And so my brain is going in a number of directions. So bear with me as I try to formulate a coherent set of questions. But while I'm doing that, I want to remind folks that you can scan the QR code in the program booklet to submit questions. Or you can just raise your hand too. And there is a mic in the back in the hand of Soo Min Kim, who's standing up right back there, who can bring the mic to you. But as I reflect on the two papers, and because I am a historian by training but theoretically inclined in a number of important ways, I couldn't help but pay attention to both of your attention to space and place. And so just kind of a word cloud that we can think aloud with, but the space of the abyss comes up for both of you, the space of the demonological-- excuse me, thinking about threshold as a term that actually appears in both papers, the cosmic, the cosmos, bordered world as another possession and the multiplicity of meaning imbued by possession, one, as demonic possession or spirit possession as a term of possibility for African diasporic religions, and also thinking about the monstrous as a kind of ontological sexed and gendered position. So I'm curious if we can comment on what you're doing with space? World is also important. I'd also like us to think there in the import of, in contemporary Black Studies, of worlding as a term that we hear in utility. What does it do for us? What are the limits of it? What is it obscure? So I'll just stop there. Why don't we tease out phrases here and think about space and place? JOSEPH WINTERS: You mean about the complexities of World and worlding-- this is better-- the complexities of World and worlding, right? So I think, on one hand, I think I've been-- I think I've been very much influenced by certain kinds of, I think, radical political traditions that are invested in something like another world being possible. And yet, there's something about-- when I think with the Tyrone Palmer essay in conversation with Eliade, it got me thinking about, well, is there some-- is there something-- we can imagine different types of worlds. We can even maybe imagine worlding differently and different in qualitatively different ways. But it seems to me that there might be something about-- that will always-- always some kind of trace, of something like borders, limits, but also some kind of-- that whatever is being described or inhabited as worlds, that has to be defined in some way over and against either something that is not coherent or regions, peoples, populations that are seen as being world poor. And that's very Heideggerian language. So I'm wrestling with that. I'm wrestling with-- I'm wrestling with, on one hand, space, place, how that's imagined. I'm wrestling with thinking about the politics of space around coloniality, gentrification, and so forth, what's happening to every city across the United States and across the world, but also thinking about the ways in which, for the traditions that I'm thinking about, creating alternative worlds, not worlds that connect the living and the dead, and that are not always-- not always connected to property. And here I'm thinking with a colleague and friend Tracy Hucks and Diane Stewart's work when they're thinking about the ways in which there are two volumes, series, thinking about the ways in which there might be Afro-Atlantic traditions, where a sense of home and belonging is not always connection to the ancestors and the gods, does not necessarily require us to think of the world as property. So I'm thinking about all that. But that's not really an answer. But I'm thinking about all that and trying to think through those tensions, if that makes sense. CECILIO M COOPER: You want to respond? AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: Yeah. All right. I'm curious to hear from you. CECILIO M COOPER: Excellent. Is this microphone on? Mic check. Excellent. Thank you very much. So I'm not originally wasn't trained as an early modernist by any means. But why I turned to early modern imagery, late medieval, is because I'm interested in multiple inflections of terms that circulate in the present. So one, for example, is the seemingly, the disenchanted separation of magic from science. So when I'm thinking about worlding or even the cosmo prefix, the term cosmology shows up in religious studies but also in physics. And when you think about cosmogony, the origins of the worlds, cosmology, the way cosmography-- those ways that worlds have been mapped, the visual grammars of early modern, late medieval imagery are windows into how people have conceived of embodiment in seemingly non-racial terms. So one of the driving forces of my interest like, what are the things that-- what are the things that seem non-racial about Blackness? What are the things that we take for granted as being indicative of Blackness? And what do those things obscure? I'm interested in, how does Blackness, before it gets appended onto certain demographics of people, what is it doing in early modern cosmographies, competing cosmographies, in the way the world is mapped, as a way to defamiliarise? I think the investment in visual culture, in cathecting onto anthropomorphic and recognizable images of Black people, they have two feet, two eyes, arms, as the able-bodiedness of it, they get some sociological archive to corroborate whatever kinds of contemporary appeals we might have about agency, even under the confines of enslavement. So I'm always thinking about how does Blackness show up in the shadow? And how does it show up in terms of my work? How does this signal chaos? He's been talking very much about that. So I'm interested in that. So cosmology, where does this show up in science and math and space? But also, in terms of possession, one of the things-- I don't think I was successful in it, but it was a wonderful thought experiment-- thinking about possession as the house inflected in terms of spirit possession, as you mentioned, but also in terms of property relations. So thinking about, what are the ideas about possession, about the relationship between cosmology on a macroscale and cosmology on a microscale, whereas man is a small mirror of the sovereignty of an individual man, the king of his castle. How does that-- how does that blossom out into a man being able to hold the universe? And how does that shape how the ways that Black people were thought rendered available to both to spirit possession in the positive and the negative, whether that's sacred possession, angelic possession, and also demonic possession? How does that open vulnerability? How does that shape contemporary claims to sovereignty, to territory, to citizenship? So those are just some of the floating ideas about, can you own property if you can also be invaded as property? Black people function as modal landmarks of territory wherever they roam. And so there's a kind of extraterritoriality about diaspora that-- so even when there's one person in a white country or 50 million, somehow, Black people signify debasement and slaveness in places where people have never met a Black person or have only encountered one. And I'm fascinated by what that tells us about global politics. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: I see that we have some hands up. Professor Rivera has her hand up. And then we'll hear from Tom in the back. AUDIENCE: Thank you for two fascinating and, I think, very interconnected papers. I wanted to pick up on the question of territoriality and the presumed nonhomogeneity of the world, perhaps, to complicate Wynter's account of it in ways that may connect the two of the papers that, it's on the one hand, there is her argument about a division, a geographic imaginary, that divides the world into inhabitable and other zones as always in chaos. But on the other hand, there is, also, in the very process of conquest, coincides with the science of dividing the world that depends on, also, an imaginary of the homogeneity of the world such that you can mathematically divide it. And this is at the very moment of conquest, this science of geography that depends on the mathematical grid over the world. So I guess I'm thinking about how the two things can coexist and actually help each other, the imagined accessibility of some areas because they are outside of the realm of the sacred, and also, then there there's accessibility to mapping and those to property. JOSEPH WINTERS: I'm thinking about-- she's got me thinking about-- oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry. It got me thinking about the beginning of J Smith's essay, Religion, Religious, Religions. But the famous quote of the conquistador coming to the Americas and saying, "These people have no religion, they have no clothes. They have no religion," well, it seems to me, already, in that moment, is a kind of-- I think I'm trying to get at-- already, is a sense of what you're marking some kind of contrast and, maybe, ontological difference by suggesting that this term religion is applicable universally in a certain way. I think that's-- I mean, it's not quite what-- it's something like, that to some extent, you know, what Wynter is getting at, is a certain imaginary of a certain-- non-imaginary of nonhomogeneity that re-articulates itself and repeats itself between the theocentric and the biocentric. And yet, at the same time, I wonder if maybe, what you're getting at-- I mean, on one hand, it assumes something like a universality of man and even a fungibility of certain kinds of regions and bodies. And I mean, I wonder if then that means that we could-- I don't want to say that. I won't say anything redemptive or anything. But I wonder if all that means that even in moments in which these ontological divisions are being made, there's some understanding of contact. There's some understanding of relation. Or on the flip side of that, if I read that more, it means that even the imagination of homogeneity or the imagination of relation can still be the occasion for all kinds of violence and brutality. I don't know if that's what-- because I mean, it seems to me she's always trying to-- I've just recently read with my students the 1492, A New Worldview. Even in these moments of brutality, she's always trying to suggest that-- but there was, even in this moment, Columbus' imaginary had to change. His very notion of what's inhabitable had to radically change. So it seems to me that she's also trying to always get us to think that, to remind us that, there are these moments, these upheavals, where there's, I don't know, some greater acknowledgment or awareness that human beings create their worlds and then treat them. And so I don't know if it's getting to your question at all. But I'm wondering if there's something about this interplay between the homogeneous and heterogeneous that we can, maybe, flip, or she might want us to flip in more generative and less death-dealing ways. But I don't know if that makes any sense. CECILIO M COOPER: Something that just came to mind, thinking about Wynter's engaging with ideas around nonhomogeneity is that, I think what she's trying to do is trouble the seemingly innocent distinctions that someone like Aristotle would make in terms of differentiating different scales of the cosmos, of things in the firmament, down things on the planet surface. So it's not just that things are distinguished from each other, It's that they're stratified. So things not being homogeneous have to be ordered. And so the idea of ordering rocks from fish lends itself to the idea that humankind as a species is not internally homogeneous, and so is therefore, internally stratified. And we know what tends to be on the top and what tends to be on the bottom. So I think what she's trying to do is, comprehensively find resonances between the sciences and religion and how it impacts just day-to-day naturalizing of biocentric theories of race. AUDIENCE: So I actually think Professor Rivera has, in many ways, stolen the thunder on my question. But I think I'll reiterate it because, in these wonderful papers, this seemed to me to be a really key theme, imagination, yes, and the scientific mapping of the world, but also in the construction of a religious other place. I mean, maybe you believe Dante went to hell. I don't know. But in some way, it's a creation of imagination. And then, I guess, my question for both of you with papers that really span this massive theoretical and chronological area is, OK, imagination works in the paradox of creation, and obviously, destructive force by that creation. And what is the way of using that, moving forward, in these animating questions that you have? CECILIO M COOPER: Would you mind repeating the question one more time? AUDIENCE: Imagination, the paradox, creative and destructive, what is the way of using that, maybe, theme, which, I think, was present in both papers as a way of moving forward with the other questions that you have? JOSEPH WINTERS: This a great question. I mean, if I think about, you're getting at this ambivalence of imagination that-- or I mean, ambivalence in the sense of the both aren't happening at the same time. I mean, she uses the language in 1492, Wynter, in the Janus face view. So something does happen in 1492 for her that is actually really important regarding a certain upheaval, a certain episteme or planetary imaginary for Wynter. And that happens at the same time that Columbus wants to, you know, redeem peoples because the end of the world is coming or something like that. So I'm wondering. There's a couple of things. One is the ambivalence of imagination, but also that a different imaginary can also be re-articulating something, particularly, I think, for Wynter, a certain kind of a set of divisions between symbolic life and symbolic death. I hope that's making sense-- such that-- I think I'll stay there. I will just say this. I think that, often, the language of imagination comes up as a way to-- and often, very auspicious and positive ways, through imagination or just a reminder that the world is imagined and constructed and can be re-imagined and reconstructed. But I take it that the authors that we're thinking with are-- I mean, maybe we have to take that ambivalence. Or maybe, I mean, that even-- I mean, if I again think with Wilkerson's call, I mean, that another world, which we might not be able to describe, would involve-- is going to have to involve some kind of destruction, which also, the destruction of our attachment to this world and all of its problems. Anyway, I hope that made any kind of sense. But yeah. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: I have a clarifying question. I'm wondering, on the point about imagination, might imagination [INAUDIBLE] might imagination actually be bereft of the kind of possibility. Do you think it's possible? I don't know. Maybe this is a pessimistic assertion. But imagination seems to me to often be a stand-in for a larger set of practices without a kind of specificity [INAUDIBLE] the ordering apparatus of the world as we know it. And so especially in religious and theological contexts, the imaginative becomes, not to use ableist language, but a kind of crutch that doesn't allow for an interrogation of the thing that we don't want to say or the thing that cannot be said. I don't know. So I'm curious about the imaginative as it relates to demons. I mean, even entering that terrain of inquiry in religious studies context, it's like, wow, you know? And we know that demonology has intricately interwoven the fabric of race-making in the new world. And so, the African and the slave become the diabolical. That's fundamental to the racializing process. And so, I'm just curious if we can think about imagination here, the uses, and perhaps, the misuses of the imaginative. Because of your offering that we might think about the end of the world, what then does it mean to follow this imagination quickly rather than tearing with the need for the end? I'm just rambling here. But I'm curious to interrogate that a little further. CECILIO M COOPER: So thank you for repeating the question. I think, for me, that it's less useful for me to think about imagination than more about desires and drives. And if on one hand, Dante's very fantastical, inspiring set of cantos chronicling this, the world of purgatory, inferno, I don't think that's any less a work of imagination than the various versions of the Bible that we have. So that's just me as someone who just-- they're in a medieval space when a very small portion of the population was actually literate. The idea that there would be complementary sets of imagery meant to illustrate, vividly communicate very complicated episodes or scenes in a very long epic, a convoluted set of stories as part of a visual grammar that requires-- I saw a meme that said that-- it was some kind of tweet, where he was saying, when we read books, we're literally just hallucinating based upon ink typed on parchment. It's something that happens in the mind. And we're not all-- what's fascinating is that we're-- it was not-- the fact that we're not exactly imagining the same things, but there's still a degree of resonance that everyone knows what you mean when you say a demon, what it looks like, what it sounds like, is a kind of a resource of tropes that people draw upon and that, often, they typically use Blackness. So when we think about-- to your point tonight about how possession comes up so often when there are accounts of possession in nunneries, I'm thinking about the nuns of Verdun. Or they imagine Black orbs just floating formlessly. And we see this kind of tropes in contemporary horror movies, black ooze. And people think they're possessed. Their fingers start blackening at the end. With all these things that-- there's no set-- no one went to a meeting and say, these are all the things we're going to narrate about what it means to be possessed. But somehow, Blackness and all these things, as a sign of disorder, are something that people readily have been drawing upon for centuries. So to your point, I think, about 1492, this linchpin point but also, Hortense talks about 1441, 50 years prior, about this disembarkation that precedes that. But to the point of what's happening in 1492, at the same time, you all know the Vitruvian man, the iconic model of da Vinci, that comes out of 1490, 1491. So at the same time, this drive to go and launch this transatlantic quest to start purchasing people and setting out a whole set of disasters, there's also this move to set visual grammars about symmetry, about cosmography, about cis masculinity as being the pinnacle of what it means to be human happening at the same time. So in terms of imagination, I'm interested in how are these imaginations expressed, and what are the things that we've inherited from those moments. And for me, it's, like, I'm not really a religious scholar. So I approach things, I'm very neutral about it. I force myself to be neutral. So when I think about sacred possession like the possession of angels or demonic possession, to me, they're both territorial invasion. So when I think about works of imagination, I don't mean to be sacrilegious. But to your point, possession or the adversarial possession is a constituent part of Judeo-Christian logics. But for some reason, there's a taboo of thinking about it critically. And that is about-- so studying that thing does not mean I can be invested in that same way. And I think some of the confusion comes because in academia, people think I study revolutionary movements, so that means I'm therefore-- get some kind of street cred for having those kind of politics. And sometimes, those things line up. And sometimes, they don't. And so just the idea of-- there's a system we should be very comprehensive and systematic in how we address systems of knowledge that should be inherited. So thinking about these things that you've offered, I think, is important. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: There's a question in the back. Is that correct? AUDIENCE: Hello. My name is Adrian. I have a question for both of you. Thank you for your presentations. I'll just start with Cecilio. I was really curious by the different ways that the talk was speaking into different conversations. And one of those that I would like to ask you about is, how your turn to the early modern intervenes in the dominant whiteness of trans theorizing. And I'm thinking particularly of Susan Stryker's words to Victor Frankenstein and the turn to the monstrous there. If that's something that you're interested in intervening into, I just would like to hear more about how you see that kind of conversation expanding or turning differently with your own turn to the early modern and the demonic? That gets me in a weird way to Joseph's stuff because, of course, the Victor Frankenstein is a turn to the Gothic. And that makes me think about the way you grapple with this apocalyptic language, maybe not so much through the religious dimension of the apocalyptic, but something like the sublime. And is that a useful category for you? And there might not-- there isn't an explicit line of religious studies thinking in the question. But I think what's shadowing the entire line of thought for me as I'm engaging with both of you, is the way aesthetic categories and literary categories actually become analogs for people to think about these religious questions. So yeah. Thank you. JOSEPH WINTERS: So I'm thinking here about the sublime through, as you pointed out, I mean, aesthetic category through people like Cotton Burke, thinking about the way in which Zakiyyah Jackson takes that on in her work, where for both of those authors, there's something about Black women that become a certain kind of embodiment of the sublime In some way. But I think what's interesting-- I know these are not all the same, but something about the monstrous and the sublime we're talking about, something like attraction and repulsion. We're talking about some set of qualities, desires, beings, that actually defy representation even as they also, in some ways, animate a certain desire to represent. There's this back and forth I'm thinking about. So I think, for me, when I think about the monstrous, I think it's very much-- it seems to me, there's some analogy here between the sublime regarding the attraction, repulsion, but also, this tension-filled relationship between that which can't be represented. And yet, we spend a whole lot of time trying to, at least, talk about it and maybe, to tarry with, if that makes sense. But I'm also trying to take very seriously the ways in which Zakiyyah Jackson argues and shows that for the two key thinkers in this tradition of the sublime, Black women or dark women become a stand-in for that which can't be represented, such that-- it certainly is an occasion for all kinds of violence, but also might be-- open up the possibility or impossibility for other ways of being, knowing, desiring, and becoming. And so I hope that makes sense. CECILIO M COOPER: Thank you for that. Thank you for the assessment. Yes, many around my subterranean undergirding concerns with trans studies. For example, years ago, I was at a trans feminism conference presenting work, and I returned to Sylvia Stryker and the tropes that are used in that very-- again, I know it's an earlier work, but a canonical essay about the narration of white trans becoming through, not just monstrosity, but specific kind of dark chaos. It was something that shows up, and it's just taken for granted and not remarked upon as being anything particularly racial are, in fact, impacting the way that white trans or white trans studies has, in fact, regarded Black transness. And so that's in my mind. And so that's on one hand. I was like, I need to very methodically trace how that comes to be. But also, my initial project when I was starting a PhD study was, I was originally doing-- I'm going to do a project on Black trans people, [INAUDIBLE] doing. But I wanted to shift course because there was a way in which, I would just say, like, hegemonic, it sucks the oxygen out of the room where there is a push towards instrumentalizing people's biographies in order to make these prescriptive political stances about futurity and generativity. And there's a way in which I-- on one hand, it's, like, you don't need to know everything that we're up to survive. And what I predicted actually happened, the things that have been in some cases cartoonishly lampooned into being very feel good soundbites about what Black trans people are doing and navigate systems of structure. And I think on one hand, we have to tell stories and be rigorous about illuminating hidden cultures. But we also should be mindful of, some things don't need to be in the academy. And there's not a lot of sense around it. I think, just literally, just straight sense, why are you giving all the recipes? Now people can't-- how are people supposed to finesse when everyone's just, like, doing a sociological ethnography. And so there's a level of, I wish people were mindful of that, but also, two, to demystify some of the things that we think we mean. So that means that, honestly, I'm very grateful to Ahmad and Joseph. You all engaged in my work. I feel very marginal to both those fields. One aside to that is that I recently presented at-- there was a conference on early modern trans studies at the Folger where I'm a fellow this year. And even in early modern trans studies, as it needs to be corrected to the very, quote unquote, "presentist." and I say that with scare quotes because I'm trained as a presentist, performance studies person. There's a way in which there is a sewer of archives, and also that, to the point about imagination of the speculative, ways in which transness is in the record. And so even as that is doing particular kind of work, thinking about your work, being a historian of mine, there's a way in which there's still key tropes they're looking for, a white Joan of Arc. We need a distinguished or recognizable white trans figure that people can latch on to. So in these stories, there is no record of-- you're not going to find a record of any Black trans person in medieval archive other than unnamed eunuchs, for the same reason why you're not going to find portraits, or there's just a lack of sense around method that, I think, needs to be attended to. So that's why I turned to alchemy. There are portrayals of seemingly Black figures. That's why I turned to demons that have been cordoned out. And even from Black visual culture, it's not being respectable enough, images of early modern imagery, in order to defamiliarise, to your point, Joseph, what's between Blackness and Black people. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: We have one question from the live stream. I do want to make sure we get to-- it's for both doctors here. What I loved about your sermonic presentations is the deep attention to how religion behaves, particularly how theological language and Christian imaginaries enact violence and erasure throughout history. What I also loved was how the sermonic moments felt rooted in a person, a people giving substance to ideation or flesh to dry bones. What does religious studies, maybe more particularly, the intersections of Black Studies and religious studies, offer to hurting people? What modalities of care and tenderness and/or resistance and abolition does religious studies offer to those that desperately need new modalities of living? And we are in a Divinity School. CECILIO M COOPER: I feel like they saw you as a religious study aficionado. JOSEPH WINTERS: I mean, one thing, I think, that this conjunction of-- this conjunction of Black studies, religious studies might offer, if we're thinking about the importance of care, the importance of a certain kind of relation or nonrelation to the other, is, perhaps-- and here I'm thinking with certain authors from Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Georges Bataille, I don't know how, they're just some constellation in my mind-- but it could be that partly what's helpful is to actually critique and refuse certain well-intentioned forms of care. And I mean, by that, I'm thinking about the ways in which compassion or sympathy can often be very much a replication of violence. Or it could be that, actually, care and intimacy are never easily divorceable from anguish and violence. I know that's difficult to hear and say. But it could be that what some of these authors were thinking about throughout different time periods or maybe getting us to see is, that care and relationality-- I don't know if relational, care and relationality is always wounded, which means that there's no way to make any kind of simple distinction between the kinds of care that we want to resist and refuse various forms of violence and brutality. And I hope that makes sense. I know it's a negative way to get at it. I'm certainly interested in certain kinds-- I'm thinking about certain kinds of practices and strategies. But I'm always thinking about those practices and strategies as being certain kinds of ruptures and cuts to certain ways of thinking about-- certain kinds of ruptures and cuts into, I don't know, the desire to overcome and get over what I call the constitutive wound. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: Got a question. AUDIENCE: Yeah. Cecilio, thank you for your paper, as well as you, Joseph. I have a question about, if any distinction-- if there's any distinction for you between how the Black Maternal has been thought as also this nonrepresentable reproductive zone in Black Studies, and how you're thinking about the chthonic and the abyssal, particularly as it has stakes for conceptions around the Black female body and sexual dimorphism and Black studies, currently. CECILIO M COOPER: Thank you. So I really appreciate the question. So in some ways, I'm going to leave you in suspense about what, well, my conclusions about that are. But I am thinking deeply about the relationships between sex, sexual dimorphism exegesis. And then that's why I turned to alchemy, to trouble some of those distinctions. But stay tuned. JOSEPH WINTERS: Really quickly. I'm actually interested in how the Black maternal shows up in hip-hop, particularly certain moments where the artists like Biggie Smalls or Nas is actually imagining themselves in the womb. So it becomes this. Anyway, yeah. AUDIENCE: Hello. Oh, this is very loud. I'm George Aumoithe, Assistant Professor of History and African-American studies. I'm very happy to have heard these papers from you, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Winters, mainly because if you listen closely enough, life rhymes. And yesterday in our class on the history, the Black history of electronic dance music, we started reading Marlon Bailey's Butch Queens Up in Pumps. In the introduction to that book, Bailey cites Muñoz's use of world-making in the book of essays, Misidentifications. And in the classroom, we began to think about underground spaces and counter-public spaces, thinking about someone like Michael Warner, big communications idea, but the idea that the underground is not just a space that is to be obscured or a space that is necessarily in contrast with the public, but is purposefully, in many ways, a sacred space. And what we were exploring in the class was the ways in which that sacrality is ineligible to those who don't know, so the kind of colloquial, if you know, you know. And so my question is-- across your two papers, I'm thinking methodologically, and so often, this question is addressed methodologically in an ethnographic sense. I'm a long-term participant observer of this group that you don't know. There's obscurity, you and in my being in this space, I can convey to you what this group is about. But Dr. Winters, the use of history is also another method, right? And that's fascinating to me. And I'm wondering with this problematic of world-making and the sacrality inherent in it and the words and the threshold that you're talking about, that moment where you recognize or you don't recognize, I'm aware it is or it's not, what do you think is the use of either register? We need ethnography in the moment to break this theoretical notion, knowable and fillable in our lives now. But there's also the historical register. You know, I'm thinking about a figure like William Dorsey Swann, you know, Afro-American born into slavery in 1860, who becomes free and is widely known as the first drag queen in America. And why it is figures like that are so obscured and still surprising to us when they're mentioned? So even as we have a crisis of needing to know and be in the moment, we still have a crisis of history too, where figures in the past, whether they're the nameless eunuch or someone like William Dorsey Swann still surprise us and still are figures we reach into the abyss to know. And I think what's so powerful about your two papers is that they offer a route for us. I'd wonder if you can both explore the method here. CECILIO M COOPER: Thank you so much. I'll say, I think I'll just-- we'll answer your question sideways. And then I think I heard you say that these underground spaces are sacred. I think, methodologically, or I'm not-- I'll just say my general orientation is that-- one of the things that Black people do to manage an anti-Black world that says, for example, Black people are lazy and shiftless, is to show how hard-working and industrious Black people are. And the other half is saying that the relegation of Black people to being profane and debased is to make the claim that Black people are sacred. I am not interested in recuperating things that have been previously said as being profane and turning them sacred in order to perform an alignment with them or resonance with them. And again, those things I do at an intellectual level and then the things-- again, the things I do in my day to day, but just in terms of chthonic space, I'm thinking about the Underground Railroad or even underground subcultures. And it's one of the reasons why I go a bit earlier than these 19th century, 18th century moments to think about, do we need this, do we need to repair or re-imagine darkness of subsurface spaces. Whether they're neutral underworlds of Hades, or whether they're the carceral spaces of hell, do we need to make them light and good and holy in order to show that Black people can interface with them? And I'm just saying, let things be profane because one person's prayer is another person's curse. And so when I think about, why do I turn to the chthonic is that, if we think about autochthony as a synonym for indigeneity, Black people may not be able to claim citizenship or sovereignty over space they were born to because they're Indigenous or autochthonous to a specific landmark within a geographic set of geographic borders. Think about the idea about thresholds and borders. But if the chthonic subtends the entire world, that says something different about where Black people belong and what they can claim. Blackness is underneath everything. And so when we take that as a foundation, we can maybe have a different kind of orientation to how we manage the valorization of light as being an exposure because I don't. Yeah. So I'll just stop there. But those are some things I'm thinking about. In my day-to-day I love-- I was a drag performer and burlesque performer. So I did performance studies. It was just all underground, not respectable gay bars. But also, when I'm thinking on a paradigmatic level, what is it about romanticizing the hidden and the underground, that's how we got RuPaul's Drag Race. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: Just sitting with that. [LAUGHTER] OK. Are there any questions? I think there was another question over here. Or did I make that up? OK. AUDIENCE: Thank you both for your presentations. I have a question about, as we're thinking about space as-- well, I have a question about utopia and the contested space of utopia and how that might play into both your thoughts, especially thinking about it from, obviously, a religious lens, it's an easy way to go there-- but then also through something like Black anarchism, and so not just the current contested space but the also aspirational contested space. JOSEPH WINTERS: Just real quick. I mean one of the-- there's different ways to think about the etymology of utopia-- I'm sorry-- the etymology of utopia. But I know this idea of no place or nowhere, which then gets flipped now here or something like that. But I'm wondering-- I mean, so I've been thinking a lot with-- I'm trying to understand the work of people like Fred Moten and the relationship between something like the Fugitive and the refusal of property settlement and so forth. And I'm trying to-- ultimately, I'm trying to think about, in future projects, something like the possibility of ethics of-- the ethics of the unsettled. Because I mean, when I think of-- when I think of utopia, I think of a combination of things that, both like a longing, a longing for something like home, but also the impossibility of home. Precisely of home means it's connected to property. I hope that makes sense because that would always-- that would mean a reproduction of a certain kind of settler colonial. So I'm trying to think-- and this goes to, I mean, the anarchy which Professor Carter, if he was here, was thinking a lot about religion of anarchy. I'm trying to think about what an ethics of the unsettled and what would an ethics of, I guess, deformation or what comes before the law might look like. And I often go to the aesthetic. I often go to music, poetry, literature, film, what that might look politically. I'm trying to work out, or maybe I should keep silent about that in these spaces with that. I'm just joking. But no, seriously, I'm trying to think about what that might look like beyond the aesthetic. I hope that makes any sense. But it's something about utopia, it's often seen as a longing for something, a future. But it's also, I think, the way someone like Deleuze looks at it and Adorno, is that there's also a sense of utopia in the present. But it's something that's also fleeting at the same time, if that makes sense. CECILIO M COOPER: I'm going to keep thinking about it. But thank you for the question. AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Anthony Trujillo. And I center myself in Native American Indigenous studies. And interestingly, I'm like, oh, man, I guess I'm doing freaking Eliade. I didn't know that. That's the analysis or the critique I'm building out. So thank you so much for drawing that out. I'm really taken with the idea of, or just the pressure on the idea of the threshold, and both as a problem, a space of problem, a space of, in your language of a cut, Professor Winter, as another kind of, perhaps, riff on that idea, the threshold as space of encounter, space of cut, and thinking about that as a site of world-making practice in some way, at least in Eliade's formation. And, you know, what gets set up as binaries is already racialized, gendered, all these types of things. So if we think about a threshold between some of-- within those formation, are we just re-perpetuating that binary as a site of threshold between? But I'm also thinking about how is this actually connected to bodies, sexed bodies, or just physical bodies, and land spaces. I've thought of trying to think a lot about amphibious as a space from which to think about different possibilities of being. So what are the sites from which to think about the possibility and also the problem of the threshold as a world-making place? I guess that's my question. CECILIO M COOPER: As you were speaking, when I was thinking about the threshold, Hortense Spiller's concept, the vestibular, vestibularity comes to mind, because the vestibular, vestibularity, marks one of several iterizations of these, as you pointed, space of encounter, portals. This is why I'm also thinking about how hellmouths, the hellmouth, is a gateway between realms, surface and subsurface space. But also, there are other ways of-- I'm still thinking about what it does to observe or mark the different ways that boundary points are where different spheres meet and at what point are we reifying them by acknowledging them. And so it's something I'm thinking about. But I know there's a vestibular. But also, Sylvia Wynter talks about the Pillars of Hercules. There's another kind of threshold space that doesn't have the same kind of bodily resonance like the vestibules in your ear. The best way to talk about the womb are The Pillars of Hercules, these two columns between the known and, quote, "unknown world" that you see them on. So there's different ways of thinking about that. And they do different kinds of work. So one is the difference between monstrosity and human beings but also the inside and outside of the vestibule like a home, the home space. So I just think there-- it marks an opportunity for violence. JOSEPH WINTERS: Let me just-- very quickly. I mean, I think for-- as you're pointing out-- thank you for your questions. I think, as you pointed out, for Eliade, I mean, it's precisely that moment where the contrast is most heightened and most salient and where it seems to-- I mean, something seems to break down between. It is a kind of passage or an entrance. But I also been thinking a lot about-- I mean, I've also just been thinking a lot about the term threshold. I actually had to go back and look it up and think about-- I mean, there's a way in which-- of course, it's a limit. It's a kind of in-between space. But it's also like-- it's a space, like, if you go beyond it, something gets activated, or if you go below it, any kind of stimulus will not cause any action. I don't know what that means, I mean, what that means for this conversation. But I think that's something I have to think more about. Because if the threshold is the occasion for some kind of production or some kind of-- I mean, in the context we're thinking about, we can think about what that action is, what that moment of action is. It can be a monstrous intimacy. It could be a violent kind of action. But if we're talking about a threshold as a moment that leads to something like inactivity or maybe a kind of falling or a kind of silence, I'm interested in maybe what that kind of trust-- so this is me saying that I've got to do more in thinking about-- Eliade, he introduces, don't necessarily go back to it. But I'm interested in-- to think about, maybe, the different ways in which the term threshold might signify, if that makes sense. Yeah. AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: We have time for one final question. Pause. --a freshman. [MUSIC PLAYING] AHMAD GREEN-HAYES: All right. Well, we'll give round of applause. [APPLAUSE] ANNOUNCER: Copyright 2023, President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Channel: Harvard Divinity School

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Length: 106min 6sec (6366 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2023