|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
Continuing his project of critical analysis of the scriptural
formation of culture, Vincent L. Wimbush has gathered in this book
essays by scholars of various backgrounds and orientations that
focus in different registers on the theme of masquerade as the
“play-element” in modern culture. Masquerade functions as
window onto the mimetic performances, dynamics, arrangements,
psycho-logics, and politics (“scripturalizing”) by which the
“made-up” becomes fixed or realities or
(“scripturalization”). Modern-world racialization (and its
attendant explosions into racialisms and racisms) as the
hyper-scripturalization of difference in human flesh (registered in
psycho-social relations as a type of “scripture”) is argued in
this book to be one of the most consequential examples and
reflections of masquerade and thereby one of the primary impetuses
behind and determinants of the shape of the realities of
modernities. The open window onto these realities is facilitated by
touchstone references to—not exhaustive treatment of—a now
famous eighteenth-century life story, The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written
by Himself (1789). This story told by a complexly positioned
Black-fleshed self-acknowledged ex-slave/“stranger” is itself a
“mask-ing” that throws light on the predominantly white
Anglophone world as masking (as scriptural formation).
Equiano/Vassa’s story as masking helps makes a compelling case
for analyzing through Black flesh the ongoing shaping of the modern
and the perduring mixed when not also devastating consequences.
In this volume, Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot, a sociologist and son of
a Kimbanguist pastor, provides a fresh and insightful perspective
on African Kimbanguism and its traditions. The largest of the
African-initiated churches, Kimbanguism claims seventeen million
followers worldwide. Like other such churches, it originated out of
black African resistance to colonization in the early twentieth
century and advocates reconstructing blackness by appropriating the
parameters of Christian identity. Mokoko Gampiot provides a
contextual history of the religion’s origins and development,
compares Kimbanguism with other African-initiated churches and with
earlier movements of political and spiritual liberation, and
explores the implicit and explicit racial dynamics of Christian
identity that inform church leaders and lay practitioners. He
explains how Kimbanguists understand their own blackness as both a
curse and a mission and how that underlying belief continuously
spurs them to reinterpret the Bible through their own prisms.
Drawing from an unprecedented investigation into Kimbanguism’s
massive body of oral traditions—recorded sermons, participant
observations of church services and healing sessions, and
translations of hymns—and informed throughout by Mokoko
Gampiot’s intimate knowledge of the customs and language of
Kimbanguism, this is an unparalleled theological and sociological
analysis of a unique African Christian movement.
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.