The Black body in Christian religious studies has been transported from the bowels of Middle Passage ships and the branches of poplar trees with blood on the leaves to toggling between fugitivity and autonomy, where it sets its limits and defines its terms of liberation. The project of liberation theologians and liberative ethicists, particularly Black Christian social ethicists, is to free the Black body from colonized Christianity's constraints. My aim for this course is to think theologically and ethically with and through the Black body to explore how the Black body is materialized through the cultural production of embodied Blackness. We will study the literature, music, theories, theologies, and ethics of Black embodiment and ground our study in the normative concerns of Christian liberative ethics. We will use interdisciplinary approaches in our course which means we will be thinking across disciplines such as ethics, theology, religious studies, anthropology, literature, and more. This is all in the service of helping students to engage in socio-cultural analysis.
- Editing Teacher: Nicole Symmonds