J. Kameron Carter...J. Kameron Carter Paratheological Blackness The Ghost of Paratheology W hat happens to the concept and practices of blackness when thought in relationship to the

The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4, Fall 2013

doi 10.1215/00382876-2345189 © 2013 Duke University Press

J. Kameron Carter

Paratheological Blackness

The Ghost of Paratheology

What happens to the concept and practices of blackness when thought in relationship to the con-cept and indeed invention of religion? What kinds of pressures does blackness place on the religious and theological constitution of the modern world? This issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly collects a wide-ranging ensemble of essays under the theme “Religion and the Futures of Blackness” that all in their own way clarify, amplify, and press these questions. Together they represent a certain kind of experimentation in black studies predicated on a claim that blackness is a disruption or distur-bance from inside modernity’s social logic and organization, its “loophole of retreat” as the slave girl Harriet Jacobs might say.

But more is at stake. Although not speaking univocally, these essays nevertheless circulate around a particular claim about modernity and black studies. Given the modern world’s consti-tution not just as an ontological but as an onto-theological formation, indeed, as a formation of (onto-)political theology and given its coming-to-be within a planetary logic of spatialized rule that quickly modulated into spatialized-as-racialized

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rule while mediated by the symbols and practices of Christianity and its “religious” others, the essays collected here foreground the need for critical black theory to attend to questions of religion and the theological in its ongo-ing work. And of course, that object is the modern world itself and its ani-mating logic of purity and sovereignty or rule, mastery, and governance. One is hard pressed to find a better guide into the study of the modern world than Nahum Chandler, who approaches it as a study of a distinct historical unfolding of the ontological problem of purity. In his elaboration of W. E. B. Du Bois as a thinker of this problem, he observes:

The enunciation of Africanist figures in discourses of the Negro emerges in a hierarchically ordered field in which the question of the status of the so-called Negro is quite indissolubly linked to a presupposition of the homogeneity and purity of the so-called European or its derivatives. . . . This situation, or more precisely problematization, yields for African American thinkers what I call the problem of purity, or the problem of pure being. To inhabit such a discur-sive formation, perhaps in a structurally contestatory fashion, one cannot . . . simply declare in turn the status (as prior, for example) of a neutral space or position. One must displace or attempt to displace the distinction in question. This necessity is perhaps all the more astringent when the distinction in ques-tion is a claim for a pure origin, a pure identity, an ultimate ground of identi-fication. Such a displacement can be made general or decisive only through the movement of the productive elaboration of difference—as articulation—perhaps even according to necessity as the performative announcement of a differential figure. (Chandler 2009: 349–50)

The essays collected here are experimental movements, “performative announcement[s] of a differential figure,” the figure of blackness. As such, blackness is a movement of the between (more on this below), an interstitial drama on the outskirts of the order of purity. It is an improvisatory move-ment of doubleness, a fugitive announcement in and against the grain of the modern world’s ontotheological investment in pure being, or pristine ori-gins, and of the modern world’s orchestrations of value, rule, and gover-nance (i.e., sovereignty) in the project or the ongoing exercise of inscribing pure being. Blackness is, to invoke Chandler once again, “paraontological” (2006: 41). In relationship to the order of pure being, blackness is a ghosting, not merely of the Euro-American subject who has been assigned a privileged position within the order of the purity, an order which has also sought to be a global order, a globally purifying order. Beyond presupposing “a certain preconstituted or nonconstituted subject . . . at the origin, as the origin, of the system in question” (Chandler 2000: 262), “the very particularity of the

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African American situation is what sets in motion, or calls for, a form of supra-inhabitation of thought or demands that a certain meta-perspective take shape right in the midst of experience, self-consciousness, or the par-ticularities of existence. It solicits the development of a paraontological dis-course” (41). Such a ghostly discourse is the discourse of blackness, which registers as a certain sonic criminality or noise within or even “music libel against” (adapting HaCohen 2012) ontology or the thought and practice of purity or pure being. Thus, while blackness is a problem for thought, it is also the possibility of thought—thought and existence otherwise, an other-wise than being.

But if blackness is precisely this paraontological ghosting of purity, if it is an insurgent subjectivity of “in-sovereign” resistance, to borrow a recent formulation from Fred Moten, to the theopolitical constitution of modern sovereignty, then in this introductory essay I want to extend these formula-tions to suggest that blackness can and should be thought of as a paratheo-logical ghosting of modernity as a practice of (onto-)political theology. It is situated in appositional—and not merely oppositional—juxtaposition to modernity’s theological protocols, whose scripts are often hidden under the veil of what has come to be called the secular. Many works point to black-ness as the paratheological ghosting of modernity as a regime of political theology, a ghosting of the wounds of black “pornotroped” flesh (Spillers 2003a: 206), and that yet harnesses the potentialities of such flesh precisely from within the death scene of modernity. Though there are many examples of this, some of the most prominent are Du Bois’s appositional refunctioning of the theological throughout his corpus, including in Souls of Black Folk (1903) and in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920), which begins with a “credo” that signifies on a religious creed such as the Apostles’ Creed and ends with a “Hymn to the Peoples” that itself is a prayer within which he announces “the Anarchy of Empire”(1996: 622–23); Octavia Butler’s novels, which interrogate and resignify the religious and the theological (Wild Seed [1980] is but one example of many one might consider in her literary corpus); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), that story of the ghosting of 124 Bluestone Road and its interrogation of religion and slavery and its refunctioning of death in the story by way of black maternity, the horizon of absolute life.

Thinking with Hortense Spillers

Through my invocation above of Spillers’s notion of the potentialities of black pornotroped flesh (2003a: 206), I am signaling what I see in her work as latent paratheological gestures, gestures internal to the black radical tradition.



I want to develop this claim a little more, though a fuller explication of it must await another occasion.1

Spillers’s celebrated essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An Ameri-can Grammar Book,” which among other things points to the theological underpinnings of slavery and early modern colonialism, is also important regarding the paratheological. Here Spillers calls attention to the “ungen-dering” transformation that “turned personality into property” (2003a: 225). This transformation was a kind of transubstantiation. Bringing up this notion, with all of its religious, even theological, connotations in this con-text, is quite apposite, for Spillers picks up on the operations of religion within the “age of conquest.” This comes out in her analysis of that crucial fifteenth-century text by Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1441–1448.2

In this text the Portuguese narrator gives voice to a form of Christian-ity tethered to Europe—not to some sort of “natural” Europe that was already in place, a “Europe (in theory),” as Roberto Dainotto (2007) has put it, but to a Europe that was in fact being born precisely in this moment—and that “[transformed] the ‘pagan’ of Guinea (as Africa was then called) into the ‘ugly’” (Spillers 2003a: 212). This empire of the skin or “politics of melanin,” as Spillers calls it (213), is “an intimate choreography . . . between the ‘faith-less’ and the ‘ugly’” (212). In what did this bestial faithlessness consist that justified the enslaved transportation of Africans to Europe? According to Zurara’s chronicle, it consisted in a lack: “They had no knowledge of bread and wine” (Zurara, quoted in Spillers 2003a: 212). Which is to say, they lacked the Eucharist or the body of Christ, or as Willie James Jennings puts it in his essay in this issue, they lacked “the traditions of race men.” But more must be said, for the Guinean lack of the eucharistic body entailed a lack of the body proper or the lack of a proper body (politic). There was, in other words, in Zurara’s Christian view the lack of the signs of civilization and thus proper rule. The absence of civilization as tied to the absent eucharistic body rendered the African body as an absence, as a void within reality, as voided reality, as oxymoronically the reality of a void or the reality of a nonre-ality. In short, what the Guineans lacked was proper order; they were thus in need of sovereignty so that they might “appear” within the order of things.

What must not be lost sight of is that the lack of which the Portu-guese chronicler speaks at root is the articulation of a religious and ulti-mately a theological lack.3 To go back to the chronicler’s declaration: “They had no knowledge of bread and wine.” This epistemological and ultimately ontological absence, this void of being or being as void on the part of the



Guineans, is at the heart of the gathering winds that will circulate hurri-cane-like and out of control in a process that Spillers will designate in her text as “ungendering” or “pornotroping.” These terms, as Alex Weheliye (2008) explicates in his reflections on Spillers’s work, foreground the link between slavery and sexuality, between suffering and (black) humanity, or more properly within the terms of Spillers’s text, between suffering and black flesh, particularly, black female flesh inasmuch as the black female slave has been the ultimate slave due to a capturing within the logic and practices of property and value of the maternal function.

And yet, as Spillers notes, even within the pornotroped production of black flesh, even within the processes of the unmaking of “personality into property,” there is possibility. “We might say that the slave ship, its crew, and its human-as-cargo stand for a wild and unclaimed richness of possibil-ity that is not interrupted, not ‘counted’/‘accounted,’ or differentiated” (Spillers 2003a: 215). The “passage,” then, in “Middle Passage” is sheer pos-sibility and potentiality, while the “middle” in “Middle Passage” is—in its refusal of stabilization from either shore, the shores of beginnings or those of destiny—existence in the middle itself. That is, it names existence as exis-tence between, where the “between” here connotes a “scene of dissimulation,” a scene, Nahum Chandler tells us, that does not “organize its own coher-ence” within a logic of being or stability, that is, within an ontology (Chandler 1993: 27). So understood, “between” is “the opening of difference itself. . . . [It is that] mutuality in difference, as difference [that] disrupts the logic of a sta-ble boundary, an oppositional logic, that would authorize the assumption or production of terms [or identities] self-identical to themselves” (27). It is pos-sibility from the outside that is on the inside, as Moten puts it in his essay in this issue. In yet another unlikely coming together, this time though not between W. E. B. Du Bois and Karl Barth (see Carter 2012) but between Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant and German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who came of age under Nazism and in resistance to it after his sojourn through Harlem and the Caribbean or more simply the “Black Atlantic,” we find a convergence wherein blackness is understood pre-cisely as between or as the force of relationality. Glissant (1997) theorizes this under the notion of a “poetics of relation,” Bonhoeffer (1997) under the notion of analogy of relations (analogia relationis). As did Glissant and as does Chandler as evidenced in his explication of the Du Bois–derived notion of “between,” so too does Bonhoeffer understand that the human is relational-ity as such and that the force of relationality is the force of thought. Relation-ality is not so much antilogical or of an anti-Logos as it is antelogical or of an



ante-Logos or what he theorizes as a “counter word” or “counter Logos [Gegen-logos]” (Bonhoeffer 2009: 302, 305). Such a counterword is a word beyond “the Word of Man” (see Wynter 1989) but as a disturbance from within that word. Such a word is an insurgent word of resistance with respect to any logocentricism or regime of a Logos.4 Or in light of Chandler we can say that “between” is both a problem for (logocentric) thought as well as its ante- and thus counterlogical possibility. We might think of “between,” to draw on another of Spillers’s powerful formulations, as that interstitial drama that marks the paradoxical subject position that is a nonsubject position, the sub-ject position of nonbeing: “Under this particular historical order black female and black male are absolutely equal” (Spillers 2003b: 156). And thus, between is blackness, paradoxical blackness, paraontological blackness.

In light of Spillers’s work, blackness is a necessary engagement with modernity’s God terms, a refusal of the God terms, of the would-be divinity, of the claim to unlimited power, of white masculinity. Spillers writes: “The fact of domination is alterable only to the extent that the dominated subject recognizes the potential power of its own ‘double-consciousness.’ The subject is certainly seen, but she also sees. It is this return of the gaze that negotiates at every point a space for living, and it is the latter that we must willingly name the counter-power, the counter-mythology” (Spillers 2003b: 163). Reso-nating with the notion of a counter-Logos, Spillers’s notion of countermythol-ogy is the articulation of a critically insurgent agency that cuts through theo-logical protocols of racialization, which cannot be severed from the protocols of gender and sexualization or from the capturing of maternity within patri-archy. This I want to suggest is the paratheological moment of her thought.

But this is something that is also at work in Spillers’s (2003c) essay “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon,” which revisits themes from her Brandeis University dissertation “Fabrics of History: Essays on the Black Sermon” (Spillers 1974). Once again the force of the paratheological is evident. That is to say, we come to see that the “between” is also a movement of escape, a fugitivity from within modernity, a “between” that recomposes that ontotheological formation or that forma-tion of political theology called modernity. This recomposition occurs under the force of relationality, under the force of blackness as passageway, or under the force of existence from the middle. In “Moving on Down the Line,” Spill-ers notes that “by 1794, the year of Samuel Magaw’s [sermon] to the [African Church of] Philadelphia; by 1810, the year of William Miller’s schizophrenic [sermonic] embrace and denial of Africa, the black person in the United States is already adrift between two vast continents, both in his body and



brain” (2003c: 262). Spillers contends that such black “kerygmatic religion,” as she calls it, must not be dismissed by a contemporary audience inasmuch as it points to the moment of (middle) passage within the wound of slavery and its afterlives, the passage that animates black critical thought:

Because a contemporary audience has no ready analogy with which to gauge the impact of kerygmatic religion, the worldview purported by certain of these sermons appears alien, and perhaps “ambivalence,” as the controlling meta-phor of my own conceptual narrative, is nothing more than a different term for emotional distance. But if by ambivalence we might mean the abeyance of closure, or break in the passage of syntagmatic movement from one more or less stable property to another, as in the radical disjuncture between “African” and “American,” then ambivalence remains not only the privileged and arbi-trary judgment of a postmodernist imperative, but also a strategy that names the new cultural situation as a wounding. (Spillers 2003c: 262)

But as a wounding, as Spillers also makes clear, the new cultural situ-ation as itself a religious situation—and what this means I will explicate momentarily when I turn to Richard Wright—is one in which “a posture of critical insurgency must be achieved. It cannot be assumed. Essentially [then], the test of belief that is crucial to our purposes here has less to do with the Word of God, or words pertaining to God, than with the words and texts of human community in their liberational and enslaving power, refracted in the Gospel” (Spillers 2003c: 262–63). Arguably, what Spillers is point-ing to is a mode of insurgent agency, a critical subjectivity, what here I am calling blackness, hollowed out from within the ontotheological struc-tures of a racialized and racializing modernity, a subject position, in short, that paratheologically operates in the passage as such, from the middle, or between all shores of stability. Such a mode of existence, far from being trapped in social death, is “mystical” and stateless with respect to the order of things. It enacts what Moten in this volume theorizes as a “mysticism in the flesh.” Mystical blackness, then, is a way of elaborating the this-worldly potentialities of the flesh in which can be constituted a multitude, a different organizing of the social, or as Spillers says, a “‘critical mass’ differentiated from others that surround it” (2003c: 257), that is to say, differentiated from the normalized body (politic) that surrounds it. This critical mass or multi-tude is the enactment of a new form of social organization, of community, of life together. But how community is to be understood here and how life together is to be grasped, or how what Frantz Fanon sought to delineate as a “new humanity” is to be thought, must be carefully outlined.



To elaborate this we might turn briefly to Zora Neale Hurston. In her brilliant explication of Hurston’s autobiographical writings in relation to her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, literary scholar Samira Kawash warns against the dangers of the modern ideal of community. Within this ideal, there is the “attempt to realize community through the operation of a rule of identity and commonality” with its seductive “promise of harmony and unity,” all the while hiding “the violence that is couched in the guise of secu-rity and commonality” (Kawash 1997: 206). Kawash reads Hurston’s writ-ings as struggling “to open life to the ‘ontological dislocations’ of accident, contact, proximity, and chance” (207). In this regard, Hurston’s artistic ren-dering of community and indeed of blackness is paraontological. Operating from the middle (passage), that is in the passage as such, hers is a discourse of escape or “cosmic upset and contagion” (201–5, 201). Kawash beautifully articulates the force of Hurston’s insight:

Contagion—whether good or bad—is accidental, it follows from touching. At the moment of contagion there is not intention to infect the other, to give the other something of the self. In this sense, contagion is giving without subject or object. . . . Contagion happens by accident, by proximity, by touch. One can-not foresee the trajectories contagion may take; one cannot predict the muta-tions that may be produced in its wake. . . . Hence, the together-touching of contagion is not from one (subject) to another (subject) but wells up in the between and the within, between one and another and within each. . . . [There-fore] the you and me of contagion are neither joined by essential identity nor separated by agonistic difference. We are rather singular and touching, together in our singularity. We cannot choose contagion; contagion is what happens to us. Equally, we are what happens in contagion. . . . Thus contagion is not another law of identity and difference but the lawlessness that the law [of sovereignty] always struggles to contain or exclude. (205)

What Kawash has delineated by way of Hurston is what may be called that fugitive or in-sovereign history of or within political theology.5

What is crucial for the present purposes is that Hurston’s writings make aspects of Spillers’s point before the fact; namely, that we are faced with a decision either to “read ‘community’ as homogenous memory and experi-ence, [as a] laying claim to a collective voice and [as] rendering an apparently unified and uniform narrative, or we might think of it as a content whose time and meaning are ‘discovered,’ but a meaning, in any case, that has not already been decided. In other words, ‘community,’ in the latter instance, becomes potentiality; an unfolding to be attended” (Spillers 2003c: 258). Fur-



ther still, both Hurston and Spillers—Spillers, in a way that I have sketched here; Hurston, in a way that I’ve only skimmed here—point to something like what I am starting to think about in this essay under the rubric of paratheo-logical blackness understood as insurgent movement within modernity’s pro-tocols of religious and theological sedimentation but yet a movement that is not reducible to those protocols inasmuch as it is a movement from the mid-dle, a fugitive movement of escape that exceeds the logic of sovereignty.

Richard Wright’s “When the World Was Red”

I want to use the remainder of this introductory essay to consider briefly one other figure whose thought may be understood as a movement of or experimentation in escape from within modernity’s ontotheological struc-tures of belief. This figure is Richard Wright. I am particularly interested in an unpublished short story Wright wrote in 1955 that he hoped, had his publisher given him a book contract, to publish in expanded form as the culminating novel in a trilogy of novels. He titled this proposed trilogy “Celebration of Life” and the final story in the trilogy “When the World Was Red.”6 As it turned out, Wright’s publisher did not contract his project and so Wright’s short story remains tucked away in the archives, having gone virtually unexamined in Wright studies.7

With “When the World Was Red,” Wright proposed an inquiry into modernity and its internal theopolitical and “theosocial” laws of the human.8 He sought to make a case for understanding modernity as a kind of religious formation, as a scene of the invention of religion and the birth of modern, Western man as the highest religious being (Homo religiosus) on the chain of (human) being. Wright’s story examines the disciplinary pro-cesses (to use a critical Foucauldian and Butlerian vocabulary) of sedimenta-tion, the processes that would rivet persons in place by way of religion. These disciplinary processes, as he sought to show in “When the World Was Red,” are processes of discipleship (and obedience, to use a theological vocabulary native to Christian soteriology or conversion discourse). At least fifty years ahead of its time with its effort to think about modernity at the interdisci-plinary, or perhaps the antedisciplinary, crossroads of the current fields of critical race studies, psychoanalysis, colonial and postcolonial studies, and finally religious and theological studies, Wright’s short story examines racial formation as a constantly mutating “mood” of intergenerational and psychosocial estrangement. Rooted in the racial (mestizo) origination of “man,” this mood was born of New World conquest and was inextricably



bound up with the invention of religion or religious man (Homo religiosus) to produce a new spatial or planetary order, an order of the West and its others.

Set in the context of Hernán Cortés’s sixteenth-century conquest of the Americas and his incursion into the Yucatan (present-day Mexico), Wright intended “When the World Was Red” to be an artistic inquiry into the psychic life of religion as it emerged from within the theopolitical consti-tution of modernity understood as a structure of rule or sovereignty. In their explication of the Western philosophical tradition on the problem of sover-eignty, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 67–136) make a strong case for this structure being split between those who rule and those who are ruled. This structure of rule, which quickly gave rise to international law, soon became a structure of racialization within which were born racially valorized and racially abjected identities. It quickly gave birth to what Spill-ers, as noted, called a pornotroped discourse of the flesh and a politics of melanin. Wright’s short story interrogates the birth of the modern world as a structure of estrangement whose production was mediated through reli-gious and, inside of this, theological thought forms.

What Wright is working to articulate in his short story cuts against the grain of how the category of religion is often considered. Foreshadowing what is only beginning to emerge in the critical scholarship on religion, Wright dramatizes religion’s formation inside of such global and social pro-cesses as colonization and racialization.9 He grasps that the operations by which religion and race have been naturalized inside of the invention of (modern) man are of a piece; they are two sides of the story of modern sover-eignty. “When the World Was Red” historicizes and thereby thinks through and between the racial invention of man by grappling with this invention precisely as part of the modern invention of religion in the early colonial con-text or within what Frank B. Wilderson III (2010) has called “a structure of antagonism.” Thus, the invention of religion has to do with the coming-to-be of (modern) man in relationship to his others. More specifically, this antagonis-tically structured arrangement arises as a mode of relation between (West-ern) man and his others that is nothing less than a hierarchy. It is an arrange-ment that values and thus evaluates cultic practices, now called “religious” practices. Within this hierarchical arrangement, cultic practices are judged as reflecting or bearing the signatures of truth (or not). And thus, they are judged as icons of (eternal) life (or death). Put differently, being interpreted hierarchically, cultic practices (now called religious practices) are evaluated within a structure of rule, an order of sovereignty. Religion, we might say then, is produced of the colonial encounter and is a feature of modern sover-



eignty. It is the name the colonizers granted the colonized, the name they granted their subordinate others within the order of (redemptive) sovereignty and as part of the machinery of the legitimation of the order of things.

Reflecting on Edward Said’s Orientalism, Gil Anidjar makes precisely the point I am trying to make, indeed, the point that Wright had been reck-oning with in the mid-1950s:

Colonizing the world since 1492, Christianity slowly granted other communi-ties and traditions, those it exploited or converted, massacred and “civilized,” enslaved and exterminated, new structures of authority and domination, new and newly negotiable configurations of power. It granted them the name it had only ever attributed to itself, the very name of “religion.” [But] it . . . did . . . this still in its own name, in the self-avowed name of Christianity, even if not always openly or even knowingly so. . . . It . . . did it all by determining the terms of ensuing negotiations, the terms of discourse, and chief among them was religion. (Anidjar 2008: 46)

And so, a certain crippled and crippling Christian imagination lay behind the production of the patriarchal order of man and his others and behind the production of the religion of man (the “true religion”) and his others (the other religions of the world or “world religions”). And if, as Anid-jar (2008: 47) also argues, it is the case that the distinction between reli-gion and the secular is also born/e with/in the making of man and his oth-ers, then the turn to the secular does not signal an escape from the rule of religion.10 It is a moment within the will to sovereignty—something else that Wright was coming to understand all too well.

Wright’s story may be read as an examination of precisely this struc-ture of rule-as-religion (and the secular), which governs the split between those who rule and those who are ruled, between those designated the living and those who Abdul JanMohamed (2005) in his recent study of Wright named “death-bound subjects.” Indeed, JanMohamed by way of Wright tells the story of modernity as a death scene. But what “When the World Was Red” clarifies—JanMohamed does not comment on this story—is that Wright grasped that modernity understood as a death scene has its condition of pos-sibility in early modern European colonialism (or the new spatial ordering of the planet) and in relation to chattel slavery and its afterlives. Indeed, Wright has echoes of lynching reverberate in his story of sixteenth-century con-quest. But further still and more to the point I am making in this essay, Wright wants to decode the discourse about “the gods” (let’s call this “the-ology”) or more specifically the discourse tied to belief in “the gods,” in the



making of modern subjectivities. His concern is with how the structures of belief connected to the dawning of modernity/coloniality yet mark the present and what futures or futurities there might be beyond the now.

What is Wright’s claim regarding “the gods”—both the Aztec gods and the Christian God—and about modernity as a structure of belief? His contention in “When the World Was Red” is that the so-called weakness of the Aztec gods (leading to the defeat of the Aztecs) was not the reason behind the conquering of the Aztec empire. By extension, the would-be righteous-ness and strength of the Christian god is insufficient to explain the military success of Cortés and his soldiers. Rather, as Lou Turner reads Wright’s story, the Aztec defeat and the European victory were the effect of a certain collision of peoples (Turner 2003: 168). Indeed, I want to follow Turner in his reading of Wright’s story as a microanalysis of the transformation of inner consciousness on the part of the Aztecs and Cortés and his soldiers alike. The transformation of consciousness—which, if Saidiya Hartman (2008) is right, the historical archive around colonialism (and to some degree even the history of chattel slavery, which emerges inside of the history of coloniality), has been unable to capture and cannot capture—is perhaps the vital fac-tor for Wright; it explains the defeat of the Aztecs and the conquest of the Europeans. “When the World Was Red” thus probes the transformation—or, to use a theological vocabulary, the conversion—that took place in the experience of the contact itself wherein the consciousness (individual and social) of both Aztec and conquistador was fundamentally altered. The con-tact moment of conversion and how it unfolded set in place a specific “mood,” as Wright calls it, that has become constitutive of the modern, an orientation into which we have been thrown.

Though Wright does not explain precisely what he means to convey with his “mood” concept, the term has Heideggerian valences, and we do know that Wright read Heidegger deeply as part of becoming acquainted with existentialism. Heidegger’s notion of Stimmung, which has been brought into English by a number of translators of Heidegger’s texts as “mood” and also as “attunement,” as Jonathan Flatley explains, “is directly related to [Heidegger’s] broader project” (Flatley 2008: 20). As Heidegger puts it in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, “Moods [Bestimmungen] are the fundamental ways in which we find ourselves disposed in such and such a way. Moods are the how according to which one is in such and such a way” (quoted in Flatley 2008: 20–21). They indicate how we are in the world, how “things always appear to us as mattering or not mattering in some way” (21). And crucially, “any kind of political project must have the ‘making and



using’ of mood as part and parcel of the project; for, no matter how clever or correct the critique or achievable the project, collective action is impossible if people are not, so to speak, in the mood” (23).

With this Heideggerian and existential notion of mood in the back-ground, we can say that Wright’s “When the World Was Red” is an attempt to artistically render and thereby to “master [the] mood” of modernity (Hei-degger quoted in Flatley 2008: 23). The story portrays modernity’s mood as a tripartite, structuring mood of race/religion/coloniality, modernity as this structure of belief. Further still, the story seeks to dramatize this tripartite mood and its theological substrate and do so “by way of a counter-mood; [for] we are never free of moods” (Heidegger quoted in Flatley 2008: 23). Flatley also observes in his explication of Heidegger’s mood concept that moods and countermoods are produced out “of practices, situations, and encounters” (23). Therefore “one must come to know what kinds of practices, situations, or encounters . . . are capable of producing a counter-mood” (24). Wright writes the story of the mood of race/religion/coloniality or the mood of sover-eignty in the modern world from a countermood that will come to be called Black Power in the 1960s. Wright was thinking through this already in the preceding decade, most especially in Black Power, which was published in 1954, one year before he wrote “When the World Was Red.” Thus, it is the countermood of “black power” that gives Wright a vantage from which to interrogate the mood of modernity as a mood of racialization and as a struc-ture of belief. He is given to see that the mood of modernity and racializa-tion, the incubator inside of which a conversion of sorts has taken place, intergenerationally marks us. This mood is nothing less than the splitting up of the human according to an antagonism between Europeanization and non-Europeanization. This split, this mood understood as the split con-sciousness of “the human,” of man, is a strategy of planetary consciousness. This consciousness and mood would eventually come to bear the name “glo-balization.” Although Wright was certainly interested in the spectacular facts of conquest by way of the Moctezuma-Cortés encounter, he was more deeply interested in this mood. Or as Lou Turner puts it, inside “the new historico-racial schema originating out of [the colonial] encounter” was the “historico-religious schema produced by the encounter. . . . [The] two form a synthetic whole as the natural history of racial modernity” (Turner 2003: 175). It was this “natural history” that Wright was most interested in.

“When the World Was Red” tracks the moment of arising, then, of the “West [as a kind of] insane asylum” (Moten 2003: 39), of Western civi-lization as a strategy of global consciousness tied to a psychic strategy of



maximum exclusion through negative incorporation. Wright concludes his story about the problem of the psychic structure of racial formation by asking whether there can be a movement of escape from within the incar-ceral structures of racialization that constitute the modern world. In this regard, Wright’s story poses the fundamental question that the authors in this issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly confront and variously respond to.

But what of Wright’s own handling of this question in his attempts to theorize race and modernity? Although Wright himself does not formu-late a well-developed answer in “When the World Was Red,” he does ges-ture by way of a countermood of “black power” in a paratheological direc-tion at a crucial moment in the story. It is the only moment in the story in which a woman, an indigenous woman of color, appears. And her appear-ance, the appearance of black/nonwhite female flesh, has everything to do with the religiotheological problematic that Wright isolates in telling the story of when the world turned red as a blood-drenched dramaturgy of sac-rifice or atonement.

There are two sides to the problematic Wright tells. One concerns the place of religion among the Aztecs. What historical knowledge Wright acquired about the colonial incursion into the Yucatan probably came from his reading of William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and His-tory of the Conquest of Peru (Fabre 1990: 127). But Wright set himself the task not of telling the history of conquest but rather of telling what is ghostly inside of the history, what the official record of the archive works—some-times knowingly, but often unknowingly—to silence in an effort to contain the static or cacophony, we might say, of history. So understood, even when speaking officially the archive also records static, as it were, disturbances to history’s peace. For Wright, a central task of fiction, indeed of the artist, is to give form to that static, to give it a “blue-jazz” sound as it “[wells] up from [the] downstairs” of history, as Wright has his paratheologically named pro-tagonist of his 1953 novel The Outsider Cross Damon put it (2003: 178). Work-ing at the intersection of the historical and the fictive (see Hartman [2008: 12]), Wright produced “When the World Was Red” as counterhistory, as a kind of “blue-jazz” story meant to give form to what is ghostly inside the archive. He presents an Aztec leader, a Moctezuma, caught between “the social and religious principles of his culture and those of Western civiliza-tion at the time of Cortez’s expedition” (Fabre 1993: 430). Internal to Mocte-zuma’s world was a contradiction, Wright contends, between native religion and indigenous sovereignty that eventually was exploited in the moment of conquest. On the one hand, Aztec religion bound the people together



through the land, thus creating a community in which “the gods” mediated social relationships through the natural elements (i.e., the sky, the rain, the harvest, etc.) that represented them. And so the gods mediated community through nature. What we see here, to quote Wright, is that “in fact, in the days of Montezuma, there was no division between the sacred and the secu-lar: they were one. . . . Life was tribal, structured on the emotional sinews of family relations, and a man was owned as much by his tribe as the tribe owned him. No other kind of existence was conceivable, for there had not been, in Aztec memory, any other kind of living” (Wright 1955: 20). And yet, the gods also selected a leader, a Moctezuma, to lead the people as their sov-ereign. And “therefore, when Montezuma acted, he was executing the will of the gods” (20). But there is one more piece to the picture, as Wright paints it:

The cloud that blemished Montezuma’s emotional horizon concerned a vague prophecy that the Aztec kingdom was fated soon to end. Computation of the courses of the stars had told him that the Aztecs had once lived under a totally different dispensation, that they had once served another god, that their stately and bloody rituals of human sacrifice had once been forbidden. That legendary oracle had further stated their old god had been the one who had taught them the arts of civilization, and that, in a celestial war, the god had been defeated and driven from the land; both that that god, as he had departed eastward, had vowed that one day he would return and claim his own. So minutely had Montezuma and his priests calculated this prophesy, that they had determined the day and season of this god’s return. Hence, during April of every year, Montezuma and his priests anxiously scanned the skies, lis-tened intently to the rumblings of volcanoes, observed minutely the eddying of streams, tabulated the behavior of men, women, and children, and espe-cially that of animals,—seeking always for a clue as to when the old god would return and reestablish the sway of his rule. (Wright 1955: 21)

Eventually, the new gods, in the form of the conquistadors and the “God-man” Cortés, do come, and Moctezuma finds “his heart,” Wright says, “on both sides; his respect for the new gods filled him with guilt toward the old gods” (27). He tries to appease this guilt by offering human sacrifices to the old gods. Moctezuma’s hope is that with the old gods appeased through sac-rifice, Cortés and his soldiers, which is to say, the white gods, will suffer defeat in the battles to come and Moctezuma’s faith in the old gods will be restored. But defeat continued, and all the while Moctezuma becomes increasingly enthralled by the white gods. As the defeat deepened, Wright imagines Moctezuma as being kept alive by only “one motive . . . : the intense



interest he had in the manners and habits of the white soldiers. . . . They were men of another stamp. What precision they had! There was no finery, no glitter, no feathers, no color; their movements were functional, precise, full of dash and force, and Montezuma watched them with an envy charged with despair” (34).

As the story unfolds we witness a process by which Moctezuma’s vision of his old gods is shattered; concomitantly he comes to desire Cortés and all that Cortés represents. Moctezuma comes to see himself as inferior to Cortés and his men, and Moctezuma is ultimately alienated from himself even as he is becoming alienated from the land he is losing to the conquis-tadores. Geographic alienation and psychic alienation are within the same (religious) economy. And yet the process that Wright is literarily portraying is one by which Moctezuma comes to desire conversion, to be “saved,” which is to say, to be like Cortés or become white. Wright is trying to open a psycho-political window onto the processes of racialization and thus onto the birth of racialized—both nonwhite and white—subjectivities. As such he is dra-matizing Moctezuma’s entry into the consciousness of “race” that is being born in this moment. Through Cortés’s dialogue with Moctezuma and his explication of Christian doctrine, particularly Christological doctrine or the doctrine of the identity of Jesus Christ, Wright represents how the power and the word of God were sutured, as Sylvia Wynter (1989) explains, to the word or the Logos of man. In this, Wright attempts to portray white racial consciousness as a form of divinization and as constitutive of the mood of modernity. Wright offers an analytic of race, by way of its representation in the superiority of Cortés and as coded through the superiority of the white gods, that interpreted racial formation and racialization as a kind of replace-ment theology, as a political theology of sovereignty or rule. Racialization does divinizing—and demonizing—work in the constitution of modern identity. Literary scholar Jared Hickman writes:

Racial discourse . . . exemplifies the modern metacosmic imagination: it is the prototypical attempt to articulate a “global” conception of life in which ultimate sense is derived from the process of defining—or divining—the meanings of the human diversity of the planet. Launching this claim man-dates recourse to a largely metacritical and historiographical mode. A prelimi-nary effort must be made to strip away the scholarly scaffolding surrounding “race,” which, until recently, has . . . tended to ensconce the term firmly in a narrative of “secularization” and the rise of “science” that ultimately opposes—even as it acknowledges continuities between—racial thinking and religion, particularly Christian universalism. (Hickman 2010: 156–57)



Wright’s story, especially the dialogue between Moctezuma and Cortés, exemplifies Hickman’s point. In the dialogue, Moctezuma enters into a kind of homosocial desire for Cortés, to become (like) him and access his power; Cortés enters into a kind of God consciousness, to be (in his imagination, at least) “sicut deus” or “like God,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1997: 111–14) might say, in the accomplishment of whiteness.

But perhaps what is most important in the dialogue between Mocte-zuma and Cortés on the intricacies of Christian theology is the translator. This translator is “Marina”—also known as Malintzín and La Malinche—“the native woman whom the Spaniards had picked up”; she “did the inter-preting” (1955: 30), no doubt as their “forced” consort.11 She is rapeable flesh for them and as such their translator, the index of the simultaneity of plea-sure and violence at the site of language. Under these terms, she makes her fleeting appearance in the midst of the patriarchal dialogue at the heart of the story. As mentioned above, this is the only time that a woman appears in the story, though as translator/interpreter she is everywhere present to it as its invisible or nonexistent but fleshy and hermeneutical condition of possi-bility. In short, she is the unacknowledged site of Wright’s countermood of black (masculine) power that makes possible his countermythological gaze back onto the racial order. She is the condition of possibility of Wright’s emerging theory of race and modernity. As a kind of refused “mariological” figure, one through whom the racial sons of god and the sons of men are born, this woman-of-color-as-translator invaginates the story, as it were. She is its disavowed but enabling potentiality and yet its witness to the colonial/racial wound of the modern world, its bruising of the flesh.

Paratheological Folds, or Futures of Blackness

I want to draw this essay to a conclusion by elaborating this point. In saying that Marina is the invaginating force of Wright’s paratheological story, I am inflecting Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the fold, which he elaborated in relation to Michel Foucault’s and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s thought (see Deleuze 1988, 1992). What is crucial for my purposes is that Deleuze’s notion of the fold provided him a way to talk about subjectivity. That is, the notion of the fold provided him a way of talking about one’s relation to oneself, even one’s affective relation to oneself, as a technique of mastering or containing the swarm or what can proliferate out of the hatcheries of one’s being. It is a technique of dominating one’s self, and thus of “having” oneself (under con-trol) by contracting the self. Self-mastery thus activates a kind of (mastering)



subjectivity. But this activation of subjectivity as a possessing, owning, or “having” of oneself through containment of the swarm, as it were, or the pos-sible proliferations of the self, is a folding of that which is outside inside. By way of “When the World Was Red,” I want to suggest that the outside that is folded in, or the inside that is itself a fold of the outside, is the sea, that “oce-anic feeling” that emerges in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents between “religious sentiment” (“a sensation of ‘eternity,’ a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, oceanic”) and childhood helplessness (Freud 2005: 36, 47–48). It is the Atlantic. It is the Middle Passage, that in relation to which modern subjectivities—we can now say modern masculin-ized subjectivities—emerge. Indeed, with its Latin origins from marinus, Marina’s name (like marine) means “from the sea.” And thus in fact as Derek Walcott (1987) has said, “The Sea Is History.” But to gloss Walcott, we must say that history is a fold, a particular type of fold. It is a certain trajectory that flows from coloniality and from the scene of the sea. It is that trajectory that refuses becoming, that refuses the invaginated instability and impurity of the sea, in the interest of activating a mastering or “having” subjectivity.12 This trajectory is the history of being, as it were, in refusal of the “between.” In Wright’s story, Marina is she who is to be mastered, the flesh to be mas-tered, in the colonial pleat or fold of history. In fact, I want to suggest that she is the fold of the fold of history; history’s double(-consciousness), its repressed maternal function and material condition of possibility. She is the fold that interanimates history, particularly, the subjectivities of Moctezuma and Cor-tés. Thus, Marina is the force internal to their homo- and theosocial history of desire.

To return to Spillers we can say that, as a figure of the middle, or of the between, or as the (sexual) passage between Moctezuma and Cortés, Marina is the “middle passage” of the text that is “When the World Was Red.” She is its invisible “American grammar book,” the hidden grammatology of the text, even to Wright’s own black masculinist voice. She is the text’s flesh, the flesh out of which modernity as a scene of racial/sexual subjection is both produced and folded or reproduced. As the silent/silenced condition of the modern/colonial world’s coming to be, she is its “pornotroped” wound, but also by way of Spillers, its paratheological potentiality and possibility toward futures that are oceanic, that are not final.

It is precisely this potentiality that Wright, in trying to escape racial incarceration at the midpoint of the twentieth century, is brought face-to-face with, though his overdetermined masculinity left him at a loss as to what to do with the figure of Marina, that is, with the maternal function. He remains



uncertain about how to think from the intersection of race and sexuality in the making of the modern world and its protocols of sovereignty. Indeed, though gesturing to this intersection, he did not know how to enact a move-ment wholly from the middle of the sea, from Marina’s flesh, from the Mid-dle Passage as potentiality. That is, he can think only of Marina, to use Cross Damon’s language, in terms of “woman as body of woman” (Wright 2003: 54). He is caught, as Nathaniel Mackey might say, within “certain constraints that racialized dichotomy and the grid of expectations help keep in place” (2005: 242).

And yet what is important about Wright’s thought, at least for me, is not just its limitations but its experimentalism, its paraontological groping, its hopeful reaching out to execute a paratheological artistry of the self, one that must confront the oceanic or the “heritage of the mother,” to take up “the ‘power’ of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within” (Spillers 2003a: 228). Wright’s black power writings of the mid-1950s, of which “When the World Was Red” is a part, were feeling their way, to gloss Mackey one more time, toward “post-expectant futures” (2005: 216). Wright’s artistry was an experiment in “blue-jazz” unfolding, an exercise in counterfolding modernity’s ontotheological protocols of racialization and thus in having life speak through death. What I am calling here Wright’s counterfolding artistry, or his effort paratheologi-cally to rethink and reperform blackness, is something like what Deleuze with his fractal ontology of becoming might call “superfolding.” The “super-fold,” Deleuze says, signals that “unlimited finity” that would free life itself into its manifold possibilities (1988: 131). The superfold is life that wells up, in Wright’s language, “blue-jazz”-like from history’s “downstairs,” from the death scene (1953: 178). It is that “affirmation not of, but out of death” (Moten 2003: 209). It is these possibilities of life or the futures of/that is blackness that the essays collected here hold open.

Notes

I am grateful to my graduate student and research assistant SueJeanne Koh for her editorial assistance in helping put together this issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly. She has been invaluable. I have also benefited from conversations with Priscilla Wald, Fred Moten, and Riz-vana Bradley on aspects of this essay. And finally, parts of this paper were presented as talks given at the University of Chicago (February 2013) and Yale University (March 2013). Conversa-tions with Robert Gooding-Williams during my visit to the University of Chicago were partic-ularly generative for my continued thinking about sovereignty, religion, and theology in rela-tionship to the black radical tradition. 1 I have all but completed an essay—“The Question of the Flesh: A Theological Inter-

locution with Hortense Spillers”—that develops this argument.



2 For a wide-ranging theological analysis of Zurara’s Chronicle, see Jennings (2010). 3 In the next section of this essay, I address more directly the distinction and relation-

ship between religion and theology. 4 To read Bonhoeffer in this way is to reckon with his blackness, if I may risk such a

heterodox thought for Bonhoeffer studies and theological studies, or his having been seized by an in-sovereign blackness, by the “between,” by the force of relationality, that renegade movement of the futures of blackness.

5 It is precisely this fugitive history that is the subject of my forthcoming work The Color of Sovereignty: A Fugitive History of Political Theology.

6 Wright (1955) detailed his “Celebration of Life” project in a letter to Ed Aswell, his publisher at McGraw-Hill, and appended his short story “When the World Was Red” to the letter. The letter is part of the Richard Wright Papers at Yale University’s Bei-necke Library.

7 I treat Wright’s “Celebration” project, generally, and “When the World was Red,” par-ticularly and in relationship to modern political theology, in my forthcoming work The Color of Sovereignty. Two important engagements with Wright’s “Celebration” project and “When the World Was Red” are Fabre (1993) and Turner (2003). In her examination of Wright’s journalistic writings, including Black Power (1954), written during the same period as “When the World Was Red,” literary scholar Eve Dunbar (2012) makes a strong case regarding Wright’s effort to find a space of existence “between nation and world.”

8 The word theosocial I borrow from my colleague Priscilla Wald. 9 See for example, Chidester (1996), King (1999), Dubuisson (2003), Masuzawa (2005),

and Josephson (2012). 10 “Christianity invented the distinction between religious and secular, and thus made

religion. It made religion the problem—rather than itself. . . . The two terms, religious and secular, are therefore not simply masks for one another. Rather, they function together as strategic devices and as mechanisms of obfuscation and self-blinding, doing so in such a way that it remains difficult, if not impossible, to extricate them from each other as if by fiat” (Anidjar 2008: 47).

11 For more on the complex figure of Marina/Malintzín/La Malinche, see Gloria Anzal-dúa (1987), Mary Louise Pratt (1993), and Lanyon (2000). I have placed “forced” in scare quotes to gesture to the complexity of what it meant for Marina to be Cortés’ collabora-tor and lover. While recognizing the overarching symbolic role that Marina has taken on in relation to womanhood in Chicano/a culture, Pratt notes that there is debate as to the meaning of her symbolism and how to interpret her relationship with Cortés. Should her collaboration with him be interpreted “as the passion-driven acts of a woman in love; as the inevitable playing out of female subordination; as revenge on the society that devalued and objectified her; as political strategy linked to her own lust for power; as an archetypal manifestation of female treachery and woman’s inconstancy” (Pratt 1993: 860)? As for Anzaldúa, she sees her as the betrayed rather than the betrayer. “Not me sold out my people but they me,” Anzaldúa (1987: 21–22) repeats three times, a sentiment that aligns more with the events as they likely unfolded his-torically: as a slave, La Malinche had little choice in beginning a sexual relationship with Cortés or serving as his translator. After her own people gave her, and twenty other women, as gifts to the Spanish expedition, her survival depended on her ability to



make herself indispensable to Cortés. And yet, La Malinche is not reduced to the abuse meted out to her. She becomes a fold, as it were, for Anzaldúa herself, a site for the gen-eration of thought. Indeed, La Malinche is the Indian woman and “the Indian woman in me,” Anzaldúa says, “is the shadow: La Chingada, Tlazotleotl, Coatlicue. They are what we hear wailing for their lost daughters” (1987: 22). What I am suggesting in my reading of Wright’s story is that Marina is a kind of fold for him too, a feminine fold, the fold of the “female within,” as Spillers puts it (2003a: 228), though he can only grope toward and reproduce her subjection in an attempt to stage his own escape from the cage that is modern racialization through an overdetermined black masculinism.

12 My use of invaginate in this sentence has moved away from Deleuze’s sense of the out-side on the inside and more in the direction of Moten’s use of it as informed by Jacques Derrida, who speaks of it as a “principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasiti-cal economy. In the code of set theories . . . I would speak of a sort of participation with-out belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. With the inevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundary of the set comes to form by invagination an internal pocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of such division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless” (Derrida quoted in Moten 2003: 258n5).

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