This special collection of essays gathers some of the contributions to the third colloquium on Coloniality, Race, and Religion, held at Harvard Divinity School, on 24–25 March 2023. The colloquium was part of a series of discussions convened to foster sustained dialogue about the ways in which coloniality and race have shaped our ways of thinking, including how those ways of thinking have shaped the conceptual apparatus of the study of religion. Ultimately, this ongoing series seeks to suggest new directions for future work and teaching in the field. What key concepts should we be analyzing more critically? How does coloniality inform the way we structure sub-fields or conceive our methodologies? What would the study of religion look like if we were to re-imagine it beyond coloniality and racism? In the 2023 iteration of the colloquium, we asked these questions from the perspective of Africana religions.
The essays included here engage important themes for the study of religion, including the religious constructions of the human and its others, the suppression and reclaiming of memory in the context of coloniality, the relation between rationality, embodiment, and religious experience, the role of slavery in capitalism, the place of materiality in ritual practice, among others.
Ahmad Greene-Hayes’s “Booker T. Washington’s Protestant Coloniality in the Afterlife of the Plantation,” analyzes Washington’s work as a case study for understanding how coloniality shaped Black Protestantism. Green-Hayes shows the ways in which Washington’s thought contributed to the construction of an idea of “Man”—in Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization—by defining and promoting standards of social respectability and work ethic shaped by the plantation system. This process of Black Protestant self-definition entailed the discursive abjection of African diasporic religions and practices.
The body and memory are the focus of Elizabeth Pérez’s essay, “Why Coloniality Forgets but the Colon Remembers: The Gut as Site of Memory in Afro-Diasporic Religions.” It analyzes forms of imposed forgetting as part of colonial frameworks, including the erasure of non-sanctioned ethnicities, as well as the Enlightenment claims that African peoples were incapable of long-term memory. In contrast, Pérez demonstrates that remembering is a consequential ethical commitment in Africana religions, which have a substantial repertoire of practices that defy the logic of coloniality and point toward the gastrointestinal system as a site of memories of collective pasts.
Reynaldo Ortíz-Minaya’s “Challenging Epistemologies and Slave Resistance as a Forgotten Structure in Caribbean Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century World-System,” interrogates world-historical studies of slavery to argue for the need to bridge the histories and theories of capital and those of slavery. Understanding the role of slavery and slave resistance in the formation of global capital is crucial for analyzing the ways in which colonial histories are imbricated in our contemporary worlds.
In “Defiant Presences: The Inspired Seascapes of Afrolatine Divinities, Saints, and Ancestors,” Solimar Otero traces the ways in which Africana entities create connections between the living and the dead, with powerful possibilities for social action. The essay foregrounds the complex and potent relationships between spiritual and material realms, exploring traditions that relate to the sea as the site of the Africana dead and of divinities, as well as describing the ways in which water in its multiple forms mediate access to the power of ancestors, saints and divinities—all of which speak to the persistence of Black presences that coloniality never managed to erase.
This collection of essays opens spaces for new conversations in which attention to Africana religion illuminates new directions in scholarship in the study of religion beyond coloniality. We hope it is received also as an invitation to continue the process of re-imagining the study of religion in dialogue with diverse traditions and histories.
