Browsing by Author "DeYoung, Mark Allen"

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    The End is a Beginning: Apocalyptic Aesthetics in Black Religion and Culture
    (2021-07-05) DeYoung, Mark Allen; Pinn, Anthony B.
    This dissertation examines the apocalypse from the standpoint of black culture and black critical scholarship, which, I argue, posits a mode of theory and practice I call “black apocalyptic aesthetics.” Apocalypse refers to both “the end of the world” and to the literal (Greek) meaning: to reveal, un-veil. I argue that black apocalyptic aesthetics is apocalyptic in both senses: it seeks to reveal the constitutively anti-black structure of what we call the world, and it calls for the end of that world as a prerequisite for black freedom. I offer a critical genealogy of the category of “the world,” demonstrating how it emerged alongside the category of “the human” in the wake of 1492, via colonization and slavery. I construct a functional theory of religion as a “feedback loop” in which the stories we tell about ourselves and the world actually (re)produce our world(s) and our conceptions of human being. What we call simply the world and the human, I argue, was produced by the same narratives that underwrote European colonization and chattel slavery, and continues to be reproduced by the cultural narratives and systems that maintain whiteness as normative and blackness as abjection par excellence; our world was produced (and is constantly reproduced) by a religion of whiteness. Black apocalyptic aesthetics names not only the theory and practice of exposing and challenging both the world and its normative (white) concept of the human, but also the creative practice of imagining otherwise worlds—the creation of new narratives, new ways of thinking/living/being human that challenge the religious (re)production of this oppressive world. As a component of black apocalyptic aesthetics, I call this religious practice of imagining and inhabiting the world otherwise in order to produce an otherwise world: black mysticism in the flesh.