Browsing by Author "Pinn, Anthony B"

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    Appositional Black Aesthetics: Theorizing Black Religion in the Visual Art of Carrie Mae Weems
    (2019-04-19) Davenport, Jessica Bobette; Pinn, Anthony B
    Scholars of religion have long looked to forms of cultural production as source material from which to proffer claims concerning the nature and meaning of black religion. And yet, while robust attention has been given to mining literary and musical forms for religious significance, few scholars in the field of black religion have rigorously engaged visual and aesthetic methods and theories. This project contributes to efforts to fill this void by examining visual artist Carrie Mae Weems’s conceptual photography as a case study. In particular, I posit that Weems’s images are reflective of what I conceive as an appositional black aesthetic. Drawn from Fred Moten’s notion of appositionality, this aesthetic refers to art and images that depict black life with complexity and a type of multidimensional openness that extends beyond categorical frames of “positive” and “negative” images. This aesthetic is also an approach to analyzing images that emphasizes expansive explorations into the complicated nuances, creative improvisations and alternative social logics that attend black life. In identifying and delineating appositional black aesthetics in works from Weems’s oeuvre, I further contend that her images provide a visual rendering of what Anthony Pinn argues is at the core of black religion: a fundamental impulse or yearning for more life meaning that involves a push for expansive ways of being and fuller life options. But whereas Pinn frames the black religious endeavor as a “quest for complex subjectivity,” Weems’s renderings demonstrate ways of being and engaging with the world that exceed the fraught racialized classificatory paradigm of subjectivity. Rather than a quest for inclusion within subjectivity’s categorical schema, this project reframes the black religion as a generative enactment of the flesh. Informed by the work of Moten as well as Hortense Spillers and Nicole Fleetwood, this theoretical conceptualization situates black religion as the locus point of possibility for complex, open, ever-shifting ways of being that always already exceed the regulating social logics of dominant society and its prescribed ontologies.
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    Thinking Through the Slash: Horror’s Entanglement in Black Religion and Culture
    (2023-09-11) Daniels, DeAnna Monique; Pinn, Anthony B
    Thinking Through the Slash: Horror’s Entanglement in Black Religion and Culture core question reframes the nature of Black religion by asking how “horror” theoretically informs its formation and aims. Therefore, I interrogate how horror provides the space to reimagine and reinterpret the meaning(s) of religious experience. Taking seriously horror’s relationality to religion changes the rules of interpretation. It creates new modes of analysis that consider the interlocking relationships between race, gender, religion, and popular culture and the contexts in which these categories exist. My dissertation investigates the cultural, social, and aesthetic dimensions of Black religious experience through attention to the relationship between religion, race, gender, disability, and horror. I argue that horror forms the point of origin for Black religion, and a turn to horror provides a critical hermeneutic that helps complicate central themes within religion. Principally, scholars of religion employ horror themes and tropes—such as terror, death, ghosts, and hauntings—without seriously theorizing horror or considering the layered possibilities represented in the full scope of horror’s entanglement with religion. New dimensions and conversations develop when horror assemblages—as I call them—are unearthed in the speculative horror fiction and cinema of Octavia Butler, Jordan Peele, Toni Morrison, and others. This turn to horror as a generative analytic offers a re-articulation of religious meaning that takes seriously the varied multi-dimensional realities that unfold in both the non-realist and ‘real lived experience’ and existence of Black people. Therefore, this dissertation brings together a network of critical theories—including critical race theory, disability theory, literary theory, and cultural studies—in relation to the study of Black religion to explore the significance and generative data sources of horror found in religio-cultural productions and expressions.