Join us on November 15th at 4:30pm (Swift Hall, Common Room) for a public lecture by J. Kameron Carter: “Mystic Song; or, Black Studies and Religion at the University of Chicago.”

Abstract: This talk sets forth a vision for black studies and religion, or “the black study of religion,” at the University of Chicago, one that builds on and extends the tradition of the critical study of religion out of the Divinity School. Key here is thinking with a figure too little known in black studies, on the one hand, and not taken seriously enough in the field of religious studies, on the other; namely, recently deceased UChicago historian of religions and theorist of black religion and culture Charles H. Long. I here mobilize Long’s late ideas of “ellipsis” and “anarchy,” using them to suss out an understanding of blackness as a kind of mysticism that is internal to black critical thought and artistic practice and that betokens an alternate ecology, an otherwise orientation to matter, indeed, to the earth itself. In thus thinking with what I call Long’s “mystic song,” I theorize the fugitive religiosity or the parareligiosity of black thought and social life. In short, I outline here what might be thought of as the spiritual vocation of the black radical tradition.

J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington where he also is co-director of IU’s Center for Religion and the Human. With appointments also in the English, Gender Studies, and African American and African Diaspora Studies departments, Professor Carter engages questions of Blackness, race, empire, and ecology through what he calls “the black study of religion.” He is the author the acclaimed Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008), as well as being the editor of Religion and the Futures of Blackness (a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013) and The Matter of Black Religion: Thinking with Charles Long (a special issue of American Religion, 2021). Most recently, Professor Carter is author the much anticipated The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song (Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2022) and has The Religion of Whiteness: An Apocalyptic Lyric (with Yale University Press) in final preparation.