You Can’t See Me!

Heterodox Black Religiosities & the Politics of Recognition

By: Dr. AK Sterling

Narrated by: Robin Leigh

In this dissertation, I explore several key works in the fields of Black literature and Black theology that highlight the rich and complex nature of Black religious and spiritual traditions in the US. I focus on studies that show how Africans and African Americans post-slavery were able to mount serious resistance to White supremacist efforts to dehumanize and assimilate Black lives politically, economically, and socially by way of Western theology’s claims and Protestant Christianity’s influence. I term the multifarious spiritual traditions and belief systems that offered Black folks healing, and the space in which to redefine and create new meaning heterodox Black religiosities. I then place my inquiry of minor or heterodox Black Christianities within a larger conversation about the politics of recognition, where the desire to be seen and treated as human within a state to which the appeals for recognition are directed and from which they are denied often prove inadequate or limited as modes for liberation.

This dissertation is an effort to think through the complexities of how African American literature interacts with what I am terming the notion of uncalling made visible by the heterodox Christianities that fall out of the scope of the Black. In other words, I analyze Black religiosity as an enactment of radical Black collectivity in counterdistinction to a politics of recognition. I argue it is this figure of the uncalled, operating out of heterodox Black religiosities, that can offer an alternative model for liberation and healing that is not bound up in outward cries for recognition—a redirected and more productive form of protest that already exists but that is underutilized. This alternative strategy aims to shift Black protest efforts away from desiring settler-colonial, patriarchal, non-mutual state-based recognition, and toward the freedom found in wholeness and strength through internal journeys, supported by radical Black sociality after the emotional and spiritual battles are waged, in the quiet victories of peace, and with the guidance, insights, theories and writings of the Black feminist tradition.

©2018, 2023 Alexander Sterling (P)2023 Alexander Sterling