Afterword: Beyond Opportunistic Blackness: Reclaiming Victor Anderson’s Religious Criticism Against the Spiritual Evacuation of Blackness

Abstract

ABSTRACT After nearly thirty years, Beyond Ontological Blackness can and should be used to think about contemporary challenges and avoidable futures in which (racial) representations could further ensnare us due to its inherent entanglement with racial capitalism. In this afterword, I argue that Victor Anderson offers an ethics of representation/blackness through the figure of the religious critic. It reclaims Anderson’s religious critic and shows how such a critic models better forms of social criticism that can be both descriptive and constructive, enlightening and emancipatory, and iconoclastic and utopian, without sacrificing either identity or difference, the individual or the group to oppressive values, norms and structures.