Devotion: three inquiries in religion, literature, and political imagination

Abstract

process of being enclosed where all are expected to be, compelled to remain fixed in our lot and knowing our stations so that a war can be properly waged in this hell. Gilmore sees what’s happening to bodies-as-capital in ways that Yale theologian Willie James Jennings has also recounted, with racial identity and private property comprising two sides of the same coin. Jennings’ explanation of the rationale behind this describes how a “hermeneutics of possession”marks this era of body removal, relocation/incarceration, and erasure as the mode of modern capitalist state building. For this enterprise, Gilmore underscores what Kathryn Yusoff recounts in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018), the geographic and geological extraction of resources that built the modern world – with its comforts and advances for some – as essentially inextricably linked with the extraction of Black and Indigenous bodies, a plight Stephanie Pincetl has argued can never merely be undone or corrected without more radical political visions of time and space that move beyond adaptation/incorporation to more radical embodiments of justice and the virtues. In the same way, Gilmore demonstrates that the racial-carceral-capital juggernaut impacts everyone (p. 469), landing everyone in the inferno, for which all peddled capitalist frameworks, including “the fiction of race projects” (p. 495), provide no ladder of escape. For Gilmore’s exposition, while leading readers into what I am describing poetically as the abyss, she doesn’t leave them there, but finds hope in collective organizing (Section 4), willing at every point to turn to work with anyone – not just those of good will, but even willing to persuade the demons! – helping folks open to new possibilities with unlikely allies. She acknowledges groups outpacing her own (p. 469), embodying “the spirit of abolition” sans the label – a strange phenomenon amid capitalist structures that everyone has an “ontological priority” to not be harmed by (p. 183). She admits that her vision is “utopian,” not in the sense promised by late capitalism with its violent abstraction of abandonment (p. 174), but in the sense of “looking forward to a world in which prisons are not necessary” (pp. 468–9). Her prescription remains: critical forms of resistance through what she calls an enmeshed “infrastructure of feeling” (p. 490). Something like compassion, or what James Baldwin and Augustine call “love.” Not merely martyrological, but part of a conversation James Cone argues must be revolutionary throughout: embodied, enfleshed, incarnated. In skin, as Gilmore strikingly reminds us (ch. 20), and with arms stretched wide as the world, with bowels of compassion that give the kind of hope to keep walking through hell, together, until the better day, the better world, comes into being.