Introduction: James H. Cone and Black Theology in Africana Perspective

Abstract

Black Power. It foregrounds the intellectual legacy of James H. Cone himself. It also examines the broader scholarship on Africana religions that has emerged through the paradigm shifts that Black liberation theology embodies— liberationist political movements, Black consciousness, anticolonial movements, and religious activism rooted in social justice. When James Hal Cone (1936–2018) first published Black Theology and Black Power in 1969, he launched a fundamental transformation in the study of race through its connection to the institutional life of religion, Black political insurgency, and the scholarly study of Black religious thought. As Cone often explained in retrospect, Black Theology and Black Power derived from his experience of “metanoia,” a conversion to embracing a radical notion of Black identity manifested in a global Black consciousness movement, the soulful music of Billie Holiday, the rebellions underway in Black ghettoes, the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the unapologetic affirmation of Black identity and Black culture espoused by the Muslim minister Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X). Cone’s work also connected to the global formations of anticolonialism that emphasized decolonizing the intellectual apparatus of Black scholars and affirming the aesthetic dimensions of Blackness—the Black Arts movement and such writers as Frantz Fanon exemplify the stakes of this radical transformation. This seminal text by Cone marked the rise of the modern liberation theology movement and established Black theology’s radical departure from the epistemological norms of white theology. The transnational dynamics of Black theology also emerged in such movements as the anti-apartheid activism of Black theologians in South Africa. Over the course of his career, Cone produced more than a dozen books attesting to the Black radical tradition’s urgent significance for the social life of religious institutions and the intellectual imagination that might guide the scholarly study of Black religious thought, liberation imperatives, and Black Introduction: James H. Cone and Black Theology in Africana Perspective