BOB’s Blues: A Reflection on the Legacy of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness

ABSTRACT This essay celebrates Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (BOB) by considering how it reads blackness as an open possibility for human flourishing. Through critical engagement with Anderson’s notion of the “grotesquery of blackness,” it reads blues as a site for considering the implications of Anderson’s contention that black theology must move beyond essentialist constructions of blackness. The reflection also highlights how Anderson’s work anticipates contemporary critiques of modernity within decolonial studies, especially in the work of Sylvia Wynter. Finally, this essay uses the insights of BOB to assess the grotesque genius of the blues by offering a brief analysis of blues singer Muddy Waters’s performance of “Hoochie Coochie Man.”