Discredited Knowledges and Black Religious Ways of Knowing

Abstract:This essay invokes Toni Morrison's notion of "discredited knowledges" to ruminate on Black religions among the enslaved in the nineteenth century, a period replete with revolution and "emancipation." It considers the slave narrative as a site of both the material and immaterial reality of Black religions in order to evidence the significance of biography for taking seriously and revering knowledges discredited by the master class, with particular attention to slave death, ancestors, funerary rites, and other evidences of what I term, "Black religious ways of knowing."