BAR Book Forum: Traci West’s“Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality and GerShun Avilez’s “Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism”

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor

02 Jan 2019

Our authors reject the contention that Black nationalism was mostly concerned with upholding traditional patriarchy and heterosexuality -- evils that are in fact buttressed by many contemporary “Christians.”

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Traci Westand GerShun Avilez.West is Professor of Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School. Her book is Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence.

Avilez is an Assistant Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His book is Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism.

Traci West’s Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality

“The intertwined cultural dynamics of racism and religion hinder us from recognizing the urgency of uprooting and ending this violence.”

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Traci West:In our current #MeToo movement moment when more high-profile perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault are being reported and in some cases held accountable, my book focuses on the necessary “next steps” of transforming our cultural values. We must discontinue our participation in incubating moral values that fuel the sexual assaults, domestic abuse, targeting of lesbians for rape and murder, and other forms of gender-based violence. In particular, I direct the reader’s focus to the intertwined cultural dynamics of racism and religion that hinder us from recognizing the urgency of uprooting and ending this violence.

In the United States white Christians constitute the most stalwart supporters of President Trump. They were undeterred by the videotape widely circulated just before his 2016 election in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. In his official response to the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia where one of them killed a woman counter-protester, the president provided a sympathetic understanding of the white nationalists. In 2018, U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions touted Christian values to defend dehumanizing state policies in a manner reminiscent of assertions morally legitimating chattel slaveryby southern white slave owning leaders. Sessions quoted Christian scripture to justify the government’s child kidnappings, criminalization, and caging of desperate brown migrant South Americans, mostly comprised of women and children fleeing violence, including domestic violence and gang rape. Right now, within the highest levels of government leadership and public support for it, Christianity coheres with white supremacy and functions like an opioid dulling our moral and political outrage about violence against women.

“Jeff Sessions touted Christian values to defend dehumanizing state policies in a manner reminiscent of assertions morally legitimating chattel slavery.”

We find ourselves in the midst of a resurgence of white nationalism, isolationist withdrawal from global climate agreements, and enactment of racially and religiously restrictive access to U.S. citizenship rights. This book radically challenges these political trends with a resolute, border-crossing commitment to discovering anti-racist methods and innovative religious and spiritual ideas that are based on encounters with Africana activist-leaders abroad. The transnational nature of both the gender-based violence and its cultural support requires solidarity with such leaders in order to expand the ways in which we address our cultural tolerance for this violence in the United States.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

In each section of this book I invite readers to consider what it means to cross cultural and national boundaries to create, share, and support one another in anti-racist gender justice transformations of society.

I hope that activists and community organizers will find this emphasis on how to learn intercultural approaches to generating gender justice to be a major “take-away” from this book. I deliberately feature ideas rooted in integrated theory-practice methods while persistently probing questions of cultural difference that impact our understanding of those methods. Activists and organizers can collect provocative illustrations of intercultural learning in which activist work is as integral a source of knowledge as traditional theoretical texts.

“I invite readers to create, share, and support one another in anti-racist gender justice transformations of society.”

For U.S.-based activists and organizers, I hope that the book confirms existing practices and ignites newly discovered ways for valuing global solidarity with leaders of African descent in the struggle against gender-based violence and other justice issues. But I also want to provoke anti-racist reflections on how we maintain self-critical moral and religious assumptions in light of the uniquely imperialistic global influence of U.S. culture, Christianity, and politics.

I wish to inspire and support creative anti-violence ideas on how spirituality that defies racist and heteropatriarchal religious traditions can contribute to building solidarity among activists, activist-scholars, and cultural workers. I suggest mind-body-spirit connections as resources for anti-violence ideas in concrete and sometimes humorous terms that I hope will elicit related examples from readers interested in spirituality, equality, and justice activism.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

Yes! There are a myriad of habits, assumptions, prejudices, and forms of complacency that I want readers to unlearn. The most basic ones include, first and foremost, our cultural tolerance for gender-based violence in the United States. I challenge readers to unlearn their capitulation to the inevitability of intimate abuse and violencebecause, many may claim, the cultural permission for it is too pervasive and entrenched within our most common understandings of gender and sexuality.

Second, I urge readers to unlearn their fears about taking-on the cultural rootedness of white racist logics and Christian paternalisms that saturate those common understandings of gender and sexuality. Such fearfulness by black readers is often cloaked in the standard concern about what-white-people-might-think and cements black communal denial that protects perpetrators. And for all readers, their fearfulness about being overwhelmed by the complex, entangled support provided by racist and religious values only nurtures more complacency in all communities, thereby stabilizing and preserving values that feed gender-based violence.

“I challenge readers to unlearn their capitulation to the inevitability of intimate abuse and violence.”

Third, and perhaps, the hardest for Christians, I insist that readers unlearn biases that make them skeptical about the value of Africana activist-leaders and their contexts in Africa and South America as sources for knowledge we need here in the United States. Non-African Christians are most often nurtured in a singular, paternalistic focus on mission and service projects in their responses to gender-based violence in Africa and to all black Africans. I utilize the metaphor of blackening to represent the method of defiant Africana spirituality, learning, and solidarity that my book invokes.

Finally, certain conventional assumptions about the very process of learning must be unlearned. My readers are confronted by my unconventional contention that learning methodological ideas, that is, exploring “how do we change” questions, need not be buried in theoretical analyses cleansed of the personal and cultural contexts that birthed them. Indeed, helpful ideas can spring from interpersonal, embodied, spiritually enlivening, and culturally vibrant encounters, especially ideas about addressing interpersonal, embodied, spiritually wounding, and culturally legitimated intimate assaults and abuse.

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

My work has been inspired by: Alice Walker’s pioneering truthtelling in her depictions of sexual and domestic violence perpetrated by black men against black girls and women and celebration of black lesbian sexual identity and spirituality in her fiction;
Ella Baker’s example of skillful and articulate dedication to building activist political resistance to racism and class oppression as well as her impatience with the patriarchal church world of sexist black male clergy;
Audre Lorde’s visionary black lesbian feminist writings, speeches, and poetry that centrally included a focus on confronting anti-black racism, including global expressions of it;
Gloria Anzaldúa’s imaginatively elegant and multi-lingual political conceptualizations of intercultural borderlands in her lesbian feminist theory;
and finally, although this might sound odd in this venue because she was not college educated, but by my own mother’s (Paula West’s) deeply spiritual expressions of Christian faith, active support for racial justice struggles in everyday public life, and mandating of family-centered intellectual development including readings of black political authors and exposure to black artists.

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

We journey together to discover them. The narrative description of my encounters with activists and activist-scholars experientially conveys the expansive moral imagination that I commend for shifting U.S. cultural values, especially related to racism and religion.

We are allowed to tell uncomfortable truths. They range from pointing to the deep racist legacy of rape culture exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, the child-rapist of his black slave, to my accounts of awkwardness and bafflement related to Christianity that surfaced in my encounters with South African black lesbian activist leaders in spite of our shared anti-violence and anti-racist commitments, but were necessary for listening that builds authentic solidarity.

We risk blackened hopefulness. Instead of merely focusing on a scarcity-of-ideas competitive academic model, or insular Christian U.S. exceptionalism politics, or the endless project of crafting critiques of homophobic and sexist blame-the-victim religion, the book demonstrates what it means to seek out and find a vast, energetic well of creative resistance to intimate violence against lesbians, transgender persons, heterosexually married women and others that is fueled by defiant spirituality in Christian, Muslim, Candomblé, African Traditional Religion beliefs, and non-religious activist work. And the very dynamics of dialogical encounters with Africana activist leaders and scholars and their contexts yields embraceable, hope-filled indicators of an even more abundant wellspring of ideas about developing deep cultural intolerance with the gender violence in the United States.

GerShun Avilez’s Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

“Solidarity does not require silencing opposition.”

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

GerShun Avilez: In our contemporary moment, there are repeated examples of violence specifically against Black people at the same time that there are discussions of U.S. culture as being “post-racial.” We are in a social world in which Black solidarity and collaboration are needed just as they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Sometimes people feel that calls for community and solidarity require ignoring individual differences and needs for the sake of the group. My book focuses on artists who show an allegiance to Black community but not at the expense of an individual’s right to express their personhood. In fact, they often illustrate the damaging costs of putting group needs over individual desires. Artists such as Alice Walker or Jayne Cortez have shown us the value of such beliefs in community, but they have also made clear that this belief should never come at the cost of an individual’s sense of self or right to express their racial identity in different ways. In this way, artists can model for all of us strategies for beneficial collective activism. The book provides a context for contemporary anti-Black racism by finding connections between the present and the recent past while also suggesting how we might devise ways to address such discrimination.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

I hope people learn from my book that disagreement and dissent are crucial parts of activism and social organizing as opposed to threats to them. Solidarity does not require silencing opposition. One can be critically engaged, and this is what I focus on in my book: critical engagement. Feminist and queer artists were often critically engaged with Black nationalism, meaning that they were invested in destroying anti-Black racism but were also insistent upon undermining limiting constructions of Blackness. They embrace the idea of racial kinship, while also recognizing its limitations. In my attempt to provide a more complete and inclusive representation of 1960s-era activism, I emphasize dissent. I do not do this in order to undermine the period’s investment in collectivity, but rather to point to the value of questioning and to the significance of diversity withincollectives. What we learn from the Black Arts Movement if we read widely is that groups do not necessarily have to speak with one, singular voice or have only one leader to create change. In fact, having multiple voices and perspectives can enable change and galvanize a population.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

There is a tendency to understand the Black Arts Movement, and Black nationalism more generally, as being mostly concerned with upholding traditional patriarchy and heterosexuality in the cause of Blackness and the Black Freedom Movement. It is this idea that I want folks to rethink. I am not saying that there were not elements of sexism and homophobia that circulated and expressed during the Black Arts Movement. U.S. society generally is sexist and homophobic, and of course the Black Arts Movement reflects some of those larger cultural tendencies. However, it is not the case that we only find those tendencies in the work of the period. There is also a questioning of the stereotypes about Black hypersexuality, recurring critiques of patriarchal ways of thinking about identity, and a sincere interest in the place of queer sexuality within the calls for Black solidarity—reminding us of Huey Newton’s call for Black nationalist collaboration with gay activists of the 1970s. Contemporary activist organizations that blend together critiques of anti-Black racism and homophobia are building on a project that began in to develop decades before.

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

I am inspired by artists and critics. Some of my intellectual heroes include: Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, Marlon Riggs, and Robert Reid-Pharr. Walker helped to stoke my love of literature, and I admire her career-long argument that we all have the potential to be better and to help each other through simple acts of love and attention. Smith gave me language to talk about the co-existence of racism and homophobia, and I believe she models a political strategy of collaboration like few others. Riggs’s films visualized for me the challenges of being Black and gay, and his work serves as an important connection between 1960s rhetoric and 1980s/90s activism for me. Reid-Pharr is the critic I think I am always talking to and building on; he embodies a personal and professional generosity that lies at the heart of Black radicalism. Their works keep me going.

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

I think my book helps us to imagine new worlds by pointing to and holding up art and cultural productions. Part of the function of art is to imagine what we could be and what oursocial worlds might become if we work together to transform ourselves and our surroundings. The world that we desire might not be, but a piece of it might exist on a page, on a canvas, on a stage, or on a screen. Paying close attention to such imaginings can help us to find a language for the worlds we wish were or perhaps develop a strategy to get there. Art provides aesthetic pleasure, but it can also help us puzzle through social and ethical dilemmas. When we take artists seriously as social and political commentators, as well as aesthetic innovators, we move closer to the worlds we desire and demand.

Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for thePolitical Theology Network. He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

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