Key Categories in the Study of Religion - Contexts and Critiques - Rebekka King
9. Reworking Our Schemes
Key Categories in the Study of Religion - Contexts and Critiques - Rebekka King
Craig Prentiss [+]
Rockhurst University
Craig R. Prentiss is a Professor of Religious Studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (NYU 2014), and editor of Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction (NYU 2003).
Description
Building on Richard Newton’s reference to the Combahee River Collective, I use the Collective’s strategy for re-imagining the prevailing classificatory model for personhood as a starting point to move us toward reconstituting the relationship between religion and race as schemes for social ordering. This essay theorizes religion and race as positioning instruments made effective by linking the historical and the contingent to the eternal and the permanent through a discourse that conjures the latter to shape the conditions of the former.