Thinking with J. Z. Smith - Mapping Methods in the Study of Religion - Barbara Krawcowicz

Thinking with J. Z. Smith - Mapping Methods in the Study of Religion - Barbara Krawcowicz

4. An Uneasy Silence: J. Z. Smith and the Divorce of Race from Power

Thinking with J. Z. Smith - Mapping Methods in the Study of Religion - Barbara Krawcowicz

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

Craig R. Prentiss takes a closer and critical look at one of the topics Smith addressed - the birth of racial imagination – to conclude that in “Close Encounters” Smith conceptualizes race “in such a way as to render the ferocious subjugation of bodies, the organization of massive new labor forces, the plundering of resources, the expropriation of lands, and the production of an intellectual scaffolding necessary for the manufacture and maintenance of historically contingent authority structures, secondary to a set of logic games playing out in the minds of a comparatively small band of renegade intellectuals comfortable casting off the shackles imposed by the hegemonic status of biblical creation”. As such, Prentiss claims, the problem with Smith’s account of the birth of racial imagination is not that it is “wrong” but rather that its usefulness is very limited because it ignores power relations that are always a factor in any taxonomic enterprise, including the constitution of “difference”. Like a Tylorian intellectualist treatment of religion as emerging from the puzzling nature of death and dreams, Smith’s “Close Encounters of Diverse Kinds” treats “race” as springing from an apparently innocent human curiosity about difference.

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Citation

Prentiss, Craig. 4. An Uneasy Silence: J. Z. Smith and the Divorce of Race from Power. Thinking with J. Z. Smith - Mapping Methods in the Study of Religion. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 46-62 Jul 2023. ISBN 9781781799840. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=39925. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.39925. Jul 2023

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