Conversations in Black: Sylvester A. Johnson
Monica Miller and Christopher Driscoll talk with Sylvester A. Johnson about his new book, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Dr. Sylvester A. Johnson is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Religious Studies in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.
Johnson received his Ph.D. in Contemporary Religious Thought in 2002 from Union Theological Seminary, New York City. Before arriving to Northwestern, Johnson held previous teaching positions at Indiana University and Florida A&M University. Some of his research and teaching interests include African American religious history; Race, Religion and COINTELPRO; and Religion and colonialism in the Black Atlantic. A prolific writer and researcher, Johnson is author of fifty publications, including two monographs: The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Johnson is also founding Co-Editor of the Journal of Africana Religions, the first peer-reviewed journal to publish research on the global religious traditions among African and African-descended peoples. Find him online at his Northwestern Faculty Page and on Twitter.
In the fields of African American religion and American religious history, Johnson is regarded as a leader, innovator, and rigorous researcher with a keen sense of where the fields have been and where they are headed in terms of knowledge production, theory and method, and professional development. There is little wonder that the Journal of Africana Religions editorial advisory board reads as a “who’s who” of American religious studies, in that Johnson — and his co-editor Edward E. Curtis IV — have worked tirelessly in helping to shape the field in recent years.
In keeping with his reputation for scholarly excellence and range, Johnson’s latest book, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is a groundbreaking, ambitious effort to “examine the intersection of black religion and colonialism over several centuries to explain the relationship between empire and democratic freedom.” Although American enslavement and anti-black racism are widely understood as related to colonialism, the relationship between African American religion and colonialism has received only sporadic attention until now. Arguing that the history of African American religion demonstrates an intrinsic relationship between empire and freedom, colonialism and freedom, and freedom and bondage, African American Religions blends historical methods with postmodern ideas about governmentality and existential assessments of the social limits of the very notion of freedom so part and parcel to Euro-American exceptionalism and black religion as it has developed in the shadow of settler colonialism. Furthermore, the book tells the story of increasing colonial surveillance of black religions, spending considerable time exploring the relationship between black religion and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Through such attention, Johnson offers an ominous truth: That the white Euro-American religious, social, and political establishment has perceived black religion as a threat, and no manner of black complicity with empire could offset the overwhelming white suspicion of black bodies.
African American Religions is a testament to Johnson’s interdisciplinary dexterity, in that the historical accounts presented are balanced with ongoing attention to the philosophical and theoretical implications of these accounts on the work of scholarship and political possibilities, alike. Quite simply, Johnson has produced one of the most far-reaching and exhaustive surveys of black religion to date. In our estimation, the book is an “instant classic” and “must-read” for anyone interested in race, religion, empire, and democracy.
MM/CD: Dr. Johnson, thank you for taking time to talk with us about your brilliant new book. Your efforts in this volume are determined, vital, and inspirational. From our read, there are multiple levels of analysis at work: On one level, you turn to the stuff of black religion to add to an on-going conversation about the overall costs of western notions of freedom. Similar to the work of Orlando Patterson, Robin Kelley, and others, you seem to be suggesting that the U.S. experiment of democratic freedom has been predicated on colonialism; consequentially, a kind of valorization of this freedom has shaped much of African American religion. In fact, you refer to colonialism as the “matrix” within which both colonizer and colonized lay claim to notions of democratic freedom. At another level, you argue that black religion has not necessarily been a marker of the best of American democratic principles or expression, but rather, a mechanism for ensuring that such principles only ever remain principles, never actualized because they are undergirded by a colonial enterprise that transmutes freedom into a disciplinary “institution.”
Could you speak a bit to these multiple levels of analysis, both in terms of the difficulty of forging multiple conversations at once, but also in terms of the content of each conversation. Methodologically, how were you able to manage these multiple registers of analysis? What are some of the specific ways that the study of black religions adds to our understanding of western democracy and its attendant notion of freedom? And in terms of black religion as a kind of governmentality, what might such a claim mean for those interested in the texture, the “nature and meaning” of black religions?
SJ: Thanks so much for your incredible response to the book. It means a lot that you have given it such a meticulous read. Yes, you’ve homed in on a range of subtleties at work in the text. So, the book examines five centuries of Black religion at points of intersection with colonialism in order to explain how democracy, freedom, and colonialism have been related. At the heart of the demonstration is the argument that democratic freedom, perhaps the most vaunted and celebrated of values, is not merely a “value” or innocent virtue. Rather, freedom is preeminently an institutional social system, in the sense that we are accustomed to understanding slavery not as a value but as an institution. I aim to demonstrate through multiple examples in a diachronic fashion how freedom was constituted as a colonial project. Freedom and colonialism, in other words, work together. One product of this demonstration is the argument that Black religion is not merely marked by the history of slavery. Colonialism is no less an urgent dimension of Black religion.
I also attempt to show that Black religion has been an ambivalent formation, sometimes opposing colonialism and at other times investing in the same to realize certain objectives. So, this is not an attempt to portray Black religion as a pristine space of moral redemption or political naïveté. Like other forms of religious agency, African American religions have been complicated by a range of entanglements with colonialism. These entanglements have been enabling, generative, and productive in an ambivalent sense. Among the most troubling part of the book for me was examining the history of African American efforts to settle Liberia during the 1800s. The result was a settler state that bore deep resemblances to another settler democracy — that of the United States.
There are multiple conversations running concurrently throughout the book, yes. I wanted to write a book about religion and empire that took empire/colonialism seriously instead of merely referring to this form of political order. I also wanted to show how religious formations have obtained through the material structures and political practices of empire, racial states, and settler rule. Black religion is by no means reducible to any of these. But the urgency of accounting for how empire has shaped African American religions is tremendous, and this book aims to respond to precisely that analytical imperative.
MM/CD: African American Religions covers and examines the incredibly fascinating and complicated stories of significant, yet underexplored, figures such as Dona Beatriz and Olaudah Equiano, among others. And later chapters in the book work to situate more well-known narratives about figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Marcus Garvey in terms of their respective projects, and the assumed threats these figures posed to American colonial interests. Could you discuss the importance of telling and re-telling these stories for the growing archives of African American experience and black religion, for both historical and contemporary contexts?
SJ: Yes, you’re right. At a time when big narratives have come under great suspicion, I think it is important to underscore that understanding multiple periods and analyzing transnational linkages over significant stretches of time is essential to giving a rigorous account of social power. To accomplish that, I wanted to familiarize the “obscure,” which I attempt to do by explaining the overwhelming significance of Dona Beatriz, Philip Quaque, and others. Scholars such as John Thornton have helped to recover important sources on Dona Beatriz, who led a religious and political movement rooted in Black theology during early 1700s. I think Dona Beatriz (also known as Kimpa Vita) offers unique insight into fundamental problems of empire, religion, and race in ways that may surprise those unfamiliar with her story. On the flip-side, I wanted to exoticize the familiar by explaining Marcus Garvey’s brilliant apprehension of why imperialism was essential to anticolonialism (this is not a contradiction). With Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly, I wanted to foreground the significance of anticolonialism and the security state for interpreting his legacy. There is actually a sub-story about J. Edgar Hoover here that did not surface as much as it could have in the book. (I hope to deal a bit more explicitly with this in a forthcoming book on religion and the FBI.) Suffice it to say that Hoover was wrong for all the right reasons. King was a threat to the social order of the United States. And contemporary Americans should stop parlaying King’s legacy into a harmonious element of US democracy, as a specimen of sentimental proof that American democracy has triumphed.
MM/CD: Historian of Religion Dr. Charles Long, whom many regard as the father of the academic study of African American Religion, has long argued that American religion and Euro-American religious impulses and discourses cannot be adequately understood without specific, focused attention to black religion. In other words, until (all) scholars of American religion take a long look at black religion, something will be missing from “their” work, and the story of American religion more generally. African American Religions works to cover much of this ground, conclusively demonstrating that the story of black religion is a story as much about Euro-American empire, as it is counter-narrative and response to empire and colonialism. As the book developed, who did you have in mind as your primary audience, and in what ways does African American Religions deconstruct long-held, uncritical, and racialized assumptions that tend to treat black religion with a kind of disciplinary segregation — as only significant for black people or scholars of black religion? What, if any, sorts of disciplinary interventions are made possible by the numerous epistemological interventions posed in and made by your book?
SJ: I wrote the book with scholars of religion in the Americas and African American Studies in mind. I also intended the book to address important questions about the material history of democracy and empire that might be of interest to political theorists. Because the book focuses on the intersection of religion and empire, it is meant to invite scholars of religion to consider the inextricable ties of that subject to colonialism, and vice versa. At the same time, the book is meant to deliver an overarching account of African American religions. Thus the title. I suspect that many people who might find the book quite relevant to their own work will forego doing so because of the title if they assume they are not interested in Black religions. As you indicate in your question, that is an unfortunate consequence of treating White religion as an unnamed universal (viz., American religion) while conceptualizing Black religion as overly particular, as a more provincial object of intellectual study.
MM/CD: The early chapters of the book forcibly articulate the economic roots of African American religion in colonialism, and the economic roots of black dispossession within (and from) Atlantic empire, more generally. At once, through your attention to Elmina and Cape Coast, which had thriving centers of trade that were by many standards fairly cosmopolitan, you persuasively demonstrate that many Africans were complicit and/or actively engaged in empire, in that empire involved the trade of a host of commodities, including but extending beyond human cargo. Hence, Africans were a vital component of the establishment of trade networks. Yet, a racialized social hierarchy ensured that even this African involvement would never “pay off” for them in a way on par with Europeans. Why has it been difficult for historians to tell the story of Euro-American empire in a way that does not flatten or erase African involvement in empire? And what is gained from fuller historical portraits like the one you present here?
SJ: A terrific question, one that demands multiple layers of response. Among the reasons is the routinization of foregrounding Europeans as agential subjects par excellence. With rare exceptions, we have been conditioned to thinking about trans-Atlantic slavery through a moral lens that impugns Europeans for exercising power malevolently and while viewing Africans as mostly hapless victims. It is certainly true that this process ended with Europeans inflicting massively destructive conquest and domination against Africans. But that’s not how the story began. I open the book with a focus on the Kongo empire because this kingdom was older and more powerful than that of the imperial Portuguese merchants who wandered into its territory in the 1400s (those from Lisbon). The Kongolese adopted Christianity as a luxury import of sorts, not so unlike yoga or pilates for high-brow Americans of the present. It was for elites. For their part, Europeans were simply unable to dominate Africans, since the latter were militarily superior and ably defended their own territory. I frame the beginnings of these imperial relations within an account of commercialism because Africans and Europeans were mutually willing (even eager) trade partners who both profited handsomely from conducting business.
Europeans may have invented a virulent form of racism, but they did not invent slavery. Nor did they invent colonialism. In fact, I am compelled to conclude that Europeans were not the first to develop a system of racism. Europeans did, however, remake slavery as a racial institution. My aim is not to get Europeans off the hook. Rather, I want to explain how the world of Atlantic history came to be, and that requires taking seriously the fact that power is not the exclusive preserve of Europeans.
Think of it this way. There is a relationship between treating Europeans as the sole arbiters of conquest and domination and treating Europeans as the sole or essential arbiters of history and civilization (think of how Georg Hegel understood history). In actual fact, they have been neither. If it is no secret that Africans were already conducting a thriving slave trade before the 1500s and had their own empires, then that knowledge needs to become data for interpreting the history of power. I think Marcus Garvey understood this, and I think this is partly why he was conscientiously a self-proclaimed imperialist. Not only did some Africans willingly enslave other Africans with no sense of remorse, but also Blacks from the United States colonized and subjugated Africans through a process of racial domination. As a result, these Americo-Liberians enjoyed the sweet fruits of democratic freedom (they were really free in the way we are accustomed to thinking of White Americans as having actual freedom) while Blacks in the United States were in chattel slavery or were being decimated under White terrorist rule following the abolition of chattel slavery. I also explain how some Black Americans participated in US wars of genocide and colonialism against Indigenous American nations following the Civil War. This was a critical factor for Black efforts to integrate into the political community of the United States.
Power is not and will never be the special preserve of the White race. But for too long, we have become comfortable with the image of Blacks as sacrificial lambs bumbling along under the regime of slaughter at the hands of Europeans. There is a type of comfort in interpreting Black religion under the sign of innocence. This is a narrative perversion, a way of reading Black religious history to achieve a mythopoeic account of good versus evil that defangs the ambivalent militancy of Blacks while succoring Christian triumphalism. At this point, we have entered the poetics of race history. African American Religions is an attempt to demythologize racial Blackness and racial Whiteness by taking what we know — power is not the special preserve of Whites, and Africans administered empires, slavery, and conquest — as useful and essential data for interpreting the history of freedom and empire to show how they have been mutually constitutive.
MM/CD: Without giving away too much from the book, or at least giving you the option of what to offer here, you make some incredible, groundbreaking suggestions about the relationship between European mind/body, spirit/body ontology (i.e. duality) and the rise of the “fetish” as a popular and philosophical topic of interest for Europeans. Furthermore, you bring ontology to bear on economics and discuss the “spiritualization of money and the secularization of finance” as significant for the growth of the slave trade. You even draw some incredibly compelling genealogical connections between the European interest in the African “fetish” and Marx’s turn to the fetish for his theorization of political economy. What do you have in mind by the turn to “spiritualization of money” and “secularization of finance”? What are the implications of this section of the book for understanding the economic roots of Atlantic empire, the relationship between economics and black religion, and the limits of economics for ensuring black entry into the “marketplace” (broadly construed)?
Check out the rest of the interview at Marginalia Review of Books.
Originally published at marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org on March 8, 2016.
