(Post)Critical Political Theology and the Uses and Misuses of Whiteness Discourse
In this essay, I advance a theological account of critique that attends to the material nature of creaturely life. This account involves first the “postcritique” movement recently taken up by literary theorists. In order to demonstrate what postcritique involves for political theology, I enlist Luke...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group
2021
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| In: |
Political theology
Year: 2021, Volume: 22, Issue: 7, Pages: 563-583 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
USA
/ Weißsein
/ Racism
/ Christianity
/ Criticism
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| IxTheo Classification: | CH Christianity and Society KBQ North America NBE Anthropology NCC Social ethics |
| Further subjects: | B
racial capitalism
B Ethnography B Felski B Bretherton B Critique B Nonsense B Whiteness |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In this essay, I advance a theological account of critique that attends to the material nature of creaturely life. This account involves first the “postcritique” movement recently taken up by literary theorists. In order to demonstrate what postcritique involves for political theology, I enlist Luke Bretherton’s anti-Manichean theological method and its case for ethnography. I then turn to an extended example. Specifically, I ask about the usefulness of whiteness discourse. I answer that the term “whiteness” is most useful when connected to the material racism that it helps to explain and less useful when abstracted from realities that “whiteness” properly describes as contingent. In pursuing my account of critique in regards to whiteness, I use my postcritical formulation to frame political scientist Cedric Johnson’s penetrating assessment of whiteness studies. I conclude by suggesting that whiteness discourse abstracted from material realities borders on nonsense, but not an uninteresting kind of nonsense. |
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| ISSN: | 1743-1719 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Political theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2021.1912449 |