Daniel McGee

Beyond the Veil

Clarence Hardy III
Spring 2015
Dialogical History: Between History and Hermeneutics
Intro
Black Religious Studies have changed dramatically since their inception in the
1960s and 70s amidst the Civil Right and Black Power Movements. The fertile cultural
environment and tumult of those decades signaled a demand for and the subsequent
creation of Black Studies departments across the United States. The aim of this endeavor,
following in the footsteps of Du bois early 20th century work1, was to discover and use
historical tools to disrupt societal myths and misconceptions about the nature of
blackness and black people. Black religion, in this regard, is implicated as a medium
scholars utilize to deconstruct such societal myths. It operates as a critical method
through a return to the sources of black religion2. Albert Raboteau is a classic example
demonstrating this within his text Slave Religion. Scholars have long since noted the
limitations of the text3, but it is important to remember the aforementioned context that
determined the production of the text. This explains its methodological bias evidenced by

1 Du bois, souls of black folk. Also disciplinary pioneers Zora Neale

Hurston and Carter G Woodsen are acknowledged.
2 Study of black religion has focused on the black church
3 Such as his mea culpa of ignoring the presence of women, noted by himself in the
Afterword of Slave Religion and By Sylvia Frey in her article on black religious
historiography since Raboteau

its underlying structural analogousness to James Cones articulation of Black theology4: it

some ways a pseudo-historical ideologically limited Christianizing systematic theology
Recent advances in demographic historiography including research into the
African religious origins, have unlocked new sources that enable the (re) construct a
narrative of the black religious experience. They have advanced beyond the black
theology/black church project. This essay will review two notable texts in the field to
emerge in the last twenty years that provide levels of texture and nuance imperative for
students inquiring in this field, especially in light of the wave of post-racial sentiment in
the Obama Age and the reactionary irruption of violence in urban contexts and backlash
from race-theorists and conservative circles. Both Michael Gomez and James Noels
project are significant to the field of black religious studies because they
methodologically negotiate the post-modern development of black identity.
Sadiya Hartman and Fernand Braudel are two thinkers whose important
methodological instincts and orientation discipline this endeavor. Hartmans notion of
compromised archive engages the importance of acknowledging methodological
concerns that prevent one from describing accurately the historical past. This is coupled
with the weight of the work when we keep our focus on the archive as a mortuary or
tomb (never losing sight of the backdrop of dispossession.) as well as the opacity of these
same sources, and the delicate act of not doing additional levels of violence to these
silenced historical subjects through faulty methods. 5 In the same vein, Braudels notion
of the longue duree or viewing history within a broad framework or a long time span as
opposed to that of the instant, event based historical approach hints at the importance of
4 Static African presence, homogenizing and flattening (compromising) their historical
presence to fit a Christianizing theological system.
5 Hartman quote and hermeneutic focus: what is the sound of ineffable speech?

destabilizing concepts that have been flattened and homogenized ideologically and
packaged conveniently as historical objects for study. The black church is such a concept,
and if we are to go even further, as is the notion of race itself. What is at stake in taking
this approach is that we cannot limit ourselves to only deconstructing social constructs
like race, but to investigating them in additionally within a framework that surpasses
races space-time phenomenological emergence. Lest I caution, one may make the
mistake of projecting a concept of race back into the creation of the modern world
anachronistically (and haphazardly politicizing history as a result).
I will use these methods as criterion for analyzing two recent texts in the study of
Black Religion.
Michael A. Gomez Exchanging Country Marks: The Transformation of African
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998)
The role of ethnicity and the development of a composite identity within the slave
community is the main concern of Michael Gomezs Exchanging Our Country Marks.
Sylvia Frey notes that Gomezs project as an important reinterpretation of Margaret
Washington Creels A Peculiar People.6 The project is buoyed by advances in
demography and African historiography. This allow Gomez to reach beyond a monolithic
and generic African past in order to determine the foundational contributions of specific
African societies such as: Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Bight of Biafra and KongoAngola, as well as host societies in North America. The result of this mapping of the
specific ethnic contributions trace of the move from ethnic based African identity towards
a racially based communal identities. These communities transcend ethnic particularity,
they are united by the forced context of capture, survival of the middle passage, and
6 Sylvia Frey pp 93

enslavement. Gomez while stressing the forced nature of this contact, he focuses on
questions of proximity at multiple levels of analyses when discussing both Africa and
American society. He emphasizes relevant demographics such as the individual slave or
descendent, the individual slaveholding unit or ethnic tribal grouping, the inter-plantation
relation or regional relationship, and the overall shared space negotiated through African
and American contact. Within the second chapter, Time and Space, he discusses
importation rates, destinations, and spatial arrangements of Africans, as well as the
various regions of origin and patters of importation from the seven regions he identifies.
This exemplifies his points of departure in later chapters when Gomez focuses on specific
ethnic regions and contributions successively. Gomez notes, the relative ebb and flow
from these regions played a direct role in both the general direction and more subtle
nuances of African American identity and culture. Gomez gives preference to the
female gender throughout his book, but he significantly finds no place for them in the
evangelical conversion movement, nor does he note, even in passing, that they formed a
numerical majority in nearly all evangelical Protestant churches, black, white and
biracial. 7 Gomez has also done the spadework for Islam in North America. As is true
for most studies of early African history in North American, Gomez struggles against a
dearth of evidence. He concedes that Muslims probably had few opportunities to engage
in corporate worship, but he does offer some evidence of individual adherence to Islam
and an awareness of Islamic heritage among second- and third-generation Africans. 8 He
notes the Islamic communitys (he views it akin to an ethnicity) impacted the
stratification of African/African -American society despite the cultural impediments as a
7 frey 94
8 frey 97

result of enslavement.9 They were viewed as skilled workers and intelligent by the host
society partly because of the presence of Islamic education in Africa, and partly because
they exhibited light skinned traits without miscegenation. Their presence points toward
one of Gomez focal points, social divisions within the African-based community were
to a degree informed by conditions growing out of the African antecedent, and these
divisions necessarily helped to shape the consequent, composite identity.
Though charting the religious cosmologies of the various African ethnic groups in
early chapters, the discussion of Christianity is left until the end, when the nexus of class,
ethnic, gender, and regional concerns are laid out as a foundation. Gomez points to three
distinct moments for black Christianity expansion.10 He layers this Christian expansion
onto his earlier foundation, producing a textured account of black Christianity. This
account resists any monolithic notions of blackness and black religious praxis, showing
how at least two distinct and divergent forms of Christianity were shaped; one with clear
African continuities, and one organized around and marked more by its encounter with
white Christianity. Gomez also is cognizant of the way power operates in this context,
showing how it impacts the process of negotiating identity and religious practice.
Ultimatly the text is strong in its historical method and content, and complexifies the
study of black/slave religion with impressive rigor of analysis. I can clearly see an
alignment with our methodological interlocutors, Hartman and Braudel, as Gomez
9 see gomez ch 4 prayin on duh bead
10 1)1760 to 1790 2)1790 to 1830; 3) 1830 to 1860. Gomez notes the
importance of the second period of Christian expansion in slave
communities was from 1790 to 1830 which was critical for the
development for the black church...[during this time] the groundwork
was laid for a class-based divergence among black churchgoers.
Gomez 255

attempts to unearth the mortuary while doing justice to the silences as well as go
beyond the cultural contact, extending his timespan deep into the African past. His even
tone and willingness to speculate softly provides a brilliant example of letting the sources
speak for themselves, instead of speaking into the sources, and restricting the historical
record to fit ones ideological or academic goals.
James A. Noel Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic
World (2009)
The imagination of matter is the central organizing principle of this text. It is in
reference to the notion of Materiality conceptualized first by Chicago school Historian of
Religions Charles Long materiality, refers to the entire network of contacts and
exchanges that humans have with each other, nature, and the invisible forces of the
cosmos. The main categories that are appropriated from the thought of Long and giving
application and expansion are notions of the cultural contact and exchange, archaic or
primitive, signification and its silences, and the opaque. This beckons again the
compromised archive
a thicker description of black peoples religious experience would indicate how black identity or,
black consciousness, was historically constituted through religious experience. Hence black religion and
black people appear simultaneously in modernity. Black religion is involved and implicated in the
manifestation of the new form of materiality represented by the concreteness black people represent.
White religion, or course, is also implicated- it helped fashion white identity vis--vis the discursive modes
that went into the construction of blackness.11

Noel uses this to imply and inextricable connection between religious

experience and what he calls the imagination of matter.12 His next step is to situate this
phenomenological emergence on the backdrop of the emerging Atlantic World economy
that produced a sensibility of European superiority over Africa and America. This
happened through the contacts and exchanges that produced a new Atlantic oriented geo11 James Noel Introduction, Chapter 1
12 James Noel Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter pp3

economic system, with its triangular trading pattern linking Europe, Africa, and the
Americas(1500-1800). These were not benign exchanges but exchanges that lacked
reciprocity and the meanings or legitimations of their outcome resulted in new
estimations of human value and notions of self among those who were made to
participate in them13 Europeans began to form a new sense of themselves in relation to
the other peoples with whom they made contact through trade, conquest, enslavement,
and colonization. African and other discovered, conquered and/or colonized peoples
became signified in the Wests discourse about itself.
We can see Noels attempt to focus on the African antecedent in his chapter of
Kongo Portuguese relations, but his focus on du bois in the mulatto chapter and double
consciousness as well as his discussion of creolization in music lends itself to some
valuable insights especially about the modern notions of racial identity that emerges after
this creation of the African American has happened, after the negotiation and fusion of
African cultures has taken root in American born shaped by the realities of the slave
practice. His description of the Middle passage, description and interpretation as dark
night of soul and experience of nonbeing (opacity) is deeply theological.
Noels text provides a hermeneutic that is based less on historical accuracy and rigor, but
on a multiplicity of interpretive entry points. For Noel the study of black religion is not
about (re) discovery of origins, he is geared toward future expressions, and seeks to
provide an interpretive cannon for reflection.
Analysis and Implications
When these two texts are read together, a certain picture emerges though we can
only sketch it broadly, regarding the relationship between the fashioning of African13 noel

American self-identity forged in the experience of slavery and the use of the nominal
term race. This has implications for the study of black religion (consciousness, culture,
ecclesiology etc.).
This is the gap that exists between Exchanging Our Country Marks and Black
Religion and the Imagination of Matter. Gomez texts is a vigorously historical text
whose commentary is meant to smooth the argument presented by the scholarly
consensus and this influx of new archival data (WPA interviews and slave posters,
advances in African slave trade etching studies). Whereas Noels texts is a work of
theological hermeneutics interpreting the black religion through Charles longs
methodology and conceptual categories in the history of regions such as cargo cult,
cultural contact and opacity and the signification of silence and hybridity/creolization.
Gomez I think would be critical of studies using a hermeneutical or phenonomolooical
approach like that of Charles Long because of his view that, to speak in generalities is to
invite inaccuracy and oversimplification.14 However, when discussing religion in Sierra
Leone, the existence of secret socies dedicated to the ngafa, genre of spirit, Gomez has a
moment of clear engagement with hermeneutics, insightfully saying, Westerners label
whatever they do not understand about non-Western societies and cultures as secretive
and mystical; hence, the most important aspect of a phenomenon is its impenetrability or
resistance to explication along conventional lines of analysis.15 Is he not talking of and
engaging with the theme of opacity? Going further, Gomez resists this characterization a
bit eschewing the secrecy and describing them functionally in both the political and
social level in their African context. These societies continued into the slave quarters of
14 gomez 144
15 gomez 94-95

North America, though reconceptionalizing their traditional functions to fit them to the
new world. This transformation is speculated on and assumed, but Noels point is valid
here, the quality of opacity as a methodological category to understand the nature of this
transformation, provides data out of a assumed yet conspicuous absence of It.
This point has special emphasis when talking about the contributions of the Ibgo who
Gomez estimates comprised 25% of all African imports form a relatively small and
homogeneous region.16 Yet were evidenced as having a proclivity for suicide, which must
be understood within the context of their own belief system where some had innate
supernatural powers to fly, the capture and enslavement and transportation across the
Atlantic during the middle passage, and the subsequent life in the new world haunted by
the distance from the land which was the same as being removed from ones ancestors a
fate worse than death17 and as Noel notes, more akin to non-being. Their belief in the
transmigration of souls or reincarnation has a dogma of success rooted within it.
Consequently the transition to America involved removing prospects of upward mobility
and the cauterization of relations with the land and the ancestors, was to cause a level of
trauma too deep to convey, thus helping to explain why a number of the Igbo responded
suicidally.18
Noel assumes an African epistemological rupture in which neither ethnic African nor
pan-Africanized means of knowing and being were sustainable in the Atlantic World.19
16 gomez 114-115
17 gomez 116-129
18 gomez 131. On pg. 144 gomex writes, convinced they had entered
a horror zone beyond the ability of human endurance, they rethought
their existence and reasoned alternatvely. They reassessed the
meaning of life in light of their novel circumstances. And they
concluded that they were now living the converse of life, suicde was
the means back to that lie, back to Africa. This
19 Jefferson Practical Review Essay of Black Religion (noel) p2-3

Elana Jefferson in her review essay notes,

While acknowledging that Africans had their own ontologies prior to their contacts with
Europeans, Noel ultimately concludes, the Non-Being that menaced the captives in the Middle
Passage was totalizing in its discontinuity with anything previously known or imagined. Nothing
in the cultural memory provided coping mechanisms for dealing with this Nothing- ness (65,
emphasis added). Noel leaves the reader to conclude that ethnic and pan-African epistemologies
were insufficient and essentially irrelevant to human captives wrestling with nothingness and nonbeing throughout the Middle Passage. 20

Seeing Noel as constrained by the twentieth-century Herskovits-Frazier debate over the

extent of African survivals or retentions, Jeffersons view is that Noels theoretical
leanings are toward a toward a projection/excavation of black U.S religion over and
against the recovery of African religious continuities.
in areas where Protestantism was the dominant religion conditions for [African] survivals were
less favorable. Importantly, however, he contends, We can conjecture that African divinities
became identified, initially, with Old Testament figures in the United States, and finally, with
Jesus (13). He acknowledges the presence of African cosmologies and divine figures, but they are
only permitted presence under the auspices of black Christianity. There is no space for
conceptualizing African religious expressions outside of either overt African spirit manifestation
or the personification of Old Testament figures.21

In this way one can critique Noels project as similar in its methodological limitations and
underlying systematic theological structure that plagues the historicity of Rabateau. For
all its hermeneutic creativity in bringing a diverse range of sources and scholarly
perspectives under a single thesis, and force that shows the relevance of materiality and
the process of imagination of matter, unless one reads Noel concomitantly with Gomez,
one becomes unable to guard against this criticism:
rendering African bodies and religions opaquefor the purpose of stressing the racialized
material construction and phenomenological appearance of black bodies and black religion in the
New World. Through rendering African bodies and religions invisible, or even inconsequential,
the image of Africa meaning the material reality of African landless bodies and their ancestral
homelands and legacies, as identified by LongREMAINS opaque, invisible, and unintelligible.

Gomezs project is aimed at this overcoming this opacity that black religious studies have
interpreted as constitutive of the veil and unable to be overcome. His text keeps in
20 Elana Jefferson pp3
21 Jefferson pp 3

tension the African ethnic (socio-political-economic-cultural-lingusistic-religious)

epistemology and presence with the new emerging American born African subject noting
points of convergence and overlap as well as points of distinction. However the scope of
Gomez text does not go beyond 1830, begging the question of why? This seems to be the
point of inflection for scholars regarding the emergence of Black Christianity. Noels
text begins with this phenomenological emergence and seeks to interpret its materiality
through the thought of Charles Long. He accomplishes his task but at the expense of
historical glosses that support his position.
My problem with Gomez text is that he treats race historically but not
theologically (maybe it is outside his projects scope). If race is a theological category
that operates in a way that suspends actual historical categories (such as ethnicity), then it
invites gestures that go beyond a particular space and place. It creates peoples who are
primitive and stuck in an ahistorical reality. Race invites theological talk and theological
answers. Its presence must be understood in connection with modernity and the
epistemological categories and intellectual structures that created it, not merely as
something adopted by diverse and converging peoples of ethnic African decent. In this
way when Gomez says that, deep bonds of affection transcended ethnic ties, forming
one foundation for the eventually movement to race, a path chosen by rather than for
Africans22 He is preforming a similarly obtuse analysis that is comparable to the above
mentioned issue with Noel (retentions vs creolization). The category of race may have
been adopted by choice, but as race is, a social constructionresistant to scientific
definition, was essentially invented by Europeans in an effort to categorize various
populations both in Europe and beyond.23Gomez goes on to note that race as a category
only acquires meaning for Africans after the increase and frequency of cultural contact
22 Gomez pp 14
23 Gomez p 11

with Europeans. He is essentially agreeing with Noel that, the nature of the contacts and
exchanges from which modernitys epistemological categories and operations ensued and
through which its power inequities are legitimated as the inevitable consequences of
progress seen as an inherent feature of Western exceptionalism.24 Both quotes imply
that race is a new form of materiality that implicates the creation of contempory identity
politics in the violence of modernity, slavery, and the discovery of the Americas.
A revisionist approach reveals much but conceals, subverts, and masks just as
much as (Noels Creolization is similar) but goes beyond its limitations through its broad
treatment of themes and range of categories. He is interpreting or trying to imagine
matter outside of imposed historical racial binaries. Gomez shows us one way to do this
through an intense ethnic focus and clearly defined scope and goals, however he project
fails to attempt transcendence of the category of race, or to really treat and deconstructed
it , assuming it as an inevitable certainty based on this process of cultural contact and
ethnic negotiation and transformation. I can agree with the sense of nationhood or
connectedness or being distinct as a grouping of decedents of Africans and slaves, but I
am hesitant to submit this emergence to the intellectual category of race, seeing it as
reifying the present staus quo, and not helping one to move beyond static and limited
notions of identity. Lindens discussion of race applies here:
The process of cultural contact, political expediency, and socioeconomic justification formulated
not only the issue, but also the idea of race. In other words, the concept of race emerged as an
intellectual structure. The merchant-adventurer trader set it up for the sole purpose of maintaining
class interests and dominance. The merchant-adventurer-trader forged the concept of race from
the beginning, as a tool of control.25

Lindens concern is that all the focus on race and attendant diversity issues
function as categoriacal structures that the latencies of power operate through to
24 Noel pp 34
25 Linden pp 82

manipulate and control and the deeper levels of experience. The problem is teasing out a
conception of race beyond the binary of the veil, that does not obscure the flatten the
complexity of the historical record. Gomez does this by revealing the presence of ethnic
contingents, but he does not prevent them from being abstracted from their historical
origins. The homogenizing power of race supersedes Gomez polyethnic conception, and
results in re-embedding them into society and discourse.
So while both texts could be opposed and see as critiquing each others
foundations, however I would like to view them as complementary, with each strength
strengthening the others weakness.
The Gomez text reads like a brilliant space-time mapping of the cultural contact
and flow of human cargo, the contours of which are negotiated with a delicate hand, and
the byproduct being not a monolithic blackness, but rather a polyethnic african-american
identity. Thus he is great with a nuanced view of the middle passage, layered spatially
and geographically as well as temporally/culturally (i.e. the cultural overlapping of
various strains of African antecedents. Gomez historical approach in my opinion limits
him because he is forced at certain points to acknowledge the limitations of his data and
merely speculate, a practice he engages in rather precisely. He is sure to not overstate or
exaggerate claims made about certain groups. Actually arguably the greatest discursive
and analytical strength of the text is his weighing of the range of scholarship. His review
of the literature functions best when he dissects the claims of other secondary sources,
showing when relevant their problematic tendencies to be totalizing in their speculation
and conclusions derived from the evidence. Similarly, his perspective trends toward the
dialogical rather than the dialectical, holding in tension a multiplicity of black identities

during slavery without collapsing them, allowing polarities and dualities to not be fused,
resolved or synthesized but continually held in tension, fixed celestial objects in a
gravitational orbit.
This is why Noels text is a welcome compliment. Though a rough and choppy at parts,
It provides a hermetical method and base, built on the theoretical categories constructed
by Charles Long, that allows us to not speculate as Gomez does, but Go beyond (which to
be fair to Gomez was beyond the scope of his book) what may have contributed to a
coagulation of a diversity of African cultural and American cultural influences into its
byproduct, the American negro. Noel is discussing blackness phenomenologically and
thus is open to critiques about historical glosses and a relative homogenizing vision of his
text. I think his theoretical categories allow for an avenue to resist such a critique. HE is
dealing with contact, opacity, archaic all thematically central to Gomez discussion on
language, ethnicity, class, and religion in slavocracy
Noel provides the interpretive framework, and Gomez the historical details.
Gomez is a foundation, a starting point for the black Atlantic temporal framework. It
shows the many dialogical tensions inherent in the polytechnic black consciousness and
aesthetic based on region and, language, class, but primarily ethnic composition. This
cultural negotiation for Gomez takes on the form of neo-revisionist scholarship. The
slyvia frey notes the origins the creolization school, and gomez seems to fit better in the
neo revisionist camp, but the hermeneutical importance of creolization as an intellectual
category and theoretical structure reveals as much as it obscures.
Noels text has a interested in music and creolizaiton in relation to salsa in his last
chapter, as well as his methodological concerns that see the muluatto in the liminal space

outside the signified racial binary, and his hermeneutical tools opacity, silence, archaism,
which all thematically contain a level of ambiguity
The discussion of music and creolizaiton is important when one thinks aobut the
state of the 21st century post-modern black expression: hip-hop and rap. The variety of
styles based on culture and region could be seen as having a foundation inside the
polyethnic distribution in Gomez spatial-temporal ordering. However Gomez resolution
of these diverse strands and multiple tensions into the modern homogenized category of
race is problematic. He uses race to allude to the polytethchnic black consciousness
that arose through internal negotiation and adoption to the forced context of slavery,
however he fails to understand the hermeneutical implications from accepting this
category created out of the contacts, and exchanges of modernity, its materiality in the
words of Noel. It is at they psychic level of consciousness a structuring of your symbolic
system through the ideology of dominance. Thus we can critique hip-hops lack of black
consciousness , its ignorance not a direct link to slavery and urban violence, but more the
neo liberal capitalist vision of the productivity of blackness, black culture, and black
bodies, no different then in slavery. Race continues to operate as a category that obscures
as much as it reveals. The post modern hip hop has moved away from a modality that
embodies the dialogical similar to the moan/shout relation in the past. Its roots are born of
innercity struggle and its musical style and regional diversity may be to some degree a
result of the polyethnic African identity adapting to its presence on America, but when
the prophetic dimension is lost the dialogical tension dissipates and we are left solely
with the assimilation dimension. We can see this present in the corporate capitalist control
of black musical expression.

Both Gomez and Noel see the veil as negotiated space, matrix or contract and
exchange, and negotiated identity. I think Noel is more akin to use the language of
liminal space whereas I would describe Gomez conception of the veil as complex
temporal object that is the modern sign(ification) race. The focus for black religious
studies thus should be constructing ways of being in the world that open up new ways of
being in the world, new material realities to use the term employed by Long and Noel,
focusing no on doctrine or culture but on the intrinsic suffering inherent in the human
condition, and remember that the religious experience of blacks in American is born out
of this suffering. Thus not limiting the discourse to identity politics (in the realm of race,
economics or religion equally) but always connecting it to the irreducible in the human
condition, the tragic that reflects and points towards the presence of the divine mystery in
history. It takes a view from the underside,

Works Cited
Appiah, K. Anthony. "Africans Before Americans: An Argument for the Durability of
Imported Cultures in North America." New York Times, May 10, 1998.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/10/reviews/980510.10appiaht.html.
Braudel, Fernand. On History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Gomez, Michael Angelo. Exchanging Our Country Marks the Transformation of African
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998.
Hartman, Saudiya. Venus in Two Acts, Small Axe 26:12:2 (June 2008), 1-14
Jefferson, Elana. "Review: Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic
World." Practical Matters Spring 2010, no. 3 (2010): 1-4.
Linden Jr. SSJ., Phillip J. "Letting Go of Race: Reflections from a Historical Theological
View."Transgressive Theological Voices XXXVI, no. 1 (2013): 75-88.
http://internationaltheologicalcommission.org/VOICES/VOICES-2013-1.pdf.
Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of
Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.
Noel, James A. Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World. New
York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.