Assistant Professor of Religion at Colorado College Christopher W. Hunt brought a new view of James Baldwin’s religion and queerness in a conversation hosted by Fordham Theology at McNally Amphitheatre on Feb. 20.
Hunt’s talk centered around his newly released monograph “Jimmy’s Faith: James Baldwin, Disidentification, and the Queer Possibilities of Black Religion.” The discussion was moderated by Rufus Burnett Jr., associate professor of systematic theology.
“Baldwin has no interest in damming up Christianity, or saving Christianity for the sake of saving Christianity, or holding on to Christianity because he feels that it has something generative to provide. He is out for something distinct,” Burnett said in an interview with The Observer about the event.
Burnett launched into the dialogue by asking Hunt for a definition of disidentification, a key concept Hunt featured in the title of his book. Hunt first traced the intellectual history of the term to the late José Esteban Muñoz, former chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Muñoz asserted that marginalized people could in certain cases re-deploy — disidentify with — concepts from a normative culture which excludes them, rather than discarding said concepts entirely.
Hunt said that he sees disidentification as the key to Baldwin’s relationship with religion. Baldwin did not remain a full-throated Christian, but he did not reject God or spirituality either. Instead, as Hunt describes, Baldwin included religious concepts and imagery in his writing, to great effect. He drew on his education in service of astute insights ranging from the effects of race to queer identity.
Hunt takes up Baldwin’s continual engagement with religion as an exemplar of disidentification.
“Hunt still has something unique to say, and it comes across with that disidentification theory,” Burnett said.
“And I thought, you know, here is a site where there’s a capacity to show God showing up in a place where folks typically don’t look for God, and that challenge to the room to consider that.” Rufus Burnett Jr., Associate Professor of Systematic Theology.
As an example, Hunt highlighted the importance of conversion in Baldwin’s work. Aside from the dictionary definition of changing one’s religion, Hunt detailed conversion as a profound representation of the potential of human change for Baldwin.
When speaking about conversion, Hunt narrated an intimate scene from Baldwin’s final novel, “Just Above My Head,” which Burnett said was his highlight of the talk.
“The moment that I feel was the most generative was when Hunt was walking through the characters in ‘Just Above My Head,’ particularly Arthur and Crunch, and he’s trying to show in this disidentifying way that they are being converted into the fullness of their humanity through their love-making,” Burnett said.
Burnett underscored the unique poignance of queer sexual interaction as a conversion in Baldwin’s novel.
“And I thought, you know, here is a site where there’s a capacity to show God showing up in a place where folks typically don’t look for God, and that challenge to the room to consider that,” Burnett said.
A key feature of Hunt’s writing highlighted Baldwin’s queerness. Burnett described Baldwin’s writing as complicating traditional discourse around Black religion.
“Hunt adds another layer to say: what about those whose sexual orientation — their notion of how they show up in the world, in their body — not to be reductive, but just consider that with respect to how what we say now is gender. So the gender put upon versus the sexuality/identity nexus that finds itself embodied in certain persons,” Burnett said. “And so he adds that layer to it and then sees Baldwin problematizing whose representation of flesh gets to be the defining representation. And then how does that get mixed in with race and the intersection of gender and sexuality?”
Baldwin held a sustained conceptual critique of race, according to Hunt. Hunt said that Baldwin saw whiteness as a “collective delusion” based on the maintenance of the fantasy of a pure and honorable history. To overcome the prejudices built into white identity formation, white people thus need to “face their history” properly to arrive at a more acceptable social framework.
Referencing the definition of “race-making” from Geraldine Heng, Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek, chair in English and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Hunt applied the idea to the political obstacles facing transgender Americans in his talk.
“We can have a long conversation about the racing, the race-making that is taking place with trans folks right now, right? I think we need to use that language, because that is the level of violence that trans folks are experiencing right now: Mark them as radically other, then you can justify their exclusion from the social body, and it’s only one step further to genocide. Consistently! But they’re not just marking trans folks as other. They are constituting themselves as a kind of white, Christian, pure people,” Hunt said.
Hunt’s urgency emphasized the relevance of Baldwin’s work to contemporary politics and religion. For Burnett, Fordham undergraduates could reconsider religion after the talk.
“I think that students reading Baldwin in light of what Hunt’s framework opens up is important because it shows that there’s a religiosity, there’s a spirituality, that’s not just personal but radically engaged in sociality, radically engaged in politics, radically engaged in what we might do for the most vulnerable of the globe,” Burnett said.
“Jimmy’s Faith: James Baldwin, Disidentification, and the Queer Possibilities of Black Religion” is available for purchase on the Fordham University Press website.
