2024 Articles

Blackness at the End of the World

Franklin, Antavius

This paper argues that there exists no ontotheological grounds for black life. As such, blackreligion and, by extension, black theology should consider the ways in which black life is life thatis lived ungrounded. The central claim of this paper notes that categories such as the good life,the human, freedom, and citizenship are inadequate to account for the reality of black life amidthe totalizing effects of antiblackness. As such, black theology should position itself to imagineblack theology beyond the confines of the science of faith and other colonial markers of life andhumanity. In essence, this paper seeks to make two theological claims/interventions; first, itquestions the use of the category of the human as a liberatory figure through which the blackcan attain freedom. Second, it throws into crisis the notion of eschatological time and salvationand the inability or difficulty to account for the black who has been rendered simultaneously inand out of time. Ultimately, this paper wants to think with black feminist futurity and Afrofuturistdiscourse as generative tools to imagine black life beyond the confines of antiblackness, if at allpossible.