More than ten years ago, Traci West, other religious
scholars, and I participated in a group to discuss the intersection of
postcolonialism, womanism, and queer studies. I am glad to see that West
includes all these perspectives in her book Solidarity
and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending
Gender Violence. West has written about and fought against violence against
African American women for a long time. Based on her encounters with activists
and scholars in Ghana, Brazil, and South Africa, West broadens the conversation
in her newest book to include Africana wisdom on ending anti-black racism
and gender-based violence.
The book recounts West’s visit to Cape Coast and
Elmina in Ghana, where slaves were kept before they were loaded as human cargo
onto ships bound for Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Americas. The slave trade
was an integral part of European colonial expansion, and anti-black racism
played a key role in it. Comparable to what Paul Gilroy has done in The Black Atlantic, West attempts to
suture broken memories of Africans separated by oceans. Her account of Africana
activism and resistance in four countries represents a countermemory to the
global myths of progress and modernity, and a subversive description of
neoliberal capitalism, which targets and sacrifices black female bodies. It
documents how Africana activists and scholars have fought against colonial
legacy, anti-black racism, and heteropatriarchy across the continents.
Postcolonial scholars have been concerned about
representation of the Other in knowledge production. In the Introduction, West
discusses her decolonizing method, which includes interweaving narratives with
theoretical analyses, paying attention to reason and emotions, and being open
to uncertainties and messiness. What impresses me most is her refusal to
produce “objective” ethnographic data of the countries she has visited. She
insists on keeping the border between the researcher and native informant fluid
by presenting portraits of “intercultural dynamics in motion” (20). West tells us her reactions on visiting the
Candomblé temple in Salvador, Brazil, her uneasiness about her host’s suspicion
of her intention, and her discomfort in gazing at black male prisoners. Her
account shifts back and forth between gender violence in the US and foreign
contexts. This juxtaposition prevents her readers from objectifying other
peoples and demonizing their cultures as if gender-based violence is uncommon
in the US.
Her decolonizing method requires utmost honesty and
self-reflexivity. West has devoted her professional career to the study of
gender-based violence and especially intimate violence. This is a topic that
not many have chosen to focus on, because it is hard and emotionally taxing.
West does not want to objectify the victim-survivors or invite a kind of
voyeurism into their suffering. Yet her narratives successfully portray the
gravity of violence, and its cost to the human body and soul. West admits that
she has unresolved questions and reveals her “vulnerabilities that include
uncertainties, hopes, blunders, awakenings, and commitments” (17). In those
poignant moments when West caught herself reflecting on her cultural biases and
class and heterosexual privileges, she invites her readers to unlearn their
habituated ways of being and be self-reflective in entering another cultural
world. The book is beautifully written. For example, West narrates the
affective experience she had while she sang “We glorify your name” in a ritual
of remembrance, rode in a bus with common people in Brazil, and dipped her toes
in the cold ocean after a long day of listening. The book engages not only the
readers’ intellect, but also elicits emotional resonance.
In the American individualistic, consumerist culture,
spirituality has often been described in private, personal, and transcendental
terms. In contrast, West grounds her discussion of defiant spirituality in
activism, especially in combating violence against black LGBTQI persons in
South Africa. This defiant spirituality is communal, embodied, antiracial,
interreligious, and practice-based. It is a spirituality that “accentuate[s]
the human-life enhancing and connectivity” (194) against death-dealing forces
that condone violence against black women. It involves challenging existing
cultural myths and Christian misogyny and homophobia, crossing identity
borders, organizing collective action, and forming alliances. Defiance
spirituality is not timid or meek but involves faith-based confrontation of
white racist realities and of the hypocrisy of faith communities when religious
rhetoric does not match action. Using the ritual of remembrance at the Cape
Town Free Gender group as an example, West shows the importance of creating
space to grieve and to remember.
The conclusion has a thought-provoking title “Hope as
a Process.” Hope is often described as a state: whether you are hopeful or
hopeless. Hope in Christianity is associated with time—the final eschaton.
“Hope as a process” signals contingency without secure promise, directionality
without assured outcome. For West, this hope is found not only in those
nurtured by religious symbols and faith, but also in secular activists working
for justice. She argues that “defiant Africana spirituality and Africana hope
are interdependent” (227). This is because “Africana spirituality births
Africana hope for solidarity in ending gender violence, which in turn fosters a
solidarity within which hope can be found” (227). Africana defiant spirituality
involves antiracist commitments, countercultural courage, and forging alliance
within the politics of intercultural dynamics. West concludes that learning
defiantly with Africana activist leaders from diverse settings has given rise
to hope. She describes this learning metaphorically as a blackening process, which repudiates the denigration of blackness
by white Christianity and colonialist thought. I want to add that this
blackening process also involves seeing the complexity and contradiction in any
given situation. It chastises us not to find an easy solution by resorting to
naïve hopefulness or romanticized hope. It has the humility to admit as Paul
says, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I
know in part, but then shall I know as also I am known.” (I Cor. 13:12, KJV).
As I was reading this book in the past months, the
news of the Hong Kong protests occupied my mind as I was born and grew up in
Hong Kong. I pondered about the relation between civil disobedience and defiant
spirituality. During her short visits to each of the three countries, West
talked to leaders, participated in meetings, and visited sacred and historical
sites. She did not have a chance to observe mass protests and describe defiant
spirituality manifested in the “assembled bodies” (Judith Butler) of mass
demonstration. In her examples of changing the marital rape laws in Ghana,
combating sex-trafficking in Brazil, and challenging discrimination against
LGBTQI persons in South Africa, I wonder why kinds of mass action was needed.
The protests in Hong Kong were largely peaceful in the beginning, but with
increased police brutality, some of the protesters have turned radical and
violent. I have been thinking about the limits of defiance. In The Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil, Candice Delmas says we do not
only have the duty to obey the laws, but the duty to justice, and “the duty of
justice demands resisting injustice, bettering institutions, and frustrating
wrongs, and it supports principled disobedience in the process. Given our
less-than-ideal polities, obeying the law is neither the sole, nor necessarily
the most important, of our political obligations” (106) During the civil rights
movement in the US and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, protesters
used different strategies, some were violent. I need to think more about the
ethics of social actions and the principles of non-violence to effect social
changes.
*This blog is based on a paper presented at a panel to review the book at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion on November 24, 2019 at San Diego, CA.
