Ashon Crawley interview - New Inquiry

Against the Normative World - interview with Sofia Samatar https://thenewinquiry.com/against-the-normative-world/

The best way I can think to reply to this is to talk about the personal. I grew up in a Blackpentecostal household in northern New Jersey. Both my father and mother are clergy and at one time, my brother and I were as well, all in the Church of God in Christ, the largest Blackpentecostal denomination in the world. In the church, I was a choir director, an organist (the Hammond B-3 organ is a vital instrument in the place of Blackpentecostal aesthetics, a very undertheorized instrument to date) and was on the verge of beginning what would have been a long, and perhaps very unsatisfying career as a preacher. I grew up very committed to the church, loving everything about the world even in its insularity, even in its enclosed, peculiar nature. In fact, we relished being “a peculiar people.” Folks that did not have to abide by the strictures of the normative world, folks that repudiated going to the movies, drinking alcohol, and smoking. It was, of course, a world with very rigid notions of sex and sexuality. However, there was much rumor and gossip that proliferated in this life world, lots of hushed conversations: so-and-so had a child out of wedlock; so-and-so is funny. Sex and sexuality were both central to the rumor and gossip economy but were also rhetorically categorically placed on the outside of the lifeworld. Without belaboring the point, once I accepted my own queerness and began to, in earnest, interrogate theologies of sex and sexuality that were repressive and diminished folks’ capacities for flourishing and vitality, I left the church almost wholesale.

Almost.

I kept listening to black gospel music, and still do listen to that genre more than any other. And this wasn’t just because I enjoyed it as a “style,” which is a term used almost always to denigrate and discard the radical potentiality and edge of the music. I enjoyed it, and enjoy it still, because the music still moves me, still resonates with me, still causes me at times to cry, still compels me deep in my flesh, still vibrates. And I began to wonder years ago: If it were possible to still be moved by the music, and still be moved by the aesthetic practices of speaking in tongues, or listening to the Hammond B-3, or hearing the Saints clap their hands and yelp and scream and cry out in ecstatic joy—if it were possible for the sonic force of this lifeworld to move me still—could such movement force me back into theologically violent, homophobic, sexist doctrinal thought? I began to wonder, and try to figure out in earnest, what was the relationship between aesthetic practice and thought. I was fearful that I would somehow be moved to a sort of repentance, to begin again to consent to theologies of violence. But it wasn’t until I read folks like Hortense Spillers with her notion of vestibularity and Saidiya Hartman and her concept of terror, it wasn’t until I read folks like Nathaniel Mackey and how he meditates on the remains of perfume even after the fact of broken bottles, until after I read folks like Fred Moten and his lingering on black performance, that I recalibrated concerns about Blackpentecostal aesthetics to ask, also, what can such a world, what can such aesthetic practices make possible.

Once I opened myself up, really made myself vulnerable, to the capacity for Blackpentecostal aesthetics to offer something to the world in excess of the theological rhetoric from which we typically think such practices, such performances emerge, I found an entirely otherwise modality of engagement with the very fact of my own existence. That is, I began to gain clarity and insight into things I did not at one time consider to be intellectual. I did not at one time think whooping—the intentioned elaboration and exaggeration of breath—during prayer and preaching were “intellectual,” only “fleshly” practices. As fleshly and anti-intellectual, such things were at one time unnecessary for pure theological reflection. But today, I’m totally cool with such practices being excessive for pure theological reflection because I think the possibility for pure theological—and philosophical—thought emerges by repressing, by gathering up and discarding, fleshly practices. And this is no more true for whooping than it is for shouting (which is not, curiously enough, vocalization and screaming, but is dance; think of shouting as part of the Ring Shout tradition); and this is no more true for whooping and shouting than it is for speaking in tongues.

What became clear to me is that each of these aesthetic practices is interconnected by breathing, but breath goes so undertheorized in much work. So in the book, I intentionally analyze breath as an aesthetic intellectual social practice. And after breath, I consider shouting, singing and speaking in tongues. In each case, I am simply asking: what can these aesthetics—discardable in the theological-philosophical thought of modernity, with its insistence on categorical distinction, distinction that racializes, genders, and sexes aesthetic practices such that the behaviors and performance I analyze are always already excessive because they are always already black—what can these aesthetic practices make possible as a critique of the curiously violent and violative normative world?

There are Otherwise ways to think temporality. There are Otherwise ways to think the concept of fleshly reality. The Otherwise, as the elaboration of the alternative, presumes that radically different relations have and do already exist. The black radical tradition is one space where I find the operation of the Otherwise. And in my own research, Blackpentecostalism also produces—while it is produced by—the Otherwise, the alternative. As such, it is a critique of the given, a critique of the normative.