One of the preoccupations of Black theology is the need to revisit the past and to assess the ways in which that past has impacted on the agency and self-determination of Black people. We are all products of history. This issue of Black Theology has as its central concern, the ways in which historical forces have informed the existential realities of Black people across the world.
The power of the mythical fable that is Black Panther is the enticing prospect of Africa and the experiences of Black peoples across the world not being framed by the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave trade or the wider tentacles of colonialism. The fact that slavery and colonialism gave rise to major deleterious impacts on Black people remains the essential backdrop that frames the continued orthopraxis of Black theology and its commitment to the liberation of those who remain the Global majority heritage peoples of the world.
In this issue, our five articles are all focused on differing aspects of history and the historical forces that have impacted on ordinary people, the “least of these” (Matthew 25: 31–46), the proletariat of the world.
Nick Megoran’s article commences this issue of our journal. This article is an important first for this journal in that we have not published a piece concerning a “Theology of work” before. Megoran’s article is an interdisciplinary piece of work that reflects theologically on what it means to be treated ethically under regimes of Human Resource Management (HRM) in the neoliberal workplace. In replacing older models of personnel management, HRM has achieved a position of dominance that raises important pastoral and ethical questions about recognition of the personhood of workers. This work taps into the historic framing of enslavement and colonialism in which Black bodies were viewed as purely economic resources only, bereft of any sentient dimensions that would render them as human beings. This is an important first for Black theology.
Christipher Hunt provides the second article in this issue. Carter’s article focuses on the towering literary giant James Baldwin. Hunt explores two of Baldwin’s hugely important literary pieces, his early masterpiece, the play The Amen Corner and his last novel, Just Above My Head. In exploring both pieces, the author borrows the language of Muñoz, who “transfigures” conversion from signifying the entry of a new convert into a life of faith, to reimagining conversion/salvation as the abandonment of Christian belief and the leaving of ecclesiastical community for the higher call of love. In reversing the usual norms of conversion, Hunt’s article uses Baldwin as a means of opening up the trajectories through which Black and Womanist theologians can navigate the broader terrains for what constitutes true faithfulness and fidelity to Black bodies and matters of self-determination and self-love.
Selina Stone is one of the most promising and important new, emerging generation of womanist theologians in the UK. In this, her first (of many I hope) article in our journal, she commences with an exploration of Anglo-African history, by drawing on feminist historians who demonstrate that British enslavement, colonialism and particularly colonial Christian mission should be understood as gendered as well as racialised forms of oppression in Africa and the Caribbean. The article proceeds to look at the “Hostile environment” policies propagated by successive Conservative governments and Brexit as continuations of Britain’s White supremacist and masculinist colonial past by centring the experiences of the “Zambrano carers”: predominantly single Black mothers left destitute by the UK government, and Black and Brown Muslim women who have borne the brunt of Islamophobic violence. Her article is a response to the Editor’s own work Theologising Brexit.Footnote1 This is another important first.
Ikenna Paschal Okpaleke is another new author to our journal. The author is a postdoctoral researcher of Nigerian descent, working in Europe. This article explores questions of disunity and rampant forms of denominationalism that have weakened the effectiveness of Christianity and the impact it could have on Nigeria as a nation. The proliferation of denominations in Nigeria is a product of colonialism and the desire of the European nations to “carve up” Africa and foster seeds of sectarianism within individual African countries like Nigeria. The author demonstrates that while Christian’s bicker and betray each other for denominational gains, the whole nation decays to the detriment of all. This article makes a plea for inter-denominational cooperation in order support the development of the nation as a means of effecting greater forms of liberative praxis of Christian faith in Nigeria.
Michael T. Miller offers an important piece of work that examines two figures from the early 20th century beginnings of the Hebrew Israelite movement. Malinda Morris was a central, though forgotten, figure in William Crowdy’s Church of God and Saints of Christ but her creation of an independent Church upon Crowdy’s death has not so far been discussed. The other figure is Bishop Allan Wilson Cook and his 1925 booklet which offers biographical, legal, constitutional, and theological information about Cook and his branch of Morris’ Church. This article provides invaluable insight into the development and formation of the Hebrew Israelite movement and its role in constructing an independent mode of Black religious self-determination for Black people in the United States. This article is an important articulation of a movement that has often gone below the radar in terms of Black religiosity in the African Diaspora.
I trust you reading this issue of Black Theology: An International Journal.
Notes
1 See Anthony G. Reddie, Theologising Brexit: A Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique (London: Routledge, 2019).