Blackpentecostal Breath

Abstract

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy, and visual studies, Blackpentecostal Breath analyses the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence. The immediate objects of study Blackpentecostal Breath engages are the aesthetic practices—whooping, shouting, noise-making and speaking in tongues—found in Blackpentecostalism, a multiracial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect that has one strand of its modern genesis in 1906, Los Angeles, California. Blackpentecostal Breath argues that the aesthetic practices of Blackpentecostalism constitute a performative critique of normative theology and philosophy that precede the twentieth-century moment. These performances constitute an atheological-aphilosophical project, produced against the desires and aspirations for the liberal subject of modern theological-philosophical thought. In contradistinction to the desire for subjectivity, Blackpentecostal Breath theorizes the extra-subjective mode of being together that is the condition of emergence for otherwise worlds of possibility. These choreographic, sonic, and visual aesthetic practices and sensual experiences are not only important objects of study for those interested in alternative modes of social organization, but they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture.

The World as Police

“…But we should not forget that, as Hortense Spillers details, the middle passage 'marked a theft of the body' through 'actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile.' Forced to embody [29] [30]…”

Reading Breath in Literature

“…they are the very air we breathe. (Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," 1884) 3 Breath, usually so hard to see or notice, receives here three different encodings in the language of nineteenth-century aesthetics, each one disclosing an intimacy between art and the action of breathing that surpasses the purely figurative. 4 In the first, by the scientific literary critic E. S. Dallas, whose mid-century Poetics channelled the deductive reasoning of Aristotle and Bacon, and also in the third, by Henry James, respiration is used as a sign of naturalness that establishes the imbrication of art in life.…”

“…2 Ashon Crawley opens Blackpentecostal Breath by quoting Garner, calling the phrase one of the most striking expressions of the devaluation of black lives in the USA today. 3 But Crawley also finds in Garner's words an implicit challenge to think otherwise: "a desire for otherwise air than what is and has been given, the enunciation, the breathing out the strange utterance of otherwise possibility." 4 Under the aegis of "expressing experiences of hostile environments and efforts to make life within them more liveable," Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues in his review of Crawley's book, "breath" articulates the somatic effects of subordination but it also has an "impulse to create and sustain human relationships."…”

“…… His lungs were designed to take the cream off the thick air, and now the cream has gone he cannot recalibrate. 3 For Hulme's narrator, breath brings a heightened bodily connection to her environment. Baras's breathing, on the other hand, seems to alienate him from his environment.…”

“…While the conventions of extreme emotion typical of medieval romance writing seem far distant from reality, the world of lovesickness, swoons and sighs taps into medieval understandings of breathing, feeling and being in the world in ways that are surprisingly realist. 3 Breathing and consciousness are inextricable, and breathlessness is directly connected with disruptions of thought and feeling.…”