Spirit of the Postcolony: Global Pentecostalism, Global Blackness
RELI 214
Spring 2025
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
AFAM 214 |
From Azusa Street to Zambia, Pentecostalism has exploded as a late modern religious movement among Black-descended people, transnationally and diasporically. This course will seek to interpret this globalization of what is often understood as a mimetic practice of Anglo-Evangelical form and practice of religion as a diasporic and transnational form of Black sociality and worldmaking. The course takes its cue from African social theorist and historian Achille Mbembe's conceptualization of the "Postcolony" as the principal of power through which Black life is lived--the arbitrary, absurd yet constitutive anti-black governance, which marks Black life-in-death around the globe. The necropolitics of the postcolony is yet the dialectical whence and whither of the pouring out of the (Holy) Spirit on Black flesh, an afterlife of coloniality and charism, which reimagines Blackness, reanimates scenes of desubjectivation and death, and reterritorializes urban space--the city--through an interstitial imagination of possibility. Focused largely on the Anglophone remnants of empire, Pentecostalism will be examined in the following locations: the United States, Nigeria, Ghana, Great Britain, Jamaica, and Brazil. The course will pursue the following themes in each locale: 1) history; 2) relationship to Black radical (or anti-colonial thought); 3) gender and sexuality; and 4) expressive culture. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS RELI |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
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Past Enrollment Probability: 75% - 89% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Texts include excerpts from:
ON THE POSTCOLONY by Achille Mbembe
PENTECOSTALISM by Walter Hollenweger
SPIRIT ON THE MOVE edited by Judith Casselberry and Elizabeth Pritchard
AFRICAN PENTECOSTALISM by Ogbu Kalu
BETWEEN BABEL AND PENTECOST edited by Andre Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani
FIRE FROM HEAVEN by Harvey Cox
AZUSA REIMAGINED by Keri Day
DREAD AND PENTECOSTAL by Robert Beckford
WHO IS AFRAID OF THE HOLY GHOST edited by Afe Adogame
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Examinations and Assignments:
Discussion posts, Group Presentation, Digital humanities final project |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course fulfills the Historical Traditions, Method & Theory, or "additional course" requirement for the Religion major/minor. |
| Instructor(s): Millner,Marlon Times: ..T.R.. 08:50AM-10:10AM; Location: CAAS LOUNG; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 17 | | SR major: 2 | JR major: 2 | | |
| Seats Available: 15 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 3 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 4 | FR: 3 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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