Abstract

As William Hart notes, we live in a deconstructive age. Whether we read Derrida or not, many of us in and outside of the academy are invested in destabilizing established narratives, ideas, and categories. Similarly, we are eager to show how dominant narratives and categories tend to cover over more promising ways of imagining and interpreting the world. Recently, this deconstructive spirit has been directed toward discourses about the black church, black religion, and black cultures more generally. Authors like Curtis Evans, Eddie Glaude, Anthony Pinn, and Barbara Savage, for instance, have challenged hoary tendencies to imagine the black church as a monolithic whole, to assume that black folk are naturally ..