In Blackpentecostal Breath, Ashon T. Crawley invokes the “atheological-aphilosophical” as a mode of being otherwise: otherwise than a theology grounded in the western logic of disciplinary boundaries, otherwise than a philosophy that rejects the flesh and blackness as flesh. His project is precisely one of enfleshment: in studying black church practices he pursues the communal breath, the collective shout. His atheology-aphilosophy is a “meditative performance”: meditative connoting interiority and the suspension of time, performance demanding exteriority and historical time. This inside-outside, timeless-timely, imaginative performance is the practice Crawley identifies as Black Study.

I want to enter there. My doorway, offered by Crawley’s text, is an arch formed by two words: tarrying and together.

Tarrying

“Blackpentecostal Breath does not so much arrive at conclusions as it tarries with concepts,” Crawley writes (3). Tarrying is an active form of waiting. To tarry is to wait with intention, to abide with expectation, as, during William Seymour’s prayer meetings in Los Angeles in 1906, the congregation would “tarry—wait with fervent prayer and song—intensely for the experience of Spirit baptism” (10). In “tarrying with concepts,” then, Blackpentecostal Breath waits on these ideas with fervent prayer and song. This is a powerful way of conceiving of study, and especially Black Study, which must engage the then and now while holding the possibility of the not yet.

At the same time, there’s something strange about this notion of tarrying, of waiting intensely with prayer and song for some kind of arrival, in a book written against teleology and western linear thinking. Surely there must be something beyond then and now and yet to come. I think this is where Crawley’s idea of the otherwise becomes most important, for the otherwise, he insists, exists outside of time. It’s neither past, nor present, nor future, but subjunctive. In Blackpentecostal Breath, you can see the effort he makes to open a space for the otherwise in his writing. This is a difficult task (one of two tasks of near-impossibility Crawley sets himself in this book—I discuss the other below). Writing, after all, is experienced in a line from beginning to end: its performative aspect binds it to linear time. To subvert the line of writing, to bend it out of its straight shape, Crawley employs backward leaps through history, moving, for example, from current practices of Blackpentecostal shouting, to the nineteenth-century “Ring Shout,” to older Afro-Arabic Sufi traditions. He seeks constantly to undermine cause and effect, always insisting that what we see and experience as forms of resistance precede instances of violence, that we—that is, that black people and cultures—precede violence, that we are not produced by violence and are in no way beholden to it or held captive to its force. He also—and this to me is his most energizing move, his most precious intervention—weaves personal memories, correspondence, and art projects into his text. These different modes of thought produce otherwise moments. They are springboards out of time, and teach us, with their riffs and elaborations, their enthusiasm, their brilliant excess, what atheology-aphilosophy might be.

And so I return to tarrying and its teleology. Is it possible to tarry without expecting a certain end? If so, tarrying would be something like the phrase by Gwendolen Brooks that Crawley quotes: “to live along.” It would be to live alongside, to embrace repetition and ongoingness, to sit with things, to get along, to get by. It would offer a sort of twist on the idea of sankofa, which Crawley also invokes: the concept, derived from Akan philosophy, of “go back and fetch it.” “Go back and fetch it” is often taken to mean that one must look back into history in order to find what one needs for the present and future. But the idea of the otherwise might teach us to go sideways and fetch it, or stay put and tarry with it: to find what we most need in the experience of what’s already here.

Together

Two near-impossible tasks, I said. If the first derives from the linearity of writing as performance, the other comes from its meditative solitude, its silence, its distance from the breathing presence of other people. As a book about breath, song, shouting, and speaking in tongues, Blackpentecostal Breath is a contradiction. The “joyful noise” of black congregants, their “tarrying praise,” Crawley admits, “is anything but easy to recount through writing” (166). Such enunciation “avoids its own representation.” And since avoidance is a key term in Blackpentecostal Breath, a strategy of resistance, it would seem that Crawley offers here a critique of his own project, or at least some concern about the effort to represent in writing a noise that resists such treatment. If enfleshment, as he maintains, is distinct from embodiment, a movement of a collectivity rather than the production of the body as a subject, then there is a risk involved in writing, in being a body alone and writing rather than part of a congregation enfleshed in song.

Well, I don’t really believe that, to tell the truth. I almost wish he hadn’t gone there, in the direction of a kind of hand-wringing, a sighing over the limitations of writing, except that I guess it was necessary to mention the difference between his chosen mode of expression and those he studies. I suppose he had to mention it, or someone else surely would. But I want to think about the way he defines Black Study, as a “methodological mode of intense, spiritual, communal intellectual practice and meditative performance” (8). Blackpentecostal Breath engages and names an intellectual community that includes theologians, poets, and key voices of Black Study, the ones I think of as the musician-philosophers, the griots: James Baldwin, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten. More: Crawley opens himself to the voices of his archive, not only quoting them but channeling them, particularly the poet Nathaniel Mackay, in his intellectual lyricism, his use of colloquial language, and his sensuous outpourings of memory. This is breath: “the space between script and speech” (220). This is philosophy mouth to mouth. This is where Crawley departs from academic respectability, from the maintenance and policing of borders, and is enfleshed in the collective singing. It’s infectious, too. Read this book and then see how you write in your journal. It’s an experience of exteriority, like the shrieking of a camp meeting where, it was noted, people “catch from one to another, till a great Part of the Congregation is affected” (187).

*

so i read blackpentecostal breath and loved it so much and tried to write about it, i don’t know, i wrote like a poet not a theologian but what can you do? but anyway i wrote about tarrying and being together and it made me want to ask you about forgiveness. i feel like forgiveness is pulsing so much about this text ashon . . . forgiveness as healing and the coming-into-being of community . . . but sometimes it’s just not there, and you say it too, that you know the church isn’t utopia, it participates in sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia. and yet you write “something is there, in the aesthetic practices,” that is working for us, all of us. no matter what, the music is on our side. it’s so beautiful when you write of touching that other boy in the bathroom in the church basement, it’s like you are, you’re both, in that moment, forgiving the church.

i’m reading a lot of mennonite missionary stories these days . . . stories of my family, kind of . . . you know my mom was a missionary in Somalia, and that’s how she met my dad. and reading what you wrote about Sufi tradition it made me think of how the missionaries viewed, and maybe still view, Somali Sufism. there’s this idea that sufism is less violent and extremist than other forms of Islam, and that for this reason, it’s a good entry point for christian missionaries, like you can get close to a sufi mosque, get people to talk to you, get inside. I really can’t help seeing this as imperialist! so it’s painful, you know? and it’s like—how do you tarry together with that—how to live along? i keep thinking of jacob and the angel: “i will not let thee go unless thou bless me.” that struggle, that wrestling, that tarrying, active waiting. and what if the blessing never comes? can we—i wonder, after reading your book—can we see the wrestling itself as a reconciliation? or an analogue to reconciliation, anyway, a tarrying despite everything, a sharing of the breath. this, it seems to me, would bust the whole notion of forgiveness out of time, and maybe return it to itself. to refuse to move on, to always be in a mode of tarrying, ceaseless movement, living and wrestling along. wrestling along, breathing along through racism, imperialism, homophobia, holding to the music. i don’t know, there are ways i don’t expect the church to bless me in this life and i don’t expect to let go either.

xoxo

I do not remember going to the Protestant church my family attended on Sundays in the early-1970s but, according to stories I have been told, I was there. I went to church. My most vivid memory of church is not the infrastructure or the rituals, but instead the long and beautiful and scratchy coat my grandmother made by hand, using fabric that was supposedly patterned with the family (McKittrick) tartan; this coat was accompanied by a soft white faux fur muff. The soft muff was only to be worn with the scratchy coat and I wore both to church. When I received by copy of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, by Ashon Crawley, I went to church. Again. And it was not easy. Situating his thinking in, with, and beyond the sounds of black theologies and aesthetics—whooping, noise, shouting, glossolalia—he offers blackpentecostalism, conceptually and empirically, as emerging from, yet refusing, the logics of white supremacy. The book is thick, bringing together black studies, queer and sexuality studies, studies of race, philosophy, religious and theological studies, and more, in order to imagine how blackness engenders what Crawley describes as atheological-aphilosphical practices. Atheological-aphilosophical practices hover outside and across normative theological and religious narratives, noticing not only how blackness and black belief systems are excised from normative monohumanist worldviews, but also how black life is in, but not necessarily of, the world (241). In and but not necessarily of: black life is thus a way of knowing and living and thinking and reading and hearing and sounding otherwise, where otherwise is illegibility (within the logics of colonialism) and, simultaneously, for many, a recognizable way of living black.

Crawley’s text works out how the brutality of anti-blackness and the violence of modernity produced the conditions through which black humanity tells itself outside normative modes of communication: in breath (pressure gradients between the lungs and atmosphere); in shouting (as choreosonic dance, moving together, moving with); in noise (decentered testimony, collective potential, joyfulness); in speaking in (glossolalic) tongues (incoherent spiritual reflection, endarkened logics). These alternative modes of communication privilege the unspeakable and the unwritten and draw attention to an expressive way of living with and against racial capitalism: pushing the air out, bringing air in, grooving, feeling sound physiologically, enunciating the unspeakable and unspoken. Blackpentecostal Breath is thus attentive to honoring the incomprehensibility of blackness as “aesthetic vitality” (235).

What is studied in Blackpentecostal Breath, I want to suggest, is livingness. The analytical sites in this text (breath, noise, ecstatic narrative, sound, movement) are, often, ungraspable. While Crawley certainly grounds his discussion a range of primary and secondary sources (archives, novels, scriptures, performances, theories, and so on), what he studies and what he wants us to dwell on, are the untethered contours of black life. Thus, the breath and the dance, the tongues and the joyful noise, are not always thick and knowable; the breath, dance, tongues, noise, are porous and unsettled. The porous and unsettled open up an ungrounded mooring. They move through and with the flesh and are thus sutured to blackness and black study and the density of collectivity and possibility. Put a different way, Crawley asks that we understand how resistances to racial violence, within the context of black religiosity, are ephemeral acts that signal deep sociality—deep sociality that is already practiced and always yet to come. Thus, the breath and the movement and the sound and the enunciations—unwritten and unspeakable ways of refusing white supremacy—map black life and livingness as the capacity to forge relational ties that are not typically honored within our prevailing system of knowledge. Here, the analytical move is to refuse a cosmogony (and analysis) of black breathlessness and expiration, and instead focus on how the production of black knowledge, all black knowledge forms, signal radical ways of living with. This attention to living with is threaded through the entire text—on my first reading I thought of it as a melancholic plea of (not for) life—and rests on understanding displacement ethically. And then, as one reads and scans and reads and rests, Moth’s Powder—an unpublished text by Crawley—interrupts. Moth’s Powder, where church’s infrastructure and architecture are undone from the inside, and it feels good (134).

Crawley put me in church. Not the infrastructure of church, but instead the aesthetic vibes that move outside and move through its walls. He put me in church by delineating an alternative (atheological-aphilosphical) belief system, one emerging from modernity, that is illegible and outside and elsewhere. In a world that despises blackness, in a world where so many poets and scholars and artists and writers and workers are scrambling to comprehend and talk through and undo the profound hatred for black, in a world that profits from circulating and analyzing obituaries (even our pleas for life are, it seems, undercut by death notices accumulating and assembling and then falling away). This is a frayed and awful world. The alternative belief system is a ritual of otherwise as an ongoing pronouncement of black humanity. Churching. To go to church is to go “where the love is felt” (22).

Ashon Crawley’s Blackpentecostal Breath is a text that eschews easy definition and labels. Convinced of the problem of categorical distinction, the argument for pure difference between categories of thought, Ashon’s writing plays in a variety of “zones.” In this sense, his contribution here might be thought as a thinking that inhabits a limit. And it is this ability to think blackness as a mode of being and form of thinking that emerges at and in the limit of certain modes of reasoning that highlights how, perhaps, that limit contains its own multiplicity—is a space in which to live and move and have being. For Crawley, the fact that the mastering discourses of theology and philosophy hit a limit in thinking black life means that thought and flesh are intimately related. Theology and philosophy attempt to subjugate and subject black life to forms of Western reason and knowing—attempt to capture the impossibilities of black life and flesh into respectably organized systems of thought. Against this subjection, Ashon argues for blackness as that which escapes this attempt at capture via the flesh.

The alignment of Ashon’s project with Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology (an alignment that is made explicit by the author), suggests we might consider Crawley’s work as a critique offered in the same spirit. What is both most striking and most exciting is that such an intellectual companion to Althaus-Reid is found in the work of one is who decidedly not a theologian, and yet who understands black religious practice as a text worthy of reading without diminishing its faith-claims. At the same time, he also refuses to subject black religiosity to the overdeterminations of reason as produced by Christian theology and secular philosophy—neither of which know what to do with black flesh. For these reasons, I’m interested in the reading methods in Ashon’s approach. Exhibiting a true clarity of vision and facility of style in how he structures Blackpentecostal Breath, Ashon enacts a performance of Black study in his reading of the flesh.

By organizing the text around blackpentecostal practices and using this enfleshment as the starting point for his thought, Ashon adeptly reinforces his central thesis—there are other ways to read and think the flesh. That these practices “yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture” (4). Thus, in some sense, Crawley’s method of reading these practices is a repetition of them. He considers the flesh with an apophatic impulse, reading with a posture of unmastery and a deep sense of communion. This is Black Study. Study which is “a methodological mode of intense, spiritual, communal intellectual practice and meditative performance” (8).

Each chapter highlights readings practices that, rather that sublating the flesh into a higher spiritual meaning, take the flesh at its word—even an incoherent word. This ability to read the flesh as a text that may be confounding to Western reason is indebted to Hortense Spillers recognition of the hieroglyphics of the flesh. Crawley’s turn to blackpentecostalism is crucial here because it does not attempt to read the hieroglyphics of the flesh as completely decipherable within his thought or conception of black sociality. Instead, Ashon highlights how reading these hieroglyphics is not a matter of translating them into proper speech, but is a matter of reading them as an indictment of the violence that can only come into being as a response to the flesh and its social life which precedes such violence.

The danger of learning to read the flesh is how such learning can become an attempt to master the flesh. Crawley guides us here, though, showing how the desire for knowledge in itself misses the point of the flesh. Something other than the production of knowledge is happening. Something else is going on when flesh congregates, when voices gather, when hands raise and bodies move in unexpected ways. The thing about the flesh is that it is not about understanding, it’s about being together as noted in Solomon Northrup’s text 12 Years a Slave—a being together that, as Ashon points out, is diminished and erased in the film adaptation. (Another instance of a Western rationale attempting to make sense of enslaved flesh by erasing their having been together.) Being together is a way of being in the world that goes against being as centered on individualist desires for privatized forms of existence. Privatized thought worlds, privatized property, privatized spaces. Against this, Ashon invites us to attend to how the flesh pulses against attempts at capture and how this stealing away from capture and desiring to be together is not a final achievement, but a form of life. This form of life is why Ashon locates sociality in the breath and the capacity for breath. The animation of matter via the breath is the grounds of possibility for thinking and reading otherwise.

This capacity to produce otherwise is rooted in ongoing openness, a spiritual-material, atheological-aphilosophical vulnerability. This openness and capaciousness, however, does not need to rise to the level of visibility, does not need to declare itself for its affects to be made nor felt in worlds. Indeed, visibility can be a problem. (236)

And this is what I find useful about how Crawley both critiques black theology and constructs an otherwise modality of thought—what he calls an atheological-aphilosophical form of thought. Ashon manages to read blackpentecostal performances very deeply and in a non-instrumentalizing way. This alone is a significant achievement for any critical text. But Crawley not only performs such readings, he desires to share such vulnerabilities, reading practices—these otherwise methodologies—as the possibility of rediscovering something felt that we may have already known but forgotten. The fact that something else, something more, is happening in and through blackpentecostal movements and feelings of the flesh than is able to be articulated in coherent speech or registered in respectable, noncriminal movements, or captured by liberal critiques of such spaces’ lack of inclusivity is brought to our attention. Crawley highlights how one need not discard or disavow blackpentecostalism in order to get to a mode of reading that is not invested in “coherent thought, coherence itself, [which] emerges from the dislodging of difference as originary in the service of the search for purity” (42).

In moments like this, Blackpentecostal Breath reads like a necessary leap to the possibility it announces. Of course, much like other necessary leaps of thought, this leaping leaves some gaps that, while forgivable, require some consideration. While any overelaboration or attempt at explanation might border on betraying the point of a work like Ashon’s, I still think there are places to push for more clarity regarding what the flesh requires of us and our thinking and being together. And, I think such pushing opens onto how I understand the possibility of black theology.

One danger I see in Crawley’s work that can sometimes appear to undercut this radical revisioning of engagement with black religious spaces and performances is the repeated gesture to concepts of infinity and affirmation—cast as positive affects—as measures of sociality with little interrogation and elaboration. For instance, he frames Otherwise in terms of infinite alternatives:

Otherwise, as word—otherwise possibilities, as phrase—announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is. And what is is about being, about existence, about ontology. But if infinite alternatives exist, if otherwise possibility is a resource that is never exhausted, what is, what exists, is but one of many. Otherwise possibilities exist alongside that which we can detect with our finite sensual capacities. (2)

Throughout the text, the affirmations of possibility for otherwise are dependent on these inexhaustible possibilities. While one might read this affirmation of infinity against the neoliberal slogan coined by Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative,” I have reservations about positing infinite alternatives, infinite resources, and infinite existence as Otherwise.

My critique here is not that infinity and affirmation are “bad” or simply “neoliberal.” Rather, my point here is that as norms of social life, infinity and the affirmation of infinity as desirable are too undetermined and thus are easily taken up in uncritical directions. Given that Ashon is invested in the possibility of a “critical academic” who can inhabit the university otherwise, being more discerning about what is held in otherwise being seems crucial for faithfulness to the flesh.

For instance, in what sense does having an infinity of alternatives actually help us discern what to do in a given moment—help us decide what is most just? It seems being able to affirm the flesh also depends on being able to say no to that which would subjugate the flesh to pure distinction. Is there a difference between the yes and the no that allows one to affirm the flesh and the yes and no that founds the desire for categorical distinction? Ashon argues that our sensual perceptions are influenced by epistemologies—that otherwise epistemologies guide our sensory perceptions. Yet how does one discern which epistemologies affirm the flesh? Indeed, tech companies like Tesla have no problem imagining infinite alternatives to our world, developing infinite and inexhaustible resources to power and affirm the value of difference as it is oriented toward ever-increasing knowledge of planetary systems, energy, and networks and drives toward infinite human life. These same companies also have no problem working with Donald Trump to ensure their vision. Thus, in many ways, the techno-capitalist vision of the future is not opposed or antagonistic to infinity or affirmations in themselves. In this case, how does one discern justice from the flesh?

This difficulty of discerning justice from the flesh is apparent toward the end of Blackpentecostal Breath. Arguing for the possibility of being otherwise, being critical academics in the university, Ashon writes of the “dark dense folds of plenitude” that affirms this possibility. Here, black sociality seems less helpful for discerning what it means “to transform the world” (237) given the fraught conditions we labor under in the academy. The opacity of the flesh (as Charles Long might put it), its unknowability, seems to obfuscate the matter of judgment that the flesh impels. Alongside otherwise being and sociality, what possibilities for judgment exist as something other than categorical distinction? That is, as important as the critique of knowledge and its production is, the possibility to determine the difference between the production of categorical distinction and the production of anoriginary difference in the flesh remains. Otherwise, we would only be able to understand Ashon’s production of knowledge here as a repetition of the desire for pure distinction. Judgment is necessary for justice and arguing for enfleshed and otherwise reading methods also requires a more careful elaboration of how justice is known and enacted, how it is different from Western conceptions of judgment and justice—even if it is not a pure difference.

It seems, by Ashon’s own account of the flesh, that one can have a robust conception of alternatives to existing orders without leaning into infinity, a concept tinged more by its absolute mystery, unknowability, and imperceptibility. But, in the case that one wants to turn to the infinite in order to affirm the flesh, the God-talk that Ashon is rightly suspicious of seems, ironically, more appropriate for thinking the relation between finitude and infinity than anything else. Without such theological reflection, it seems more difficult to get the critical leverage on infinity in order to make the yes or no distinction, the judgment calls, that enable Ashon to affirm the flesh against the violence of categorical distinction.

As someone who understands herself as a black theologian I find it necessary in the wake of Blackpentecostal Breath, to affirm the possibility of black theology, not as the desire for the proper—for the assimilation of blackness within theology in order to make blackness respectable to theology—but as the intensification of this immanent critique, the judgment that black flesh makes. For, to make such judgments is not to become legible to the legitimators of canons, but to continue to speak a word that cuts against the quick of white reason, undressing its appearance of decency to expose the violence of mastery and sovereignty it covers.

This undressing requires one understand black theology as a negative affirmation. One must press into the naysaying unsaying that marks the finitude of black flesh as a living in the face of white death dealing, impressing theological speech with the urgency of black life.

Announcing a no to white reason and violence is the only way to say yes to black life. One can say, then, that the impossibility of black theological and philosophical work means it is only possible to do black theology as this negating theology. As this simultaneous naysaying and unsaying. Affirming the possibility of impossible speech. Introducing incoherence into the purity of theological thought. It may be, then, that it is only through the introduction of the no from black theology, a critique that is immanent to the purity of theological thought, that Blackpentecostalism is able to intervene into such thought as atheological—is able to intervene into such thought as the exhalation of a yes. An affirmation of black flesh.

Where there is no music, the Spirit will not come.

—West African Proverb

Ashon Crawley’s Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility stunned me: First came admiration, then search for adequate and appropriate reading hermeneutics, then some understanding, finally—joy! Quite honestly, this is the most difficult book I have tackled since first wrestling with Bernard Lonergan’s Insight.1 The difficulty of navigating Insight lies in actually and practically coming to terms with one’s self-appropriation, that is, one’s discovery of one’s self and of one’s own intellectual operations or activities as an inquiring, intelligent, reasonable, responsible human subject. Self-appropriation is grounded in an “eros of the mind, the desire and the drive to understand”;2 it is grounded in the dynamism of the human spirit, the desire of knowing, choosing, deciding, acting, doing, loving. The difficulty in navigating Blackpentecostal Breath lies in one actually and practically relinquishing hegemonic modes of discourse and understanding that are opposed to lived black experience or that negate or pathologize that lived experience prima facie. Crawley invites us “to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible”3 and, in this way, affirm what is “otherwise” and to allow ourselves to be caught up in its possibility of black beauty. By foregrounding Insight in my critical reading of Blackpentecostal Breath, I propose that these two very different and very demanding works are at one in apprehending the complexity and intricacy of the eros of the human spirit and its possibilities; foreground epistemology,4 ethics, and authenticity or integrity in advocating the unity of mind and heart and act; and seek ways to respond in love to the already gifted love of Divine charismatic initiative. Finally, in a Foucauldian sense neither Insight nor Blackpentecostal Breath is a theoretical work, although each draws upon various theories and may be said to advance a theory—of human understanding in Lonergan’s case, of aesthetic possibility in Crawley’s case. In a Foucauldian sense, each as theoretical is practical, is practice.5

Blackpentecostal Breath enfleshes four interlocking aspects of a blackpentecostal aesthetic—breath, shout, noise, and tongues, and, thus (re)orients theological performativity. In this regard, Blackpentecostal Breath recaptures, dances, plays with,6 “works” and “works on,” at least, three areas: (theological) method, church, and poetics.

To say that Blackpentecostal Breath “works” as well as “works on” signifies not merely Crawley’s erudition and originality, but his skill as conjurer. “The conjurer in Afro-American culture,” writes Houston Baker, “is frequently referred to as a ‘two-headed doctor,’ a person of double wisdom who ‘carries power’ as a result of his or her initiation into the mysteries of the spirit.”7 The conjurer “works” not so much to solve problems or resolve difficulties, although this is one recognized function of conjure. In Blackpentecostal Breath, Crawley discloses and interprets, makes the truth of the matter, the flesh of the matter visible. He follows in a “pharmacopeic tradition of practices”8 that evoke and sustain social-historical transformations as these materialize in “ritually patterned behaviors and performative uses of language and symbols conveying healing/harming intent and employing biblical figures and issuing in biblical configurations of cultural experience.”9 Crawley sets out not only an analysis and critique of Blackpentecostalism, but offers a performative-analytic exposition of its dynamic, expressive, fleshed and fleshly movement of and in spirit—spirituality. Blackpentecostalism appears, quite radically, as act. Crawley opens the eyes of the reader to see Blackpentecostalism’s fleshly acting out and acting out of spirit and to glimpse a spirit-infused, spirit-possessed aesthetics of possibility.

Blackpentecostal women and men yield to spirit’s gifts of holiness, of silence, of power and breathe: They commune in flesh, shout, dance, whoop, sweat, tremble, quiver, and tongue praise of the divine. Cursory and curious observers misrecognize, reduce, categorize, and objectify enfleshed blackpentecostal breath. They judge and dismiss this breath as immoderate and unnecessary excess, rather than enfleshed freedom yearning for the unseen, for possibility. Such observers do not understand enfleshed blackpentecostal breath’s healing surrender to spirit’s work and power and their embrace of the liminality and beauty of worshipful living—otherwise, nothing; otherwise, nonexistence.

By way of method, Blackpentecostal Breath mediates between a black cultural matrix and the significance and role of religion in that matrix;10 at the same time, this text incarnates and performs transdisciplinary discourse, effecting and signifying a dazzling unity of knowledge beyond any single discipline. Without dropping a beat, without reducing enfleshed blackpentecostal breath to abstraction or subjugating enfleshed breath to the numbing weight of oppression, the work unifies flows and overflows in open-ended, clear, rigorous, tightly skeined literary theory, theology, queer theory, sound and visual studies, musicology, and continental philosophy; in intertextuality; in contextual detail and depth; in beautiful, synthesizing, nimble blues prose (“always on the verge of lyrical scandal”)11 that is “multi-referential and multidimensional”12 and improvisational. As a work of transdisciplinary discourse, Blackpentecostal Breath “works on” theology by exemplifying what it might look like to take up an “iconoclastic role . . . to challenge both the dominant order of the world and theology’s own symbols and rituals for the sake of liberating them for play with God.”13 Crawley demonstrates just how “the aesthetic practices of Blackpentecostalism constitute a performative critique of normative theology and philosophy that precede the twentieth-century moment” (7).

Blackpentecostal Breath “works on” church by interrogating and antagonizing, disrupting and dis-ordering “not only racialist, classist, elitist ideologies of which whiteness serves as foundational, [but] interrupt[ing] black church aspirations toward respectability . . . because such aspirations are, at base, antiblack” (13). Blackpentecostalism, Crawley argues, is not “utopic, that is free of the problems of marginalizing” (24). The politics of respectability are alive, active in, and activate classism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. “But something is there in the aesthetic practices” and those practices antagonize “the very doctrines of sin and flesh” (24). Crawley maintains that Blackpentecostal aesthetic practices have the capacity to critique the ways in which sexism, homophobia, and transphobia and classism inform and shape the world. Moreover, such thinking “otherwise” affirms “an asubjectivity that is . . . about the open, vulnerable, available, enfleshed organism” (24–25). Crawley’s text calls the black church away from exclusionary practices of regulation and control, for such treatment disregards the central mystery of Christianity—Word made Flesh, Incarnation.

Still Blackpentecostalism subsists as the most fleshly expression of Christianity, and tongue or black orality remains the most fleshly and most spiritual attribute of Blackpentecostalism. Blackpentecostalism signifies linguality. The tongue, that necessary muscular organ of the mouth, not only contributes to survival—breathing, eating, drinking—it figures prominently in shouting, in noisemaking, in speaking. Metonymically tongue is language and speech. Speaking in tongues or glossolalia constitutes “a mode of contemplative, meditative practice, [and] is foundational for the Blackpentecostal imagination” (207). And that imagination seeks to enflesh truth (epistemology); to render, enflesh, and affirm black being and be-ing black (ontology); and to enflesh relations to the other (ethics).14 Crawley illustrates what Walter Ong means when he writes: “Sound is more real or existential than other sense objects, despite the fact that it is also more evanescent.”

Richard Kearney defines poetics broadly as “an exploration of the human powers to make (poiesis) a world in which we may poetically dwell.”15 Like Kearney, Crawley pursues a “critical poetics [that] transcend[s] both the empire of reason and the asylum of un-reason” in search of a new hermeneutic.16 Without adherence to any single set of poetic conventions, rules, or procedures; with charismatic, yet disciplined intuition that resonates time and meter, the poetics of Blackpentecostal Breath calls for a relational aesthetic that rises from intersubjectivity and builds a space which spirit inhabits and within which spirit works. That space may be religious or ecumenical or interfaith as exemplified in Crawley’s incisive and insightful critique of the New Atheist Movement’s hostility toward belief and its collusion in the general sentiment of antiblackness. Here Crawley links the dismissal of Islam’s public aesthetic-religious practice of wearing its belief “on the flesh” (my italics) in khimar, niqab, burka, and hijab with the racialization of flesh, “the wearing of belief in the flesh” (25, my italics). What is at stake is the other, relation, the human.

To follow the lines thrown out by Blackpentecostal Breath is to plunge into a deep, black, fleshy pool of signification. Underneath and throughout this remarkable work, black questioning anticipates, black thought lives and vibrates: Black living thought captures the sound of black human transcendence tuned by the Hammond B-3; captures

tones that are not simply moving toward resolution but are on the way to varied directionality—not simply in a linear, forward progression but also vertically, down and up, askance and askew. What if, as open to openness, the sounds of the B-3 prompt in its hearers and intellectual practice of a reaching toward the beyond? Would not this reaching, this movement toward without ever seizing the beyond, instantiate ongoing anticipatory posture, an affective mode of celebratory waiting? (256)

What if? What possibility? Makes me want to shout!

The organ is crooning. The mothers are wailing. Parents are raising their hands, speaking of God’s magnanimous power. Children huddled in the four corners of our small blue church, speaking in other tongues. I am sweating. Shouting. Shaking. Dancing. Crying out. My feet shuffle to the beat of the music, arms flailing around like a windmill set free. Ushers dressed in white, circle my little body. Nine years old. I feel the Spirit. It has gripped me, taken hold of me, will not let me go. The experience is strong. I pass out. The women cover me with white sheets. I feel the warmth of God.

This experience marks me, my black body. Yet, as I began studying for a PhD in religion, I became painfully aware that this kind of religious experience is held as suspect, excessive and irrationally superfluous, secondary to the primary work of rational philosophical argumentation and/or Christian doctrine. For certain, in large part, the problem I faced was bound up with the ways in which the theological project privileged theoria as the starting point in describing and legitimating doctrine and “proper” religious experience. As Crawley rightly intimates, this starting point has been grounded in the ideological project of whiteness, which is a way to think the world through the violation and “violencing” of non-European experiences and expressions.

Ashon Crawley’s book Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility not only captures the sonic beauty and intersubjective joy of black Pentecostal experience in the United States but also provides a prophetic paradigm for how we might think about the only future theology may have: a future that is rooted in the rejection of Kantian categorical distinctions and pure thought, a future that turns toward the celebration of black flesh in all its plentitude of meanings. Blackpentecostal Breath is about black religious experience as a collective expression, the shared work of what Robert Wuthnow refers to as the “production of the sacred.” Crawley’s text announces how the celebration of black flesh through aesthetic and sonic practices enunciates an expanded sociality that disrupts and ruptures the epistemologies and temporalities of philosophy and theology in the West.

Crawley challenges the very foundations of Christian theology in the West. He asks: “What counts and who decides what counts, as theological or philosophical thought?” Crawley’s text echoes black religious scholar Charles Long’s contention that the plurality of African-American religious experiences has yet to be captured in traditional theological modes. The black aesthetic practices (shouting, speaking in tongues, noise) that Crawley thickly describes move toward the “more” of black religious experience, experiences that have not been rationalized or systematized in Western Christian theology because theology labels such experiences as wild, uncouth, excessive, and demonic.

For instance, Crawley privileges the Azusa Street Revival of 1906 in his discussion of blackpentecostal aesthetic practices. However, he offers a de-colonial reading of Azusa. Azusa is not another instantiation of Western Christian pneumatology. No. Azusa can be interpreted as offering a performative imaginary that “thinks” new modalities of thought altogether, as Azusa is about how the spirit moves in and though black flesh (and all flesh) in enacting an egalitarian sociality that is unbounded, liberative, “bluesy,” and desirous of being with and for others who are radically different from oneself. In 1906, Azusa and its black aesthetic practices were labeled by many white ministers as “animal-spiritist,” wild, and non-Christian. These aesthetic practices were labeled demonic because these practices were carried in black flesh. For Crawley, blackness is a performative imaginary, an otherwise way to think the world, a way to implode the project of whiteness through generating new categories that can value and celebrate black flesh in all of its complexity and multiplicity. It is at Azusa that a new grammar of love and togetherness are performatively “thought.”

As a scholar in theological education, I want to emphasize that Crawley’s text has profound ramifications for theology. One can infer that he diagnoses theological education as unequivocally lost. This text should compel every theological scholar to confront an undeniable truth: theological education is on its deathbed, unless it transforms. The future of theology is dependent upon its ability to reconstitute itself from the ground up, away from predetermined colonial logics of subjectivity and pure thought and toward an aesthesis, which privileges subaltern religious experiences rooted in the fleshly, sensible world. “Life in the flesh” is about a togetherness that is imagined through somatic possibilities. As Crawley suggests, at Azusa, participants believed that one needed to be in the world as an agent of radical alterity, which is about a somatic openness to others while establishing one’s own claim to move through the world differently. Alterity is about how one thinks and enfleshes the relation of difference. Western systematized accounts of theology and their categories obtain and think difference by way of its exclusion, as difference is interpreted as an aberration of pure, normative thought. In contrast, radical alterity disrupts and ruptures this way of “thinking difference.” Difference is not something to be excluded or excised from pure thought or practice. Instead, the relation of difference is thought and embodied diasporically. As Edouard Glissant intimates, diasporic epistemologies have always acknowledged multiplicity in unity, a plentitude of meanings that can exist together, enlarging and dilating our view of ourselves, others and the world. This way of thinking and valuing difference is a spirited fleshly practice that enacts love, life and possibilities as a critique to a violent, violating world that seeks to expunge difference and consequently contract a sense of togetherness and expanded sociality. We must turn to these alternate genealogies and inheritances to discern our way forward within theological education.

There are a few lingering questions I possess after reading Crawley’s important text. These questions are not necessarily critiques and/or concerns in relation to his work. Rather, these questions continue to haunt me as a theological scholar after reading his text. When he speaks of his project as “atheological and aphilosophical,” how does this claim grapple with any perceived or actual benefits when speaking about categories such as “tradition” or “doctrine”? Within theology, might there be an account or idea of tradition/traditioning and doctrine that does not recapitulate to the violence and violation of modern colonial logics and categorical distinctions? Might this atheological project make room for tradition and doctrine or are both categories simply irredeemable? It seems to me that theology is deeply bound up with some explication of doctrine or tradition that clarifies its orientation toward the Divine and broader world. Is Crawley suggesting that these categories will always undermine the open-ended character of blackpentecostal aesthetic experiences or might there be an account of both existing together? If so, what might be the contours of this account? I recognize that these questions may not necessarily be within the purview of Crawley’s text. However, Crawley’s atheological and aphilosophical project compels theological and religious scholars to wrestle with how his project remaps the basic theoretical, methodological and political orientations of theology.

Despite these questions, this is what Crawley “gifts” to the field of theology: a prophetic warning to reckon with itself as a colonial project rooted in the exclusion and expulsion of black flesh. Yet, the specter of black flesh haunts the Christian imaginary. Crawley helps the theological scholar to see that theology indeed must decolonize or die.

There is a vibration, a sonic event, a sound I want to talk about, but its ongoing movement makes its apprehension both illusory and provisional. . . . It is a resource that is plenteous, that exists in plentitude, always available and split from itself, split from while transforming into itself. It is the gift, the concept, this inhabitation of and living into otherwise possibilities.

—Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath

Kick.

Kick.

Tap kick and cross.

—Spoken instructions to the Sakeem line dance

Ashon Crawley’s visionary work, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, argues—beautifully, complexly, carefully—against the violence of enclosure. The text performs its deep ethical and critical investments in the plentitude of black social life in and through the abundance of registers on which it vibrates. It is simultaneously epistle, provocation, and charge. It is fundamentally and irreducibly interdisciplinary, deploying phonetics, exegesis, archival exploration, and personal vignette among its interpretive technologies. It also signifies beyond its materiality as a book object. I carried my bound copy around with me for months: across at least eight states; on the train on my daily commutes; religiously to my favorite neighborhood coffee shop. While carrying—while toting—the text with me from place to place, people routinely engaged me in conversation about it. The cover image invites this exchange. A 1941 photograph of black Pentecostal worshippers in Chicago, Illinois, spans the bottom quarter of the front of the book. The celebrants pictured here, these black folks in thrall of Spirit, usher us into the fellowship that Crawley names as the otherwise possibility of black social life. The woman appearing at the bottom center of the picture plane offers an embodied invocation that literally and theoretically frames the book. Her outstretched arms reach across the edges of the cover. Her uplifted palms are plaintive and vulnerable, evoking the supplicatory pose of Jesus the Christ figured on a crucifix.

I linger here, on this cover and this woman’s two-handed entreaty, in order to emphasize that Blackpentecostal Breath is, in large part, a call. Indeed, as a lapsed member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a former minister of music, and a believer in the miracle of black people’s faith, I cannot help reading the text as an invocation. Crawley’s work is a hailing that at once queries and creates the possible worlds of love and non-harm that we might make together—and I am persuaded by the otherwise possibilities of everyday communion that are produced through others’ witnessing of the book itself. It is not surprising to me that toting this book around has caused me to name myself as a teacher, to respond to strangers’ requests for résumé help or career advice. It is no surprise that the very picture of black worship in public spaces generates stares, sparks conversation, and makes people want to ask who I am, what I do, and why I carry around a book like that.1 This essay is my effort to tarry with Crawley’s call, with the book’s charge to study black forms of world-making, and with commingled breath. In what follows, I tarry for a little while with the specific forms of invitation given and accepted by communities who create black social life within the improvisational practice of soul line dancing. Tap. Kick and cross.2

Direction(ality) Matters

Line dancing depends on agreement. A form of popular social dance, it “typically involves 24 to 64 beats of choreographed steps, consisting primarily of walking steps, turns, kicks, and sideways travel. Dancers arrange themselves on the dance floor in lines, all facing the same way.”3 This uniformity is indicative of the form: regularly arranged groups of people moving in a line is the visual hallmark of the dance. Even on a crowded dance floor, there is always the reasonable expectation not to be knocked about, or down. Even inside of choreography that calls for the constant travel of exquisitely long strides across the floor—or for full spins and rapid-fire kick-ball-changes—you are expected not to be in the spot where the dancer beside you will need to be. “Directionality matters,” Ashon Crawley asserts, “and it carries the material trace of the purposiveness of movement—turning, tuning, torque—toward social ecstasy.” I want to suggest that the ecstatic sociality of soul line dancing is created by the anticipation that line dancers have for each others’ movements, by an expectation of fellowship and shared exhaustion that is born of practice and, yes, signaled by bated breath.

Soul line dancing is a variation on the line dance form in which choreographed steps are backed by African American musics. It differs from the popular form of country line dancing in that its dances are set to zydeco, rap, rhythm and blues, reggae, and even gospel tracks. Its sonic origins lie in the rhythm and blues (R&B) music produced in the twentieth century by African American vocalists and instrumentalists. Innovated and performed primarily by African American dancers and choreographers, soul line dance has an international reach; its practitioners represent a diversity of ethnic and racial identities.

In the United States, soul line dance communities are at once hyper-local in scope and nationally connected, and they are characterized by mobility and non-ownership. Dancers convene for classes and parties in rented halls; in community outreach centers; in churches; in buildings belonging to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Soul line dancers also gather in large convention centers for a few days each year to give annual awards for choreography and for excellence in dance.[footnote]Since 2008, the Union Crew Star Awards gala has recognized soul line dance innovations from across the country. The traveling event bestows honors in such categories as East Coast Regional Dance of the Year and Choreographer of the Year. For more on the Union Crew Awards see http://home/163979.cloudwaysapps.com/esbfrbwtsm/public_html.urbanlinedanceconnection.com/uploads/linedance/profiles/Union%20Crew%20Profile.htm.[/footnote] This mobility resists enclosure, gentrification, and the prerogatives of black capitalism’s fetishization of real estate. As Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, line dancer Ms. Elsie Jones succinctly observed when reflecting on her love of the form, “Nobody’s paying us to dance.”4 The DJs, event organizers, photographers, videographers, and other vendors round out a dance economy based on multiple meanings of travel: from venue to venue and from one place on the dance floor to the next. Often, they will leave their stations and join dancers on the floor. This, too, is a refusal of the categorical distinction that Crawley’s work enjoins us to resist; it marks a refusal to police the distance between seller, designer, and end user.

Soul line dance is part of the corpus of black vernacular dance traditions that dance historian Jonathan David Jackson defines as “a complex family of forms and steps that includes hand dancing, rhythm tap, stepping, and line dancing.”5 Soul line dancing—here, simply, line dancing—is an “intricately choreographed” dance form that relies as much on improvisation as it does on memorization of predetermined choreography.6 It is conversational. It requires the communal back-and-forth of bodies in motion. Through its emphasis on interdependency, the body/booty work of soul line dance bears out one world of “otherwise possibility,” one possible world of closely lived and irreducibly coterminous lives.

As a black vernacular dance form, soul line dance emerges out of the connections between sound and movement. John David Jackson explains,

One of the most important aesthetics of black music and dance is an understanding of the inseparability between music and movement. This inseparability does not always mean that particular music and dance traditions develop simultaneously. . . . Rather, black vernacular music and dance are conceptual and experiential partners that feed on the same processes for intervention.7

Jackson’s argument that “improvisation is choreography” profoundly names the correlation of improvisation and routine that is constitutive of soul line dance. Ashon Crawley’s excavation of the interdependencies of the choreosonic elaborates this conjunction. Crawley’s term, “choreosonic,” recognizes a “bridge between” concept that, in its grammatical coupling, “forces the consideration of the ongoing relation between choreographics and sonics, how they are constitutive of the other, how the distinction cannot ever be maintained, cannot ever be made pure, cannot ever be made to be categorical” (Crawley, 98). He reads Blackpentecostal shouting as a choreosonic practice, a practice that “undoes the distinction between movement and sound (Crawley, 28). Crawley assiduously details the choreosonic kind of sociality produced in the instance of the shout, inside the groans and wails and foot-stomps that Blackpentecostals produce in worship. Following Jackson, I want to offer back to Crawley’s text the improvisational choreosonics of “the wood,” the term that many members of the Philadelphia line dance community use for the dance floor, as another site wherein the conjoinment of movement and sound undoes the distinction between the two. I want to offer soul line dance as a space of choreosonic sociality in which the act of being together on the wood is both quotidian and holy. Soul line dancers do, indeed, empty (ourselves) out to each other in service of the creation of the social. Dancers embrace each other in sweaty hugs, share bottles of water and portable fans, knit themselves together through regular preparation in borrowed spaces. This sociality is, in fact, ecstatic. And this ecstatic sociality, in such a time as this, calls forth questions that test the limits of my critical faculties here: What miracles of safety, if any, does breathing together—sweatily and in regular revolutions—produce? What does it truly mean to be together in the sanctity of exhaustion? What might a choreosonics of friendship look and sound like? What happens when people move?

The Choreosonics of Black Friendship

I spent the three years between 2010 and 2013 living and working as a graduate student in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During those peripatetic West Philadelphian days, I was sustained, in large part, by the beloved community made by soul line dancers. I found sanctuary in the circuit of soul line dance happenings that traveled, quite literally, from Pennsauken, New Jersey, to Delaware and throughout greater Philadelphia. Among my regular haunts, perhaps the most regular of all was the midweek class and party at the Park Avenue Banquet Hall. These events—known popularly as “Parkside Wednesdays” or simply, “Parkside”—ritually transformed a multiuse building into a sacred space of dance fellowship from 7pm to 11pm each Wednesday night.8 By sacred here, I do not mean to suggest a practice that belongs to any specific religious tradition. Rather, Parkside is sacred in the sense that it is continuously sanctified, or made set-apart, by its revelers. In the space of the hall’s main ballroom, I have witnessed the deep friend-making enabled by social dance taking place among folks who identify as queer, as Christian, as Muslim, as poor, as middle class. These gatherings are inter-generational, imperfect, fundamentally and irrepressibly social.

Describing the impact of the Parkside community on her life, Elsie Jones recounts, “I find it uplifting to me to share these things.” She continues,

There are times when I want to sit in a corner and cry. [But] you have to do something for yourself. So we all decided that line dancing wherever we are is a safe place, a place to lay it down on the floor. There is somebody there who will become your sounding board or whatever it is that we need. Because we are a community, there is no need to feel like you are alone.9

Jones here contrasts isolated stasis, sitting in a corner and crying, with communal movement. We might read the act of “lay[ing] it down on the floor” as both an unburdening and a supplication. From its cover image through to its treatments of Blackpentecostal tongues and shouting, Crawley’s work gives us a mechanism through which we might see both Ms. Elsie’s laying it down and her community’s picking it up as a movement in/as the “fleshliness of black love” (Crawley, 76).

One of my favorite soul line dances is based on this kind of love movement. Entitled Sakeem, the dance was created as an act of friendship between legendary line dancer Dave Bush Jr. and his friend, dancer Sakeem Parks. Parks tells the story of the dance’s creation in a recorded interview,

The real story is Dave made that dance up for me. He called me over his house one day. I said, I’ll be there. So, I [go] over his house, I go in the basement and he says, “you got to learn this dance.” So I couldn’t catch it. Went back the next day, end up getting the dance. He waited till we got out in the club and told me, This is called the Sakeem. I was like, what? I was like, WHAT? I was like, he threw it on me just like that. I said, “you serious?” He said yeah. He gave that to me . . . [for] being a friend and bringing him in to the group . . . Love him, miss him. I can’t talk too much about him. I’m emotional about that man. Seriously.10

Threw it on me just like that. Parks’s comment vibrates at the frequency of Ashon Crawley’s “like that,” a phrase Crawley uses to elaborate the “intellectual work that is done through . . . form” (Crawley, 47). Dave Bush Jr.’s seemingly spontaneous gift reveals a flourish, a gifting like that. Reading through Crawley, we might consider the Sakeem as a dance “sent into the world . . . to make audible, visible, felt [and] known” the bonds of black friendship, the sounds and movement of black friendship (Crawley, 50). This friendship is world-making done to a beat.

To learn the Sakeem, you have to chant. Indeed, I learned it that way at West Philadelphia’s Sayre Morris Recreation Center some years ago under the tutelage of line dance instructor Gloria Kingcade:

Kick.

Kick.

Tap. Kick and Cross (step).

Kick.

Kick.

Tap. Kick and Cross (step).

Kick and cross (step).

Kick and cross.

The absence of lyrics in the song invites dancers to make vocal music of the dance’s instructions. People on the floor will frequently call out additions to the form between beats, yelling out directions for interspersing jumping jacks, push-ups, and low dips along with cries of, “Repeat that mutha.” The dance is performed to the song Plastic Dreams, a ten-minutes-and-fifteen-seconds-long instrumental house music track produced by Dutch DJ Jaydee. Driven by a Hammond organ, the song pulsates with the instrument’s unmistakable vibrato. Soul line dance DJs will often play Plastic Dreams in its entirety, pushing the crowd to endure beyond the three- or four-minute mark when many recorded soul songs end. We might ask, What is the friendship that comes after exhaustion? The dance calls for a series of counterclockwise rotations at regular intervals: first 240 degrees, then 180 degrees, then 90 degrees. This pattern (3/4 turn, 1/2 turn, 1/4 turn) is combined with syncopated footwork, adding to the complexity of the choreography. In just about every instance of the Sakeem’s collective execution, a low murmur can be heard: Tap. Kick and Cross.

There is arguably no real need for experienced dancers to chant the instructions. Few dances involve this kind of extensive directional repetition as a feature. Following Crawley, I offer that this chanting’s extravagance is, in fact, an “excessive force that constitutes the very possibility of meaning.” What I mean to say is this: in the chanted geometries of black movement, soul line dancers sanctify the spaces of their convening. This recalcitrant togetherness exists “in the along,” over and against forces of racism and capitalist enclosure that would name such communion as befoulment, as loitering, as useless noise and carrying on.11 At the meeting of improvisation and repetition, dancers move in and through a sounded sociality that rehearses friendship and looks like what we might otherwise call love.

Works Cited

Crawley, Ashon. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Fordham University Press, 2017.

Happy Feet Dance Network, https://syndicate.network.youtube.com/watch?v=FakUs9ym5Ys

Jackson, Harvey H. III Ed. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 16. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Jackson, John David. “Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing.” Dance Research Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 2001, pp. 40-53.

Jones, Elsie. Personal conversation. 18 July 2017.

Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Urban Line Dance Connection, http://home/163979.cloudwaysapps.com/esbfrbwtsm/public_html.urbanlinedanceconnection.com/uploads/linedance/profiles/Union%20Crew%20Profile.htm

I am a cradle Catholic. I treasure the social gospel, and find myself centered by words chanted in unison and the clang of the censer’s chain. I am one who leans in to catch a taste of wafting frankincense. The doctrine, however, is not my own. And like most Black American Catholics, however, I’ve spent my fair share of time in Protestant churches. Joyful noise is familiar and inviting if not regular in my life. Those doctrines are also not my own. But one afternoon was different. I went to the funeral of a friend’s mother. She was a COGIC deacon, and a community leader and lover of her community.

Afterwards, I tried to explain to Ashon Crawley what I experienced that day. I said to him, “I almost had a conversion experience.” But those weren’t the right words at all. They sat on my tongue after I released them, awkwardly. I disdained them. What I felt wasn’t an “almost,” and it wasn’t conversion. It wasn’t a desire to learn and accept doctrine or adopt the sect. But there was a there there. Now, having read Blackpentecostal Breath, I know now what it was that so moved and embraced me. It was the otherwise possibility in that space, it was blackness/breath/living in the along that resonated at my very core. It was ordinary virtuosity, the unexpected sounds that coasted into a collective composition, the hands of Black women reaching skyward, slapping, on keys stomping and caressing them, and the circling—a centrifugal force of resistance.

Resistance. That word doesn’t sit quite right either.

Ashon’s thoughts make you question each triteness, every cliché. Shorthands are not just insufficient as he shows us, they are ruses. The book is a direct confrontation with the philosophy of the enlightenment and a rejection of categorical thought. At every turn he shows us what they miss and how they erase, destroy or stunt. In these pages, for example he provides one of the most pithy and incisive critiques of Orlando Patterson’s Hegelian-rooted theory of social death. Ashon’s reading practices, of Black practices, is a testimony that other kinds of relations beyond those of domination, property, the law of the father can, must, and do matter.

Black matter is neither dead nor deconstruced. It is multidirectional and creative.

This is not a history of Pentecostalism. Ashon tells us that in the beginning. He writes in and of tradition instead. And it is gloriously promiscuous. Although his attention to the past and specific sites and moments that are critical to Pentecostalism is painstaking, he eschews the disciplining narrative of history in favor of an architecture of relations that are vital and travel in multiple ways: back, up, in, out, and around in circles. The conventional Black American axis of South to North, is complicated by the Islamic roots of praying to the East and Pentecostalism’s roots in migrants out West. The circling repetition of the ring shout is not separable from the pulsing improvisation of the shouting body.

And yet, and this is very important for this book, the composition is tight. This is not undisciplined work though it is an unflinching critique of dominant modes of inquiry in a series of academic disciplines: philosophy, theology, political theory, history. Methodologically, Ashon has woven together threads of a tradition in lieu of chronological narration and conventional exclusionary abstraction. The book is structured poetry: synchronic, diachronic, and spatially exploratory at once.

I was reminded of this truism: There are questions that, as a professor, you ask students because you want to defamiliarize their answers. The danger is, of course, that in the midst of the lesson you cannot make things cohere again. The questioning eats all answers. Here is one of the questions I have learned to hesitate before asking: What does it mean to be Black? It never goes according to aspiration. I should have long known this. As an adolescent I picked up a book about the subject, read a few chapters and cast it aside furious. The author had no idea. He wrote, with amusement, about the curiosity that very light skinned people who obviously had more European ancestry than not, were nevertheless considered Black, as though that were strange. How, I wondered, could someone so fail to understand that Blackness is in the doing and being, not the epidermis? That signification of skin color is a red herring born of the ascriptive not the collective. Blackpentecostal breath testifies that Blackness is in the flesh: how it responds, moves and the sounds it creates. This, I think, is what my students can read to catch a likeness of Blackness.

Ashon’s shift from the visual register to enlist other sensorium is essential for Black study and has large scholarly implications—What else might we open up? Where else might we go from here? Perhaps, I am inspired to think, to the feel of bare feet on dirt and then on wooden slats as the freedpeople built Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. Perhaps to the calloused fingers of sweetgrass basketweavers on the sea islands, callousing carried from Sierra Leone, or to the itchiness of indigo seeped into the hands, or the texture of yams on the tongue—the fueling of the body, the responses to the rain, the soreness of muscles, the intimacies of labor. Ashon guides us to explore the intellectual, spiritual and enfleshed story of Blackness. And in refusing categorical thinking, he recommends and models treating senses as they are, always in relation and connection. Sound is not separated from motion. We breathe air together, we feel it together, in the vibration in our throats and off our bodies and the landscape around us.

This is defiance. Choking, lynching, suffocating: the destruction of breath is White supremacy in action. But Ashon reminds us that stealing breath is not the only story. His black study takes us to the creative experimentation of breath and fleshly experience that abandons all Cartesian anxieties: we are chorally connected, mind body/self/other. Hence, Blackpentecostal breath insists upon what Ashon calls otherwise possibility not as doctrine but in the doing.

By disentangling himself from the privileging of the visual in scholarly inquiry, as well as linear time, the register of sensual immanence comes to the fore in Ashon’s thinking. There he is attentive. Settling in a given moment he witnesses a host of things: fugitivity, memory, and desire. Though discipline is rejected as an academic vanity, this is disciplined reading. In these encounters Ashon enlists varying resources: physics, composition, poetry, song, footage, to reach for a telling of Blackness that is vital rather than categorical.

One day, waiting for my son’s game, I sat in on a basketball practice at a school for the deaf that serves Black youth. The girls played hard. They sweated and laughed and signed to each other with breadth and gracefulness. I am a hearing person and I was captivated by their sound. The slap of feet in a saunter or a pose, a guffaw, a play fight, a running holler at something uproariously funny. The shifting rhythm of a crossover. I knew all of these. They were very Black sounds. These sounds of Blackness, as it were, were made by the patterns of their breath and movement. Aha, I thought, this is what Ashon is unearthing. Black sounds were not predicated on hearing (or seeing) oneself, “be Black” they were produced by a praxis of Blackness in breath and motion. Ashon explains panoplies in Black spaces such that this moment has become one that I would be loathe to think of as “odd” in the sense of unusual, though it was, for me uncanny—it was the familiar unfamiliar that brought further clarity to what is in Blackness, not unlike the Pentecostal funeral service I attended. I was not converted. I was in that number.

Blackpentacostal breath, though it dwells specifically in spaces built by a religious tradition, is a theory of Blackness more than it is a theological or religio-historical inquiry. The word theatrical is also too small a reference, but I use it to describe what he presents as sites for imaginative activity that open up philosophical prospects that come from enfleshed exploration rather than abstraction. His contemplation of suites of sounds, movements and moments in churches provides moments of inquiry and theaters of possibility. This book is an altar call with no pieties, a mode of study with no doctrinal requirements.

In that vein, towards the conclusion Ashon turns the idea of “loss” (lost home, lost language, lost tradition) so prevalently enlisted in how we tell the story of Black Americans on its head. Ashon embraces the nowhere. Statelessness, internal colony, a nation on no map: these ways of naming Black life on these shores too easily capitulate to the very order the question. Ashon treats nowhereness not as shame but as the inflection point of possibility. This is instead, as he says and I paraphrase, a love letter in favor of the social. The social is prioritized over the territorial, over the settlement, over the border drawing.

For instance, in his exploration of speaking in tongues he brilliantly marks the distinction between describing tongue speaking as an experience of fluency in a coherent received and enclosed language, and as glossolalia, ecstatic utterances outside grammars and rules and “knowing” in the sense we usually apply to language. This latter realm of plenitude and indeterminacy is mystery and potentiality at once.

Blackpentecostal breath is scholarship yet it is also political work, though that might not be readily apparent to one disciplined in the ways of political science or theory. Stepping away from religious doctrine and stepping away from academic disciplines are similar moves. Words like recognition and citizenship aren’t here, neither are extended discussions of church rules. It is a work of the inside-out, rather than the theory-laden material of Western social theory. As an example, Ashon weaves a story and it is illustrative of the entire text, about learning to draw. In the beginning he was taught to start with a hard outline and color within. As a student of architecture, he was encouraged to begin with shading, and to allow the form to follow. It is the moment of encounter, the shadows not the frame, that pulls in his care and contemplation. That is ultimately the recommendation or better yet the sermon, that we learn from the together—sharing air, harnessing air, making noise, shaping it, sounding with one another—how to be instruments of ethical relation.