Emilie M. Townes

Sites of Memory: Proceedings too Terrible to Relate

In her essay “The Site of Memory” Toni Morrison explains how her work can be situated within the genre of the memoir. Her essay helps introduce several major themes of this chapter and the book as a whole: imagination, history, the fantastic, the power of images, and memory. She begins her discussion with slave narratives that, she notes, say two things: “This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but it also represents the race” and “I write this text to persuade other people—you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are human beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery.”1

Teaching and the Imagination

Abstract This article is the text version of a plenary address given on November 6, 2015 before the Religious Education Association at its annual meeting, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Uninterrogated Coloredness and Its Kin

orthodox moral discourses ignore the diversities within their (and our) midst in an ill-timed and increasingly suspect search for an objective viewpoint that can lead us toward the [T]ruth.

Everydayness: Beginning Notes on Dismantling the Cultural Production of Evil

We begin with ourselves. Each of us must answer the question: What will we do with the fullness and incompleteness of who we are as we stare down the interior material life of the cultural production of evil? Rather than content ourselves with the belief that the fantastic hegemonic imagination, the motive force behind the cultural production of evil, is a force that sits outside of us, we must answer remembering that we are in a world that we have helped make. The fantastic hegemonic imagination is deep within us and none of us can escape its influence by simply wishing to do so or thinking that our ontological perch exempts us from its spuming oppressive hierarchies. These hierarchies of age, class, gender, sexual orientation, race, and on and on are held in place by violence, fear, ignorance, acquiescence. The endgame is to win and win it all—status, influence, place, creation.

The Womanist Dancing Mind: Cavorting with Culture and Evil

This quotation is taken from Morrison’s acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996. As such, Morrison focuses on the dangers, the necessities, and the pleasures of the reading/writing life in the late twentieth century. For her, the dangers are captured in two anecdotes. In one, it is the danger that, in her words, “our busied-up, education-as-horse-race, trophy-driven culture poses even to the entitled.” In the second, she teases out “the physical danger to writing suffered by persons with enviable educations who live in countries where the practice of modern art is illegal and subject to official vigilantism and murder.”

Growing like Topsy: Solidarity in the Work of Dismantling Evil

Solidarity amidst our differences in the face of structural evil may seem to be an exercise in tempting the agony of the absurd. Stowe’s introduction of the character Topsy in her abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is a case in point. In this acutely troubling introduction we have of Topsy, Stowe exposes us to the traditional stereotypes of Black women slaves (regardless of age). Topsy is black, her eyes are round and they shine—they actually glitter. Her eyes, not her body, move quickly and restlessly over the contents and the people in the room. Her blackness is contrasted with the brilliant whiteness of her teeth. Her hair is woolly and braided in such a way that her plaits stick out in every direction. Her face is a mixture of shrewdness and cunning, gravity and solemnity. She has a single, ragged dress made of bagging. She appears odd and goblin-like, heathenish.

To Pick One’s Own Cotton: Religious Values, Public Policy, and Women’s Moral Autonomy

Public policymaking is, regrettably, often seen as exclusively political or social.2 The sometimes deeply religious and/or theological underpinnings of our basic attitudes concerning the nature of peoples and the kind of public policies we must respond with remains unacknowledged or unconscious. We are often unaware that moral landscapes are driving our public policy decisions and that this makes our public policy decision-making problematic at times. The other side of this coin is that there are times when we are very aware of the moral landscapes driving the creation of some of our public policies. It is equally regrettable that in these instances, a rather narrow and damning view of the individual, government, and society dominate.

Invisible Things Spoken: Uninterrogated Coloredness

Our postmodern culture suffers from the enormous impact of market forces on everyday life. We live in an era where the United States has replaced Europe as the global hegemonist. There is an increase of political polarizations along the lines of nation, race, gender (sex, sexuality, sex roles, sexual orientation, sexism), class, denomination and faith traditions. In our world, culture is sanitized and then commodified. This process of changing aesthetic tastes—domestication of the once exotic or feared other, uncontrolled appropriation, market-driven refiners’ fires, mass production, and marketing—is for our enjoyment at the expense of people’s lives and shrinking paychecks. Often the solution is placed in the hands of lottery games—games of chance.

Vanishing into Limbo: The Moral Dilemma of Identity as Property and Commodity

In this 1955 essay, Baldwin explores Richard Wright’s novel Native Son to illuminate what it means to be a Negro in America. For Baldwin, this is visceral. He is tired of Black folk being treated as mere social agendas rather than as flesh and blood. He notes that dehumanization is never a one-way street, that the loss of identity—be it stolen, borrowed, denied, or annihilated—has consequences far beyond those who are the immediate victims. For Baldwin, our crimes against ourselves echo and haunt and damn and eviscerate us. It is not enough (not in 1955 when the essay was published, not today) to think that we can leave our memories checked at some dismal door of gerrymandered elections or xenophobic nationalism or sycophantic equalities. Indeed for Baldwin, the story of Black folk is the story of Americans, one that is not, in his words, “a very pretty story. ”2 This is a story of shadows, or a series of shadows that are for Baldwin “self-created, intertwining.” And, sadly, Black folk do not exist except in “the darkness of our minds.”

Legends Are Memories Greater than Memories: Black Reparations in the United States as Subtext to Christian Triumphalism and Empire

I begin with part of the actual text of the special field orders because I find many things about it noteworthy. First, the phrase “and a mule” is no where to be found—not in sections 1 and 3 above, not in sections 2, 4, 5, or 6 that are more concerned about loyalty to the Union and military service and defense. Second, this was a decidedly un-universal field order. The boundaries are clear: islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, in other words, the sea islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia (These included Edisto, Hilton Head, Port Royal, St. Helena, and many other smaller islands that had been under Union control since 1861.)