I’m a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. I am nearing completion of my dissertation, Blackness and the Problem of Belonging: Political Theological Readings of Race, Reproduction, and Domesticity, which recasts the scholarly conversation on how Christian supersessionist ideas of election shape Western racialized imaginations of national belonging by focusing on how gender and sexuality structure the reproduction of the claims that justify and legitimize belonging. Black scholars in theology and religious history like Willie Jennings and Eddie Glaude have provided helpful examinations of the racial boundaries of belonging, noting how black estrangement from national imaginations of peoplehood is related to modernity’s lingering Christian inheritance. I first extend and reframe this line of inquiry by showing how racialized claims to chosenness and peoplehood are managed through recourse to the reproduction and domesticity and thus show gender, sexuality, and kinship as key terms in diagnosing modernity’s Christian imagination. From there, I revisit the work of three black women writing in the long 19th century, Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Angelina Weld Grimké, to show how their critiques of white Christian nationalism occur within through their representations of black kinship in domestic literature. Their work, I argue, shows how the household is a critical site in the management of racial belonging and provides helpful strategies for black feminist intervention.
In addition to being a scholar, I also love making music and writing songs. I have a podcast and a newsletter that you can subscribe to, and I’m available to contact on twitter or by email.