Abstract

The task of this dissertation is the development of a white North American theology which is capable of challenging white racism. It offers a constructive re-envisionment of the meaning of Christian "salvation" within a phenomenology of race in this culture that specifically addresses the predicament of white people in their "whiteness." The position proposed here will argue that James Cone's christological assertion, in God of the Oppressed in 1975, that blackness is salvific in North America applies to all of North America, black and white . The argument will move through six major points. I will first sketch out the interdependence of soteriological and racial discourses in the colonial project and in the Enlightment and then elaborate Cone's christological assertion in relationship to white theologian Theo Witvliet's dialogic response to set the stage for a turn to discourse analysis. I will proceed, in a second moment, to an exposition of the broader discursive structure of racialization to which blackness points as that structure shows itself in the phenomenology of race offered by W. E. B. DuBois. That synchronic exposition will concentrate on blackness in its contradictory syntactical linkage with whiteness as a form of "double-consciousness." The third move will analyze blackness "in itself" diachronically. Here blackness will stand revealed as a cultural tactics of resistance invented historically out of a mix of white European and black African religious and cultural resources. In the fourth place, I will consider what that tactics means for whites whose whiteness has functioned as an implicit soteriological code within mainstream Christian notions of integrity and wholeness. I will argue, fifthly, that it points towards an ironic reconstruction of white identity vis 'a vis blackness that draws on postcolonial understandings of "grotesque" forms of subjectivity. And finally, I will outline a practical and performative re-scripting of the white racialized body under the thematic rubrics of apostasy, exorcism and initiation