Description:
The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker
Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled "Black Metamor-phosis: New Natives in a New World." Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production. Wynter's writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work. Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter's writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion's relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.Brief description: Justine M. Bakker is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). She researches the intersections of race and religion, with a specific focus on alternative, heterodox, and esoteric forms of religiosity and method, theory, and conceptualization in religious studies.
Review Quotes: Words Made Flesh engages Sylvia Wynter's work as critical of, and critical to, the study of religion. As such, it is a compelling and powerful contribution to a field often still saddled by a (perhaps unwitting) commitment to colonialist, racist, and discriminatory logics of comparison and categorization. This book is as necessary as it is groundbreaking.---Biko Mandela Gray, Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University and author of Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject