Love, Blackness, Imagination: Howard Thurman’s Vision of Communitas

This essay engages the theme of religion and the futures of blackness by critically examining the interrelationship between two normative standards in the discourse of religion and blackness: love and community. The essay proceeds by thinking love and community as risks and not as guarantees. This elliptical procedure in analyzing this discourse recognizes the in/ability to think these except by way of thinking blackness as the other of thought, that is, as an/other thinking that is not reducible to the calculus of thought proper. Specifically, I delineate how and in what ways blackness serves as the condition of possibility for frustrating and constituting a thinking of love in and through the imagination. I then press such a thinking in exploring the formulation of an ideal of community that interrupts hegemonic circuits of knowledge/power. Indeed, it is by recourse to love and community in and through the imagination where we are able to recover a thinking that challenges the dominant configurations of power and open up new lines of investigation into the open futures for the discourse of religion and blackness.