Joseph Winters is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He also holds secondary positions in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. His interests lie at the intersection of black religious thought, African-American literature, and critical theory. Overall, his project expands conventional understandings of black religiosity and black piety by drawing on resources from Af-Am literature, philosophy, and critical theory. His research examines how literature, film, and music (especially hip hop) can reconfigure our sense of the sacred and imagination of spirituality.

In this presentation, Winters contends that black studies (including literature, aesthetics, philosophy) has had a long-standing interest in interrogating the religious even if the field is typically treated as a secular paradigm. In addition to showing how certain grammars of the sacred propel anti-black racism, authors within this tradition have gestured toward alternative ways of imagining and practicing the sacred, spirit, wounded intimacy, and so forth. To flesh out this other form of sacrality, Winters thinks at the nexus of contemporary black thought, including Fred Moten’s turn to mysticism and Christina Sharpe’s invocation of the wake, and critical approaches to religion, including figures like Charles Long and Georges Bataille. Through the juxtaposition, Winters hopes to think beyond certain rigid oppositions, such as religious and secular, sacred and profane, and pessimism and optimism. He ends the presentation with a reflection on Octavia Butler’s Parable series to show how fiction can help us think about the prospects and limitations regarding the cultivation of practices of care and intimacy in the face of terrestrial catastrophe and human anguish.  

Sponsored by the Religious Studies Program as part of the New Directions in Religious Studies Lecture Series. With co-sponsorship from Africana Studies and Research Center, Society for the Humanities, and Department of Literatures in English.