Black religion suffuses Black political thought and, therefore, Black people. For Black people are not at liberty to not possess political thought: how can such a thing be possible when the Black body is the site of so much political deliberation? In We Testify with Our Lives, Terrence Johnson takes a literary, philosophical, rhetorical, and textual reading of the development of Black Power to describe the nature of that inherently political existence, and the religiously inflected practices and language that enables a group to survive. What emerges is a complex narrative of the radical origins, religious inflection, and reconstructive capacity of Black political philosophies of survival, a narrative that advocates for a holistic view of Black political thought.
Johnson calls attention to the diversity of Black religious expression, and in so doing locates a powerful precedent for the creative reimagining of structures of oppression. This is important because a...
University of California Press