Words Made Flesh

Justine Bakker (Edited By) 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. David Kline (Edited By) David Kline is Teaching Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity: Religious Autoimmunity (Routledge, 2020).

Introduction: Sylvia Wynter and Religion Justine M. Bakker and David Kline 1 PART ONE: The Religiosity of Being Human 1 On Self-Creation: Autopoiesis and Autoreligion David Kline 21 2 Symbolic Rebirth and Ceremonies Never Lost: African Religions and the Paradoxical Progressivism of Sylvia Wynter's Work Oludamini Ogunnaike 44 3 (Para)religious Traces in Sylvia Wynter's "Demonic Ground" Justine M. Bakker 97 PART TWO: Science, Secularism, and Man's Political Theology of Race 4 The Wynterian Turn: Human Hybridity in the Natural and Human Sciences Niki Kasumi Clements 129 5 The Ceremony beyond the Secular: Postreligious Autopoetics in Wynter's The Hills of Hebron Rafael Vizcaino 153 6 Sociogeny, Race, and the Theological Genealogy of Economy Tapji Garba 171 PART THREE: Counter-religiosities beyond Man 7 Interrupting the Sanctity of Man: Wynter, Imperial Piety, and the Unruly Sacred Joseph Winters 193 8 Moving to a Realm beyond Reason: Mapping Ontological Sovereignty in Counter-worlds of Liminality Shamara Wyllie Alhassan 211 Coda: Nuiscientia Anthony Bayani Rodriguez 235 Acknowledgments 243 Bibliography 245 Contributors 263 Index 267

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