The Anarchy of Black Religion

“The Anarchy of Black Religion is a pivotal contribution to fostering an imagination other than the one that has been furthered in the age of modernity. J. Kameron Carter reformulates modern religion as key to understanding the inseparability of the polity and the colony, of liberty and necessity, and of value and violence. As Carter outlines, the black study of religion assembles an image of mattering that cannot be arrested by the intrinsic antiblackness that sustains the reign of the Human and inflicts unrelenting physical and symbolic violence on the planet and all of its existents.” - Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of Toward a Global Idea of Race

“J. Kameron Carter’s claim that the modern western formulations of racial capitalism and religion go hand in hand renders it impossible to think the one without the other. His interventions in this ambitious, rich, and imaginative book have the power to change the study of religion as a whole and in tremendously salutary, necessary ways.” - Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion

"In our racially segregated world, this diffunity is crucial to explore, especially as a Christian. As Carter describes it, Christianity helped create a religiopolitical regime of antiblack exclusion and racial capitalist extraction. But with Carter, I too am dreaming of an alternative social order—one that is not predicated on exclusion and instead chooses to embrace difference and learn from Indigenous ways of living in harmony with all creatures." - Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo, Sojourners

"In many ways, [J. Kameron Carter's] book is a prayer that brings about a childlike sense of imagination. It becomes more than an intellectual work and something I view as deeply pastoral."

"The Anarchy of Black Religion is a provocative and thought-provoking text building upon the convergence of many discourses of blackness, and it is a necessary read for those whose interests lie at the intersection of black study, black religion, and theology and other texts which in some way take on the task of describing blackness in modernity and its relation to commodification, gender, sexuality, and religion/theology."
  - Antavius Franklin, Reading Religion

"Carter ... doesn’t merely describe the kind of improvisation for which he argues in this book. He performs it. His creative word-play keeps the reader engaged as he poetically winds his work around themes of ancient European alchemy, mid-20th century gynecological practices, and even Euclidian geometry, weaving together an account of black religion that is at times inspiring, often personally challenging, and overall, totally mystifying." - Derek Ryan Kubilus, Doxology

“The Anarchy of Black Religion is a timely and daring book that troubles the academic study of religion using an ‘an-archic’ study of blackness as religion. Both critical and visionary, Anarchy goes beyond lamentation of what Carter describes as the catastrophe of modernity and cuts a path through it.”