Creative Response as Rejuvenation

Insights Editor William Greenway Interviews Asante Todd

Your dissertation advisor Victor Anderson wrote a book titled Creative Exchange. What is the relation between “creative exchange” and “creative response”?

Anderson has been especially influential for me. Not just Creative Exchange but also Pragmatic Theology and Beyond Ontological Blackness. I was influenced by his argument for the “opacity” of sources in Black theology. What we see with thinkers like James Evans, Dwight Hopkins, and Cheryl Sanders is attention almost exclusively on slave narratives as a source for moral values. But following Anderson, creative response emerges from attention to diverse sources, not just to slave narratives but to other cultural products like songs, art, practices of cultivation, and other ways human beings make themselves and make ways of life. So, my research is very attentive to those. In all these ways I build upon Anderson’s work and teaching.

You begin with Clementine Hunter’s painting of an early nineteenth-century baptism. What about baptismal scenes is so resonant for you? And how does this relate to your discussion of realism and expressionism?

I first found the Hunter’s painting though Diane Glave, who discusses its religious and cultural significance in Rooted in the Earth, and I was really struck and inspired by Glave’s interpretation of the painting. In particular about how it was both expressivist and realist. Let me talk first about the expressivist dimensions of the painting. The painting mimics the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the wilderness. Jesus’s baptism is a sign of the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, a sign God is well pleased with Jesus. All these are about renewal and rejuvenation, and this theme of rejuvenation is a key theme that shows up in both these paintings and in African American spirituality as creative response. Hunter emphasizes this theme by effectively recreating the wilderness in her painting. It is crawling with the abundant life of creation, and for Hunter this is an interpretation of the power of spiritual renewal. It is spiritual renewal that not only energizes and rejuvenates one existentially, it also has consequences materially, in the world. This is one of the main points, and this idea of rejuvenation is really compelling and pivotal for me and for spirituality as creative response. This potential for rejuvenation is so powerful that for Hunter it even leads to the possibilities of the transformation of the wilderness itself. And maybe instantly for African Americans this means the potential to transform oppressive and brutal experiences into something more constructive, positive, life affirming. My hunch is that this is a stratum of African American spirituality that is not separated from the world but is in tension with the world such that although there are brutal realities that we have to confront and deal with, this African American spirituality thinks that can’t be the end of the story. “Expressivist” also means the hope of many African American artists that this rejuvenating energy would have implications not only for African American faith and culture, but for larger U.S. society and even global society. Much of African American spirituality seeks to find ways to contribute rejuvenation and healing not only to black culture, but to other cultures as well, because cultures are interrelated—distinct, yes, but also interrelated. There’s a hope in that. Finally, when I first saw these paintings, I didn’t see all these things. The first thing I see is serenity. Somehow when I look at these paintings a space of serenity, focus, and self-possession arises in the midst of oppressive conditions. That is a fascinating spiritual event: to be critically aware of the brutalities in U.S. society, not to idealize or dream them away, but at the same to also be able to find peace and serenity. Rejuvenation, serenity, hope: that is what these paintings communicate to me.

What’s at stake in “African American” or “Black” or “African”?

All these terms are, I think, reflective of African Americans trying to find a sense of identity from a largely marginalized social position. They all reflect what W.E.B. DuBois in the early twentieth century called “double consciousness.” A sense of being American but not fully American, also African. All these reflect this twoness, an attempt to reconcile these without obliterating either. African Americans don’t want to get rid of either part of themselves, and we can’t just simply say there are only two. And I use the term “African American,” but I’m a moving site, so sometimes I may say “Black” based on what I want to emphasize. I would not want to absolutize any single term. In this regard, some people ask if there’s such a thing as a uniform Black identity. Well, the simple answer is, “no.” But it’s complicated. We remain in a large sense caught in a tension every African American has to reconcile. We are definitely in a moment of postmodern blackness, where African Americans are contesting one another about what it means to be black. A paradigmatic example of this is the contrast among civil rights activists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Hip Hop culture and movements like Black Lives Matter. Black identity is not a monolith. It’s diffuse, broken up. At the same time, all black bodies fall within certain significations produced by Anglo culture. For instance, “stand your ground” culture. It may fall differently on different black bodies, but every black body stands in danger of becoming a victim of “stand your ground" culture. So, no, we are not monolithic, there are real disagreements among African Americans—religious disagreement, class disagreement, gender disagreement, disagreement between civil rights activists and hip-hop culture—but also, transcending all disagreements, we share a discrete, common identity, and sometimes that commonality comes home in profoundly disturbing ways. For instance, the incident with Trayvon Martin showed the vulnerability of black folk.

You emphasize connection to nature, and humans as co-creators and cultivators …

It is may be ironic but doing this research has made me feel I don’t have enough experiences with nature, and I want to be more intentional about that. I have this great memory of being three or four, and my parents had a garden in the front yard. I spent so much time in that garden and loved it so much that my dad gave me a Swahili nickname, “mdudu mtu.” It means “bug man”! Sadly, since then I’ve not been connected to nature. My research has made me wonder to what degree urbanization has removed us from connection with nature. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, African Americans, both during slavery or emancipated, were on the land. But then we have the great African American migration from the South into the North, mainly into urban areas, and we lose that connection with nature. Now, let me say that we have to be careful not to romanticize nature. There are vicious things in nature. And we have to be careful not to construe nature as only good if tamed. Also, whenever we talk about African Americans and nature, we have to avoid “primitivism,” where blacks are portrayed as “more natural” then other “races,” because this reinscribes the racial division. At the same time, because of a distinctive set of experiences, African American culture and other cultures may be in a position to issue a challenge to mainstream Western culture, a challenge to reconnect with nature. How do we get back to nature, that is a lingering question that’s worth asking.

You speak a good deal about nationalism. Is there hope for nationalism in some form and what is its relation to liberal democracy?

Based on my historical reading, nationalism has failed to include Blacks in a general sense. Well, let me be specific: historically American nationalism always jeopardized African American citizenship and inclusion. Does that mean that all future forms of nationalism will fail? I don’t know, but based upon history I think the answer probably is, “yes, they will fail.” The question of liberal democracy is different, but linked, because modern nationalism came up alongside liberal society. There are principles of liberal democracy which we should keep, like equality and freedom, but we had to add equal protection before the law. So liberal democracies offer benefits, but there are also limits with liberal democracy. For instance, liberal democracy doesn’t have a way to interpret and register diverse ethnic or social groups, so there is denial of marginal and oppressed communities, a tendency to monolithic, nationalistic thinking, which easily lends itself to creation of surveillance states which compromise civil rights in the name of protecting the nation. Is there another way of understanding ourselves as a community? I like the talk of “beloved community” and the “Great World House,” but I would not prescribe what we should become. It is important that all peoples come together as citizens to create new languages. Now, someone may ask about “Black nationalism.” First, in the U.S. context Black nationalism is a defense mechanism, a defensive position many Blacks take in an attempt to stand up under a very oppressive Anglo American culture, which is a global power—African Americans are just underneath the global Leviathan and seeking to put up as many defenses as possible! “Black nationalism” is one of those defenses, even as we are doing this other thing of trying to live constructively in American culture. Having said that, there’s no excuse for not naming also the limits and real problems of Black nationalism, for Black nationalism can reproduce oppressive politics. Finally, when it comes to “nationalism” as a category, even if we as a nation were finally able to fully include African Americans, there would still be questions of gender, sexuality, and environment that the idea of “nation” as a communal imaginary is not well-equipped to address.

Today some Black intellectuals see Martin Luther King Jr. as hopelessly assimilationist. At the same time, popular culture commonly sees Malcolm X as wholly sectarian …

This is the perennial question. How do we reconcile the particularities of African American culture with the need to connect to others. I would place creative response at the intersection of these concerns, but my work leans away from sectarian visions and more toward King, beloved community, and the Great House. And let me say that King was not some creampuff assimilationist. King called out militarism, classism, and racism. Today, Cornel West makes a similarly broad critique, but in his day only King called out all three, and that took courage and made enemies among diverse groups. So I want to disband the narrative that says King was an assimilationist. Love, yes, but not without justice. I also want to disband the narrative that says X was a rabid Black nationalist. X changed after he traveled to Mecca. He began to sound more like King. In his biography, X says that early in his life a young white woman came to him and asked him what she could do to help, and he said, “Nothing, get out of here.” But after traveling to Mecca, shortly before he was assassinated at the young age of thirty-nine, he says he wishes he could talk to that woman again, because he would have a different response. So by the end of their lives, both King and X were moving to more universalist positions. I think we need to talk about African American empowerment and advancement and liberation, but it can never be that we talk about those vital topics without also talking about the ways we’re related to white culture or Asian cultures and others. I don’t think the solution is to get rid of this thing called “white culture.” Here a spirituality as creative response asks for conversation among communities of difference, talking about particularity and unity.

You ended your essay with a quote from an old spiritual: “God gave de people de rainbow sign … no more water, but fire next time.”

Yes. This is the famous line James Baldwin used for the influential book he wrote near the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, The Fire Next Time. Baldwin’s Pentecostal tradition emphasizes the movement of the Spirit, and the “fire” in the hymn is a reference to the Spirit, to “baptism by fire,” “baptism in the Spirit.” For Pentecostals, “living in the Spirit” describes how we can live “in the world but not of it.” But “the fire next time” is also about the theme of divine judgment here, and that is a powerful theme common in African American thought, namely, that final judgment is not human, not the judgment of the Supreme Court. There is another source by which we can call out the evils we see in U.S. society. W.E.B. Du Bois talks of the “ultimate justice of things," and Frederick Douglass talked about the “Supreme Court of Heaven.” The idea that the nation is accountable to both its own standards and to do justice to the poor, that can say something is wrong even if it is done in the name preserving the nation, in the name of “national security.” This idea of a Court of Heaven is not so far from early modern Enlightenment thought. For instance, John Locke, at the very end of his Two Treatises on Government, says the people have a right to revolt if the government does not uphold its duties; that in such cases, people can make an “appeal to heaven,” to a divine standard, that holds no matter what the government declares to be legal. So, the reference to “fire” is a gesture to divine judgment, to judgment about what is wrong that is not dependent upon human customs or nature, but upon a higher standard. Of course, all this resonates when African Americans look at paintings of baptisms!

A final question, is there a thought that you hope would spring immediately to mind when we hear “African American spirituality as creative response”?

Yes. The one word I would like people to think when they hear “ spirituality as creative response,” as I stressed right at the beginning of this interview, is “rejuvenation.” I would love for them to think immediately of rejuvenation, because that is what the spirituality as creative response is fundamentally about. This is a new horizon for me, as well, from my research. The practices of baptism, of protest, of gardening, all of these are about rejuvenation—both for the self and for the world. I think rejuvenation is key for a spirituality as creative response, and I think the practices I named are just a start, and can open us up to other forms of rejuvenation. So what I hope for and work for and celebrate as I look at those paintings of baptism is rejuvenation, rejuvenation for African Americans and for all of us as we struggle to move forward theologically and culturally.

To listen to the full interview with Asante Todd about his essay, Creative Response, tune into our new Insights podcast at AustinSeminary.edu/Insightspodcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Questions for Discussion

1. Professor Asante Todd begins with Clementine Hunter’s painting, “Baptism,” which graces the cover of this issue of Insights. How does the painting fall into the category of “realism”? How does it fall into the category of “expressionism”? How does the tension between the painting’s realism and expressionism empower a spirituality as creative response?

2. What is the “twoness” Delores Williams describes in relation to African Americans’ experience of nature?

3. How does Professor Todd’s image of the garden connection us to nature as “cocreators” and “co-cultivators” and lead us to engage in “prophetic confrontation and contestation”?

4. How is Todd’s understanding of “stewardship” linked to cultivation, caregiving, and contestation?

5.How does the writer’s understanding of “ownership” of land differ from “imperialist” understandings?

6. How has the status of African Americans and Blacks changed in the United States over the course of the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries? To what degree has “nationalism” in the United States included or excluded Black Americans?

7. Why might Professor Todd suggest that “nationalism” always tends to be built upon exclusionary dynamics?

8. How might the meaning of “baptism” be especially significant and helpful as our society reckons with a racist, exploitative past and moves toward a more just future?