Siphiwe I. Dube: Black African Neo/Pentecostal Political Subjectivity and/as Black Consciousness

MIASA Public Lectures Series

In this presentation, I explore the political implications of African forms of Pentecostalism for critical race discourse. In particular, and drawing on a critical engagement with the work of Nimi Wariboko, I argue that what African Neo/Pentecostal Theology highlights is that moral and political subjectivity in the context a necropolitical postcolonial Africa, are a result of the intersection of a complex set of practices linked to oneself, others, the state, and G/god. Moreover, in its concern with political well-being, African Neo/Pentecostalism highlights the black racial identity of its adherents as part of its ideological participation in the broader project of black emancipation. In other words, what the centering of race does is not only to de-abstract the African Neo/Pentecostal subjects from their specific socio-political location of Africa, including all the implications of such a location. Centering race in analysing African Neo/Pentecostal discourse also allows us the opportunity to see continuity in the struggle for black emancipation pursued through a specifically Christian political theology. This centering is important to foreground because it provides a different dimension through which to apprehend and comprehend the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism on the continent beyond simply a discourse of spiritual revolution. The pursuit of racial emancipation as part of what African Neo/Pentecostal political subjectivity offers black African political subjects in a continuously racist world, allows us to resist to some degree the discourse of the supposed complete co-option of religion by politics in postcolonial Africa.

Siphiwe Dube is a Senior Lecturer and former Head in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and chapters (and also supervises) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, decoloniality, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice. His current two projects focus on African Political Theology and the Religious New Right in post-apartheid South Africa. He is a United World College (Atlantic College) alumnus, a former NRF-DST Scarce Skills Development Postdoctoral Research Fellow, a former Africa Fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh and currently a Pan-African Scientific Research Council Fellow, NRF-rated scholar, and Senior Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana.

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