Words Made Flesh - by Justine Bakker & David Kline

Book Synopsis

The first sustained treatment of religion and religions in the scholarship of a prominent Caribbean thinker

Sylvia Wynter is a profoundly transdisciplinary scholar whose works span an impressive array of theory, literature, science, anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies as well as different forms, including essays, plays, a novel, and a 935-page unpublished manuscript entitled "Black Metamor-phosis: New Natives in a New World." Whatever the medium, Wynter frequently engages religion as a relevant category of analysis, from reflections on Christianity, Islam, and Rastafarianism to the category and role of religion as a universal aspect of human social production.

Wynter's writings have received enthusiastic attention by scholars in Black studies, Caribbean theory, critical race theory, literature, and philosophy. But until recently little scholarly writing exists that directly engages the topic of religion in her corpus. Words Made Flesh seeks to fill this gap by focusing exclusively on religion, religions, and religiosity in her work.

Bringing together scholars that provide a wide variety of theoretical perspectives on religion, political theology, social theory, and science studies, this book offers an in-depth engagement with one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years and illustrates how Wynter's writing has significant implications for the study of religion and religion's relationship to colonialism, race, humanism, science, and political theology.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

Justine Bakker (Edited By)
Justine M. Bakker is Assistant Professor in Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has published on religion, esotericism, and race in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion, Correspondences, Aries, and Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

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