Event

In author Ashon Crawley's own words:

"My first book project, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016), engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or “otherwise” modes of existence can serve as disruptions against the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black Pentecostalism–a multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect with one strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los Angeles–Blackpentecostal Breath reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. These choreographic, sonic, and visual practices and the sensual experiences they create are not only important for imagining what I call “otherwise worlds of possibility,” they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture in an era when such expressions are increasingly under siege."

Dr. Ashon T. Crawley is Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies and African American Studies departments at the University of Virginia. He earned my doctoral degree from Duke University in the English Department with a certificate in African and African American Studies and before Duke, attended the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, earning a Master of Theological Studies degree with a concentration in feminist thought and queer theology. His research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black Studies, Performance Theory and Sound Studies, Philosophy and Theology, Black Feminist and Queer theories.  He has published work in CR: The New Centennial Review, Performance Research; Current Musicology; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society; The Journal of Theology and Sexuality; Black Theology: An International Journal and in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. Most recently, Dr. Crawley has published literary essays with The Los Angeles Review of Books; The New Inquiry; The Normal School; Interfictions and Avidly.  He also has book chapters in Black Gender and Sexuality: A Reader (Palgrave MacMillan) and Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Identity in the Twenty-First Century (The University of Alabama Press).