Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice)

This groundbreaking book provides an analytical tool to understand how and why evil works in the world as it does. Deconstructing memory, history, and myth as received wisdom, the volume critically examines racism, sexism, poverty, and stereotypes. Front Matter....Pages i-xv The Womanist Dancing Mind: Cavorting with Culture and Evil....Pages 1-9 Sites of Memory: Proceedings too Terrible to Relate....Pages 11-27 Vanishing into Limbo: The Moral Dilemma of Identity as Property and Commodity....Pages 29-55 Invisible Things Spoken: Uninterrogated Coloredness....Pages 57-78 Legends Are Memories Greater than Memories: Black Reparations in the United States as Subtext to Christian Triumphalism and Empire....Pages 79-110 To Pick One’s Own Cotton: Religious Values, Public Policy, and Women’s Moral Autonomy....Pages 111-138 Growing like Topsy: Solidarity in the Work of Dismantling Evil....Pages 139-158 Everydayness: Beginning Notes on Dismantling the Cultural Production of Evil....Pages 159-165 Back Matter....Pages 167-200 In her latest groundbreaking work, Emilie M. Townes weaves literary analysis, social history, and cultural studies with ethical and theological theory to understand the interior life of evil. Incorporating history with the study of memory, she explains the complex social relationships in American society that reflect evil as a cultural production. Townes focuses on four manifestations of the cultural production of evil in American society and their global dimensions: identity as property and commodity, uninterrogated coloredness, empire, and religious values in public policy formation. Her conclusion outlines the solidarity necessary to dismantle these forms of systematic evil through a reexamination of the Christian understanding of hope