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516 - Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America |
Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black
America
By Theophus H. Smith
New York, Oxford University Press, 1994. 287 pp. $32.00.
Conjuring Culture is a compelling, interdisciplinary testament to the transformative power of human spirituality. Theophus Smith describes how the Bible has been a transformative tool for African Americans. It has been and remains a "book of ritual prescriptions for reenvisioning and, therein, transforming history and culture." Biblical interpretation from a Euro-American perspective has been combined with African -magical folk practices like conjure to develop an interpretive strategy that not only brings the Bible to life in the contextuality of African Americans but transforms that life with healing vision and power.
Conjure, Smith explains, is the magical folk tradition of black North Americans. He defines magic as a system of signs and symbols for mapping and managing the world. It is a form of communication, just as chemistry is a systematic ordering of symbols and signs that communicates an understanding of the natural world. With that understanding, a scientist can also hope to control that world. The magic of conjure has the same function and intent. Through the figurative use of biblical typology (Moses, exodus, promised land, Suffering Servant) the African American attempts to order and understand reality. The African American conjuror hopes to transform it.
The African American conjuror, whose identity comes in such diverse forms as Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. DuBois, Howard Thurman, James Weldon Johnson, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King, Jr., is a kind of doctor of the spirit. Smith is careful to point out that conjure need not be exhausted by the negative content of sorcery or voodoo. Medicinal or quasi-medicinal purposes are just as important; the conjuror may intend to heal with as much vigor as he or she intends to destroy.
Depending on the work of Northrop Frye, Smith argues that the Bible functions as a code that must be read typologically. African Americans have done so, but with a conjurational intent. For example, Smith recognizes that law typically has the role of "legitimating and enforcing bondage.,, Its primary purpose is to restrain. However, building from the exodus countercultural model of law as a device for setting captives free (it secures access to the promised land), black Americans have most often
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517 - Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America |
employed the law as an instrument for achieving emancipation and civil rights. In other words, the law has been transformed; it has become a conjure tool. As such, it is used to transform the culture it inhabits.
Smith orders his work by clustering his typological headings thematically. Genesis, exodus, and law are considered in the section on ethnographic perspectives. Spirituals, wisdom, and prophecy are contained in a section on theoretical perspectives. The final section, theological perspectives, includes the topics gospel, praxis, and apocalypse. His work with the exodus typology provides a useful illustration of his method. African Americans have continually perceived their reality through the lens of the Israelites in Egyptian bondage. Leaders of the people imitated, through both their rhetoric and performances, key Israelite figures like Moses (Smith discusses Martin Luther King, Jr., as one who successfully presented himself as a Moses figure) who assisted God in the liberation of the people. The exodus of the Hebrew slaves, thus, became a "mundane reality in contemporary terms." What is even more exciting than the figurative parallelism and mimetic performance, however, is the conjurational expectation that God could be invoked to initiate the powerful typology of exodus in the contemporary life of the people. Ritual human actions of obedience and righteousness (as, for example, King's mimetic Moses performances) could, in this way, conjure the presence of God who would establish a new cultural reality. "From this perspective I propose the hypothesis that black North American experience features a development from designating or 'summoning' God in worship, to an intention to conjure God for freedom."
Jesus typology is discussed in Smith's chapter on gospel. African Americans have long maintained a mimetic desire to emulate Jesus. But the black Christian desire was a conjure desire. It was and is not simply an attempt to imitate Jesus as victim but to understand how Jesus used victimization for the purpose of transforming the victimizer. Here conjure becomes a homeopathic cure. Just as a physician will use a precise amount of a disease to stimulate the body's immune system to react against it (immunization), so the conjuror wants to use the process of victimization as a means to cure it. This is precisely, Smith explains, what Martin Luther King, Jr., successfully accomplished in his civil rights strategy. His nonviolent marches were calculated maneuvers that elicited the hatred and violence of prejudice in such a shocking but contained manner that they provided the stimulus for their own eradication without further perpetuating the process of victimization. Society's outrage was used to assist blacks in using the law as a therapeutic tool to end the segregationist effects of the prejudice disease. Here, praxis as a conjure tool directly operated from gospel as a conjure resource.
There is no doubt that Smith has made a major contribution towards furthering the development of an African American hermeneutic. His work quite carefully describes the transformative process that has existed in the African American Christian community. And his careful documentation of the manner in which this hermeneutic has developed biculturally
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518 - Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America |
not only demonstrates how cultures have engaged and learned from one another but also fosters the continuation of this cross-cultural learning and spiritual growth.
My primary critique of the work involves Smith's refusal to bring the epistolary material of the New Testament into view. While I have my suspicions as to why he does not, I would argue that no biblical hermeneutic can be complete without a consideration of this key corpus of biblical texts. Here, in fact, may well be where the process of conjure that develops out of that transformative mix of African tradition and Euro-American Christianity might demonstrate or already have demonstrated its effect most potently. This remains to be seen, but the future work that Smith intends certainly needs to address the question and the texts that raise it.
Brian K. Blount
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ