Black Worldmaking in Worship: Pedagogical Lessons from the Aesthetic Life of the Black Church

• In Event: The Black Church Ain’t Dead! A Revival on the Educational Legacy of the Black Church

Abstract

I theorize the Black church as a site where Black aesthetic practices function as key shapers of cultural (re)memory and critical insurgency, actively ghosting the racialized geographies of Euromodernity. The church enacts an appositional force—rooted in a love-driven, paraontological refusal of anti-Black ontologies—that unsettles logics rendering Blackness as outside the “normative” aesthetics of humanity. Through embodied ritual, song, testimony, communal practice, and resistance, the Black church produces life texts that emerge from and exceed the racial violence that structures Black life, making possible the tangible and imagined work of Black worldmaking (Author6, 2024). Drawing from J. Kameron Carter’s (2013) theorization of Blackness as paraontological and Christina Sharpe’s wake theory (2016), I situate the Black church as a living spiritual infrastructure where aesthetic practice becomes pedagogy, and the sanctity of the space becomes rehearsals for myriad routes to Black freedom. In this spiritual space, I conceptualize Black worldmaking as emerging through ritualized acts of community, offering a mode of educational insurgency that refuses containment within dominant epistemologies that frame in/formal schooling. Employing autotheory, I weave personal narrative, Black church histories, and Black study to map how the church’s ongoing political and/as pedagogical work holds urgent lessons for building more resistant educational spaces under conditions of antiblackness.

Author

• Justin A. Coles, University of Massachusetts - Amherst