미국흑인 종교적 상상력의 세 가지 특징

Three Distinctive Features of Black Religious Imagination: Malcolm X, James Cone and Alice Walker

This paper aims to generalize some distinctive features of black religious imagination specially in the twentieth century by looking at three representative black religious figures such as a Muslim Malcolm X, a liberation theologian James Cone, and a womanist Alice Walker. As any texts transform themselves actively interacting with their constantly changing contexts, religions as culture are also subject to change. As such, Christianity, which is transmitted from the white to the black, undergoes a creative transformation in the black people's imagination. Unlike the white intention to make the black slaves more obedient to their white masters, Christianity plays a central role of empowering the black to protest against the white supremacy specially in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. When it comes to the twentieth century, black religious imagination emerges in much more varied forms, not just Christianity but also Islam and Womanism. I assume that the black experience, which centers on both physical and social suffering, determines the color and shape of black religious imagination although its essence is fluid rather than static. Based on the assumption, the common features in those black religious discourses are provisionally described as communitarian, resistant, and empirical. All of the three figures above feature not only those three characteristics but also each idiosyncratic quality. It needs to be noted that this is only a provisional typology to map the black religious imagination, which would be only helpful but not exhaustive nor absolute.