Conversation with J. Brent Crosson

by Drew Konow

DK: What did you learn about religion during your research? 

JBC: I am still learning.  “Religion” is my object of analysis in Experiments with Power and the theoretical lens is obeah—the criminalized problem-solving practices of Caribbean spiritual workers.  In this way I try to reverse the power dynamics of many studies of religion, in which a particular group or figure is the object of study through which “religion” is described.  In this latter approach religion is either backgrounded as a taken-for-granted category or is defined in some positive way (as belief, as ethical training, as moral tradition, as a balm for the pain of existence).  My wager is that we need to look at practices that have been labelled bad religion or not-religion—what I call religion’s shadows—to really understand the category religion.  Otherwise we’ll still reproduce various tropes that are part of liberalism’s project of separating good religion and coercive power.  (Another way to think of this project is the de-ethicization of exchange [or “sacrifice” as it comes to be called when non-commercial] and the ethicization of the self—with “religion” a key sacred realm of the latter sphere).  This is also the alleged division between economic/political power and religion.  I argue that the dominant ways in which recent scholarship has tried to address this purification—through the ethical turn(s) or turns toward ritual—have reproduced the problem.  Like secularism, religion must be pursued through its shadows—the excesses of an exclusionary process of purification (that we might call “religion-making”).  But these shadows are actually the light that allows us to see religion.  In the same way that a spiritual traveler in the traditions that I write about must descend into the darkness of “the Depths” first before rising to the Heights, so too studies of religion have to dig deep into these shadows before offering some positive definition of “religion” (a universalizing project to which scholars seem attached).  And the depths or the shadows are not immoral or insubstantial, as many of our tropes associated with darkness imply.  They are simply deep.  They are what gives depth to any talk about “religion.”  That’s partly why the book is structured around this African Caribbean cosmo-theory of the Heights and the Depths.

DK: What is the most important message you hope your readers take away from the book?

JBC: It depends on who is reading the book.  For a US audience not familiar with the Caribbean and/or ensconced in a US-centric view of things, there are a few messages.  One is that racialized police brutality is a transnational phenomenon.  Like any good history of Black Power or Pan-Africanism, analyses of police violence must take a transnational perspective.  This perspective must also account for the ways that the US has policed other countries through economic, covert, and military means.  People in the US are entirely capable of denouncing a right-wing coup attempt in DC or calling for police reform, while supporting the very systems that enact right-wing coups and violent policing around the world (no matter which party is in power).  This is the cycle of law-making and law-preserving violence, which today manifest as the impasse of (neo)fascism and (neo)liberalism.  

For a broader audience, the book focuses on the criminalized spiritual work of my interlocutors to understand this cycle of law-making and law-preserving violence that confronts many people around the world.  In Experiments with Power, I sometimes rely on Walter Benjamin’s early and difficult essay “Critique of Violence” to articulate how some spiritual workers are thinking about these things.  Law-making violence, which breaks the law to impose “law and order,” does not necessarily manifest as fascist white libertarian nationalism in Trinidad, but as a related desire for the violent imposition of law and order by a male sovereign who would transcend the constraints of law.  This desire for a toxically masculine sovereign who, in the bluntest manifestations of such sentiments, would go into poor neighborhoods and kill or round up lower-class Black men, is found in popular culture (the host of Crime Watch, Trinidad’s most popular TV show, for example) and in the public figure of the Chief of Police (especially in the recent chief’s shoot-to-kill policy).  What Benjamin shows is that this desire for authoritarian extra-legal violence is integral to the “rule of law” that liberalism upholds.  In other words, the liberal rhetoric of law preservation—of rights, procedures, and tolerance—depends on extra-legal violence.  We can see this in the US in the recent coup attempt.  Those who denounce the insurrection in DC as illegal, upholding the constitution and the “rule of law,” also support a government that has aided and abetted countless right-wing coups around the world.  This law-making violence abroad supports the privileges through which feelings of rights are made for certain US citizens.  There is an under-acknowledged relationship there. 

Experiments with Power is an analysis of this wide-ranging impasse between (neo)liberal law preserving violence and (neo)fascist law-making violence.  Within liberal secularism, religion is both the rule and the exception in this cycle of violence—both a system of ethical rules and an ineffable disposition that transcends rationalization.  The book does not stop with the elucidation of this impasse, but, like Benjamin’s essay, works at sketching an alternative by drawing on spiritual workers’ theories.  For Benjamin, this alternative has been translated into English as “divine violence.”  While many ideas about divine violence would simply seem to reproduce images of fascist law-making force, Benjamin argues for a divine justice that suspends the law without seeking to impose “law and order.”  I understand the spiritual and ethical work of my interlocutors in these terms.  As such, their work is experimental—ritually performing exceptions to religious or legal norms to produce the unexpected rather than to establish a new norm.  

One of the key examples I use is a practice of justice-seeking burial that would be considered immoral, macabre, or repugnant even to many of the family of the unjustly dead.  In the case of the police shootings of two women and one man at the site of my field research, such burial techniques produced an unexpected and unprecedented outcome—the arrest of the police officers involved in the murder of these three unarmed people.  This justice-seeking spiritual work did not uphold such techniques as good or proper; rather, it violated norms to render an entrenched state of affairs contingent.  The force of state law was shifted from its rutted banks and could flow in another directions—with some of these new channels potentially dangerous to the families of the deceased themselves.  This work is experimental not in the sense of an experiment that performs certainty—what is already known or normative.  This would turn what my interlocutors call “experiments” into “ritual,” at least in the ways that this latter term has often been defined as law-preserving.  Another way to think about the difference between this experimental modality of obeah/science and law-preserving violence, is the difference between abolition and reform.

DK: A major argument within the book is that obeah challenges existing theories and definitions of religion. What specific theoretical interventions does the book make? And how can these theoretical insights be extended beyond the context of obeah and Trinidad? 

JBC: I think I might have anticipated this question in my answer to the last one.  But I guess I could talk more about the terms spiritual workers use to describe what they do—science, work, experiments, justice.  These terms are of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot called “North Atlantic universals”—magisteria with provincial Atlantic histories and universalizing aspirations. A certain idea of “religion” is one of these North Atlantic universals, and so are popular notions of “science,” “power,” “work,” and “the rule of law.”  As both profoundly internal to and excluded from the Atlantic genealogies of these terms, Caribbean peoples have used these words in ways that unsettle and elucidate these domains.  In different ways in the anglophone colonial archive and in English creole usage, “science” has been a long-standing synonym for “obeah”—the term through which subaltern spiritual work has been criminalized in the Caribbean as “any assumption of supernatural power.”  There has been a profound misunderstanding of this lexical equivalence as an attempt by subjugated Caribbean peoples to mask their African traditions with the modern Western legitimacy of “science.”  

In the book, I go into great depth on how the opposition between science and religion was operationalized in moral economies within the study of religion.  Scholars of religion constantly compared “Western science” and “primitive magic”—separating “religion” from both.  What this comparison did was define non-Western problem-solving religious practices as science-like by virtue of their alleged pragmatism and/or amorality.  Yet, in a relation of colonial mimesis, these early accounts asserted that non-Western magic is like “Western science” but still a poor imitation.  It could only aspire to the mastery of inchoate forces that “Western” or “modern” science had actually achieved.  

Caribbean spiritual workers turn the terms of this mimesis on its head.  Science is not necessarily a legitimating word because it communicates the same moral ambivalence and debate that obeah does.  “Science” communicates the potential harm that inheres in projects of mastery (and their inherent fallibility).  Science, experimentation, and work provide semantic spaces of maroonage from the North Atlantic universal of Religion as unified moral tradition separate from political power.  So the moral ambivalence of “science” does not communicate privileged neutrality or rational mastery, as it does in North Atlantic universalism, but a fraught space of ethical debate.  This means that ethics must be experimental rather than simply rooted in fixed oppositions or codes.  All of this extends beyond obeah or Trinidad, because the linked understandings of “magic,” “science,” and “religion” that obeah/science unsettles reflect a global project known as the West.  Again, to borrow from Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the West is a project rather than a place, unevenly performed in a variety of settings.  It is a morally normative project of reform.  Certain understandings of “science,” “religion,” “power,” and “law” are some of its cornerstones.  As with science and religion, spiritual workers made me rethink the relationship between law and justice, but I fear that would require me to make this answer longer than it already is.     

DK: Arlena’s murder at the hands of the police frames much of your analysis in Experiments with Power. What does the book suggest about the relationship between religion, violence, and anti-blackness?

JBC: Anti-Blackness is basically the way through which liberal ideals of religion and power can except themselves from the law-making violence on which they depend.  This is what makes liberalism a “moral-racial” framework in the book, for it elaborates lower class blackness as violence that can be reformed through either (state) law or (Christian) religion.  Fanon noted this decades ago, when he talks about blackness as the moral “abyss” for whiteness.  But in the book, part of my argument (again relying on spiritual workers’ conceptions of the Depths) is that this abyss is not simply a moral aporia but a depth in which conceptions of power and ethics can take shape through responsibility rather than deferral.  Again, the Depths are not simply the denigrated, amoral abyss but a depth that gives superficial conceptions of ethics or religion some gravity.  However, as I go to great lengths to show in the book, this is not simply an equation of blackness=Africanity=alternative conception of religion.  There is no single community of moral consensus that we could point to and call “a religion” in the way we like to do.  Members of the same religious tradition, community, or family disagree on the limits of ethical practice, using terms often associated with anti-Africanness (like obeah) in a variety of ways.  Instead of conceiving of obeah as a moral community or a discursive tradition (in the ways we are so accustomed to conceiving of “religion”), the book looks at obeah as a field of debate on the ethics of power (with power understood to be both spiritual and material).  In some ways obeah is thus in between Weberian conceptions of “politics” and “religion,” rather than falling to one side of Western modernity’s great moral divide between instrumental and value-rational spheres.  Again, this moral divide can only be sustained through the all-too-real analytical fiction of anti-Blackness, since liberalism’s ethical sacred spheres of religion, nuclear family love, or law can never be separated from law-making and law-preserving violence in practice.   It is basically the way in which liberalism casts itself as a project of ethical reform rather than coercion, thus reconciling Enlightenment ideals of rights and the universal (hu)man with the violent, hierarchical systems that these ideals support. 

J. Brent Crosson is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Texas who focuses on secularism and religion in the Carribean.

Drew Konow is a first-year doctoral student in Religion in the Americas. He studies religion, capitalism, and popular culture.