Introduction: Cursus Fugae: Frenzied Soundings and Threatening Gestures; or, the Making of an Undisciplined/Black-Fleshed Maroon
Part I. Contemptus Mundi; or, Hōs Mē: Initiation into a Discursive Formation
1.Contemptus Mundi: Social Power of an Ancient Rhetorics and Worldview (1992)
2.Ascetic Behavior and Color-ful Language: Stories About Ethiopian Moses (1992)
3.Not of This World: Early Christianities as Rhetorical and Social Formation (1996)
4.Like a Ship that’s Tossed and Driven: The Ascetics of Social Formation (2001)
5.Contemptus Mundi: The Dialectics of Modern Formation
Part II. “Hitting a Lick With a Crooked Stick”; Or, Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures: Oblique Critique of the Discursive Formation
6.Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures: African Americans and the Bible—A Disturbing Conjunction and a Defiant Question (2000)
7.“Naturally Veiled and Half Articulate”: Scriptures, Modernity, and the Formation of African America (2008)
8.“No modern Joshua”: Nationalization, Scriptures, and Race (2009)
9.Interpreters—Enslaving/Enslaved/Runagate (2010)
10.Per-forming Scriptures: Text(ure)s of African Diaspora Formation (2020)
Part III. Signifying (on) Scriptures; Or, Reading Textures, Gestures, Power: Efforts at Re-orientation and Re-formation within the Veil of Formation
11.The Work We Make Scriptures Do for Us: An Argument for Signifying (on) Scriptures as Intellectual Project (2010)
12.Scripturalization: A Theory of the Politics of Language (2015)
13.From Being Framed to Selling Shadows
14.American Constantine
15. White Men’s Fetish: The Black Atlantic Reads King James (2015)
16. The Name the Peckerwoods Gave It: St. Paul’s Holy Spiritual Temple and the Scriptural Formation of the Black Atlantic
Written in collaboration with Rosamond C. Rodman
17.“We Will Make Our Own Future Text”: A Proposal for an Alternate Interpretive Orientation (2007)
18.Meditation on Disruption (2018)
Part IV. “I’m Buildin’ Me a Home,” Or, “[I] Had to Run”: Expansive and Safe Space for “Composing” the Human
19.Scriptures: Fathoming a Complex Social-Cultural Phenomenon (2004)
20.Escape: The Launch of the Independent Institute for Signifying Scriptures (2014)
21.“I Wish [We] Knew How it Would Feel to be Free”: The Subjunctive Mood (2016)
22.“If the president does it…it’s not illegal…”: The Modern Nation/State as the Scriptural (2017)
23.“They’re Ruining the Game”: (Mis)Readers of the Nation-State (2018)
24.“Who Counts?”: Classification as Scripturalization (2019)
25.Scriptures, Race, Nation: Thinking Through Our Mystifications
26.Religion as the Scriptural: Or, the Mimeticization of Reality
27.Scripturalization as Violence
28.“Backgrounded by Savagery”: Black Flesh as Scripture
Afterword: Mr. George Floyd—American Scripture