Black Flesh Matters

Black Flesh Matters: Essays in Runagate Interpretation, a pathbreaking collection of essays, advocates a style of biblical criticism inspired by “the world of the Black vernacular and vernacular-sensitive scholarly criticism.” It is a must-read, and not only for anyone interested in emancipatory biblical interpretation. I highly recommend it!

-- Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Krister Stendahl Professor, Harvard Divinity School

In the introduction to this collection of 30 years of writings and reflections, Vincent Wimbush says he invites readers to ‘travel back’ with him. I object. He is not inviting us ‘back’ to anything. He is passionately demanding that we keep running with him. This is the better metaphor: Running, like music, produces diverse effects. Some readers will be mortified by what Wimbush writes. I am hopefully terrified and, like Wimbush, aim to continue to keep myself fit and ready to run. We all need to run.

-- Kent Richards, Executive Director Emeritus, SBL

Black Flesh Matters delivers a powerful intellectual framework for the first solid way forward since the alleged American freedom from slavery 170 years ago. It provides clear and deep paths beyond American tragedy, if we can take it in. Vincent Wimbush’s previous books created the big picture. This new book brings together undaunted reckoning with the horror of American slavery, a clear portrait of how scripturalizing can make ‘our own future,’ and an extraordinary compiling of African American insight and imagination from the past 400 years.

-- Hal Taussig, professor of biblical literature (retired), Union Theological Seminary

Vincent Wimbush’s new book, a dazzling compendium of essays both new and not so new, fairly scorches the hands that turns its pages. Taken as a whole, the arguments focus on the profound necessity to create a new canonical formation of the meanings and mandates of being African American. The call to action by Dr. Wimbush, a consummate scholar, draws on an enormously wide-ranging referential landscape, from his own academic research in classical sacred texts to the immediacy of discourse by contemporary global writers, artists, musicians, and social critics. His book is a significant life work to which he brings a Black scholar’s brilliance and passion, and from which his readers cannot turn away unscathed.

-- Ronne Hartfield, senior research fellow in religion and art, Harvard University Center for the Study of World Relig