J. Kameron Carter will give two lectures, one on Feb. 29 and one on March 1. Both will take place at 7:30 p.m. The lecture on Feb. 29, Christian Supersessionism; or, The Jewish Question in Red, Black, and White, is The School of Theology’s annual Belford Lecture on Jewish-Christian Religions.  It will be held in Hamilton Hall’s Hargrove Auditorium at The School of Theology. The lecture on March 1, The Post-Racial Condition: Notes on American Political Theology, is co-sponsored by the University’s Political Science Department, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the University Lecture Committee.  It will be held in Gailor Auditorium of Gailor Hall. 

Feb. 29 Lecture 

Carter's lecture considers perhaps the key question of Christian life and thought today: the question of the articulation of Christian identity to racial identity (including nationalism), on the one hand, and the making of the modern, Western citizen, on the other. Carter argue that that these visions, indeed this fusion, of Christian and racial identity represents a new form of the Christian theological problem of supersessionism (the belief that Christians have displaced the Jewish people as being at the heart of God’s dealings with the world) — namely, its racialization. In explicating this problem for contemporary Jewish-Christian relations, Carter will offer a summary of the central thesis of his book, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University press, 2008).

March 1 Lecture 

Part of what galvanized a cross-section of support from conservatives, liberals, and especially independents for Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy in the 2008 election cycle was the belief that he represented the transcendence of race, and thus that with him the race problem — that great nemesis of American society — would in a significant sense be put behind the nation. They were willing to risk belief in Obama, though the nature of his personal religious beliefs were in question for many of them. Nevertheless, an Obama presidency still signaled for enough of the American electorate what Carter is calling “the post-racial condition.” 

This lecture unpacks the post-racial condition, arguing that it represents a pervasive, new structure of national, cultural, and political belief that marks the United States of America and a significant part of the Western global culture.  But Carter further argues that the post-racial condition is emphatically NOT the condition of the overcoming of race. Rather, it is the condition of its hyper-articulation and performance. It is the condition of racial performance but no longer under the name of race. It is racial performance that need not speak the name of race.  It is racial performance and identity inside of economics, education, and the like, but most especially under the names of religion and politics or “the saving of the nation.” The task of this lecture is to indicate these new operations of the racial imagination at the intersection of religion and politics.

Moreover, Carter shows how the post-racial condition can be found in nucleus form in the vision of American nationhood, democracy, and race of one of the most celebrated founding fathers: Thomas Jefferson. He briefly considers Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia ” as already the terms of the “post-racial” racial condition that the contemporary Tea-Party movement in the fulfillment of the 1980s Reagan revolution represents. Carter concludes the lecture with a few thoughts on what the post-racial condition means for the 2012 presidential election. 

J. Kameron Carter is associate professor of theology and black church studies at Duke Divinity School. He received his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia in 2001. In 2008, his highly-acclaimed book, Race: A Theological Account, was published by Oxford University Press. Carter investigates the complex forms of identity (especially around race, gender, and nationalism) that have come to mark us all. He engages questions of identity, politics, history, cultural and social criticism, film criticism, and the like as part of the pressing task of voicing a new religious and Christian social imagination for the 21st century. 

These lectures are open to the public.