A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? A Postcolonial Response to Cone'sBlack Theology and Black Powerat Forty

In this essay, I posit that the original way in which the concept, heuristic, and signifier "liberation" functioned in U.S. Black Liberation Theology has by both form and content been un/consciously resignified into a discourse of cultural legitimation. The signifier "liberation" has become decontextualized (politically, economically, and culturally) in the second and third iterations of U.S. Black Liberation Theology, causing the discourse to become perpetually oriented towards past, not present or future, alternative dreams of social transformation and sites of struggle informed by the Black Christian radical tradition. In order to accomplish such work, this article employs a postcolonial perspective to the sources and discursive strategies within U.S. Black Liberation Theology. The second section of the article examines the historical and social processes involved in the slippage between liberation and legitimation, probing key moments and issues of class difference that led to (1) the disengagement of U.S. Black Liberation Theology with the cries of the living poor and marginalized and (2) the development of evasive discursive strategies within U.S. Black Theology that render Black Liberation Theology into a middle-class theology.