This book models an ex-centric orientation to the study of modern formation as the study of the hyper-signification ("scripturalization") of difference as racialization/racism. As Black flesh came to be identified as persistent baseline for difference, it opens windows onto mimetic translations ("scripturalizing") of all modern subjectivities.

Vincent L. Wimbush, PhD, Harvard University, is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures at the Claremont Graduate University.

Introduction: Cursus Fugae: Frenzied Soundings and Threatening Gestures; or, the Making of an Undisciplined/Black-Fleshed Maroon

Part I. Contemptus Mundi; or, H¿s M¿: 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