The Peace Mission Movement's Communion Table
Topics: Black Geographies
, Feminist Geographies
, Food Systems
Keywords: Black geographies, Black ecologies, Africana Religions, food, urbanism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 40
Authors:
J.T. Roane, Arizona State University
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Abstract
I historicize the efforts of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, examining the ways that ordinary members fashioned insurgent modes of social belonging wherein they defied segregation and began to articulate a new vision of the future based in peace. Collectively, members of the Peace Mission remade property as a collective asset, disarticulating it from blood and familial transmission, as well as from race. They embraced asexuality and proposed a non-reproductive future, that while not queer in the sense of (openly) embracing same-gender sex or love, queered/queried the horizon of reproduction, growth, and profit championed by dominant urbanists including planners, politicians, and police. I center my examination of the group after it shifted center from Harlem to to Philadelphia in the early 1940s. I focus on the group's “Holy Communions" viewing these regular feasting rituals as enactments of earthly satiation giving material substance to more abstract notions of peace centered by Divine. Feasts held together materially each outpost of the organization, constituting the infrastructure for the group's "heaven on earth." Attending to the archived menus, I decenter Father Divine's charisma, drawing out the quotidian efforts of Black migrant women who used the communion to shape visions of peace through the practice of commensality. Critically, through the communion table, and its aesthetic of abundance, these women transposed and adapted the ethos of plotting and the Black commons from rural communities and mill towns in the South, creating novel forms of collectivity and substantive belonging against a backdrop of urban enclosure and atomization.
The Peace Mission Movement's Communion Table
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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