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Fugitive Saints: Catholicism and the Politics of Slavery
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Description
How should the Catholic church remember the sins of its saints? This question proves particularly urgent in the case of those saints who were canonized due to their relation to black slavery. Today, many of their racial virtues seem like racial vices. In this way, the church celebrates Peter Claver, a seventeenth-century Spanish missionary to Colombia, as “the saint of the slave trade,” and extols Martín de Porres as the patron saint of mixed race people. But in truth, their sainthoods have upheld anti-blackness much more than they have undermined it. Habituated by anti-blackness, the church has struggled to perceive racial holiness accurately. In the ongoing cause to canonize Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian-born former slave, the church continues to enact these bad racial habits. This book proposes black fugitivity, as both a historical practice and an interpretive principle, to be a strategy by which the church can build new hagiographical habits. Rather than searching inside itself for racial heroes, the church should learn to celebrate those black fugitives who sought refuge outside of it.
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Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Sainthood and Historical Memory
2. Claver’s Ministry of Slavocracy
3. Coercive Kindness: Re-Considering Claver “from Below”
4. Claver as Race-Making Ally of Anti-Blackness Supremacy
5. The Racialized Humility of Peter Claver
6. The Racialized Humility of Saint Martín de Porres
7. Catholic Sainthood and the Afterlife of Slavery
8. Venerable Pierre Toussaint and the Search for Fugitive Saints
9. “Far is Free”: Towards a Fugitive Hagiography
Bibliography
Index