From the Grave Upward: Southernist Political Theology, the Dead, and Gaza

How does the Palestinian experience help conceptualize an umbrella understanding of genocides against indigenous peoples, the racialized others, spanning from Africa, Asia, to the Americas, and back to Palestine? Our Southernist political theology decenters sovereignty, beginning instead with those whose lives have been ontologically marginalized—those who are exposed to death, maiming, and dispossession not as exceptions but as constitutive of the political order. Unlike classical political theology, which begins with the sovereign as the decider of exception, our proposed southernist framework insists that political-theological analysis must start with those whose lives have never entered the calculus of exception, for their exclusion is constitutive, not accidental, of the moral and political order itself. In conversation with contextual liberation theology and Womanist interventions as well as Fanonian genealogies, we articulate a southernist feminist counter- (lower case “t”) theology that refuses the metaphysical binaries—good and evil, chosen and annihilable, sacred and profane—upon which sacred violence depends.