• The first book-length engagement on religion in the work of Sylvia Wynter, one of the most innovative and important thinkers of the last forty years.

Contributor: Justine Bakker Justine M. Bakker is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). She researches the intersections of race and religion, with a specific focus on alternative, heterodox, and esoteric forms of religiosity and method, theory, and conceptualization in religious studies. --- Contributor: David Kline David Kline is Teaching Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity: Religious Autoimmunity (Routledge, 2020). --- Contributor: Shamara Wyllie Alhassan Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is an Africana Studies scholar and transnational ethnographer focusing on the ways Rastafari women build pan-African communities and combat anti-Black gendered racism and religious discrimination in the Caribbean and Africa. Her forthcoming book tentatively titled Remembering the Maternal Goddess: Rastafari Women’s Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan African World is winner of the National Women’s Association and University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She is the coeditor of Black Women and Da Rona: Community, Consciousness, and Ethics of Care, which was published with the Feminist Wire Books series at the University of Arizona Press in 2023. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. --- Contributor: Justine Bakker Justine M. Bakker is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). She researches the intersections of race and religion, with a specific focus on alternative, heterodox, and esoteric forms of religiosity and method, theory, and conceptualization in religious studies. --- Contributor: Niki Kasumi Clements Niki Kasumi Clements is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Associate Professor of Religion at Rice University (Houston, Texas). Clements researches Michel Foucault’s fascination with Christianity and ethics through his published works and the archives at the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Her first monograph, Sites of the Ascetic Self, engages the ethics of John Cassian (c. 360–c. 435) through Foucault’s interest in this late ancient ascetic as part of his genealogy of the desiring subject. Clements is at work on her second and third monographs, Chez Foucault: Foucault’s Histories of Sexuality and Foucault the Confessor, focusing on Foucault’s textual and conceptual shifts over his last decade. --- Contributor: Tapji Garba Tapji Garba is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought at York University. Their research engages political theology, legal history, and political economy from within the field of Black studies. --- Contributor: David Kline David Kline is Teaching Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity: Religious Autoimmunity (Routledge, 2020). --- Contributor: Oludamini Ogunnaike Oludamini Ogunnaike is Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in African Studies and the Study of Religion from Harvard University and is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (PSU Press, 2020) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīh. Poetry and Its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020). --- Contributor: Anthony Bayani Rodriguez Anthony Bayani Rodriguez is Assistant Professor in St. John’s University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His current book project, Heretical Scripts, chronicles Sylvia Wynter’s involvement in decolonial struggles in the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States since the 1950s. --- Contributor: Rafael Vizcaíno Rafael Vizcaíno is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. His work employs decolonial approaches to examine the intersections between race, religion, politics, and secularization. He won the American Philosophical Association’s 2020 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought, and his first book (forthcoming) recounts the modern dialectics of secularization from the perspective of Latin American and Caribbean thought. His second book (in progress) examines the relation between philosophy of religion and political theology in the context of epistemic decolonization. --- Contributor: Joseph Winters Joseph Winters is Associate Professor at Duke University in Religious Studies and African and African American Studies. He holds secondary appointments in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. His interests lie at the intersection of Black religious thought, Black studies, and critical theory. His research examines the ways Black literature and aesthetics develop alternative configurations of the sacred, piety, (Black) spirit, and secularity in response to the religious underpinnings of anti-Black violence and coloniality. His first book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, was published by Duke University Press in 2016. He is currently finishing a second manuscript, titled The Disturbing Profane: Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred.

Words Made Flesh engages Sylvia Wynter's work as critical of, and critical to, the study of religion. As such, it is a compelling and powerful contribution to a field often still saddled by a (perhaps unwitting) commitment to colonialist, racist, and discriminatory logics of comparison and categorization. This book is as necessary as it is groundbreaking.---Biko Mandela Gray, Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University and author of Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject