Decolonizing Revelation: A Spatial Reading of the Blues

Decolonizing Revelation: A Spatial Reading of the Blues demonstrates that the cultural phenomenon of the blues is an indigenous way of knowing that offsets the hidden logic of racialized dominance within modern Christian understandings of revelation. In distinction from the Christian, Religious, and racialized understandings of the blues, this dissertation focuses on the space in which the blues emerges, the Delta Region of the United States. By attending to space, this dissertation shows how critical consideration of geography and region can reveal nuances that are often veiled behind racialized and theologized ways of understanding the people of the Delta Region. Reading the blues in space discloses the ways in which the blues dislocates the confines of interpreters that label it a racialized phenomenon on one hand, and the devil\u27s music on the other. By wresting the blues from colonialist and racist logics, this dissertation contends that the space that produces the blues can be recovered as a viable resource for reimagining a theology of revelation