UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Todne Thomas, associate professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School, will be the featured presenter during the Africana Research Center’s upcoming Power Hour webinar.
Thomas’ lecture, titled “Burning the BlackMotherChurch: On Ethnography and Matrifocal Methodology,” will take place virtually at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 1. Advance registration for this event is required.
On June 22, 2015, the College-Hill Seventh-Day Adventist Church — a predominately African American church in Knoxville, Tennessee — was burned. The church building sustained minor damage, and a side door and surrounding wing of the church sustained fire and smoke damage, after bales of hay were left in front of the church and set ablaze. The church van also was ignited, and its chassis and tires significantly damaged by fire, making it inoperable. The local police classified the burning as an act of vandalism, and no suspect was ever apprehended.
Thomas’ talk will focus on her current ethnographic inquiry into this local arson and its aftermath. Her inquiry is guided by a matrifocal methodology — an autoethnographic study that explores and informs her relationship to the research as a daughter, a Black feminist anthropologist, a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, and the gendered and institutional dynamics of her own relationship to place and Black socio-religious life.
Thomas also investigates the complexities of studying Black subjectivity, anti-Black racism, and religious violence in Appalachia — a region that is not associated with a large African American population, the plantation complex, or the post-industrial city. In addition to troubling racial, regional and spatial narratives of exceptionalism that might obviate the quotidian character of anti-Black religious violence in Knoxville, Thomas applies a matrifocal methodology to explore the gendered implications of Black church arson (the burned BlackMotherChurch) and its attempt to circumscribe Black church therapeutic potentialities that are highly mediated by Black women’s homosociality.
For additional information about the Africana Research Center, its Power Hour webinar series or Thomas’ upcoming lecture, contact Erin King at euk2@psu.edu.