Guy Emerson Mount, “Elsewheres, Nowheres, and the World Ending Tendencies Within W.E.B. Du Bois’s Religious Thought”

Building on the recent work of Kai Perry Parker, this paper pushes back against the idea that the Black prophetic tradition was the dominant tendency within African American religious thought.  Instead it offers the apocalyptic and world ending theologies that emerged from W.E.B. Du Bois’s engagement with the Baha’i Faith as a normative case study for Black ecumenical religious politics.  Even as Adom Getachew has worked through Hegel to show that pan-African radical politics in Du Bois’s lifetime engendered a “world making” project for post colonial African leaders, this paper shows that when access to traditional political levers of power seemed unlikely in the early twentieth century, Black thinkers turned instead to world ending visions in order to, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “change everything.”  The Baha’i Faith offered just such a stark religious ‘elsewhere’ for Du Bois to imagine an end to America’s vast racist, imperialist, and ever expanding ‘nowhere’ for Black people.  Through a deep archival dive into Du Bois and his wife, Nina’s, engagement with the Baha’i Faith scholars can make better sense of Du Bois’s 1920 proto-Afrofuturist science fiction story “The Comet” as well as how Black religion more broadly functioned not as a vehicle of escape (much less a passive waiting on redemption) but a generative ‘faith without hope’–where the current unredeemable world must end and “a new world rolled out in its stead.”

Guy Emerson Mount is an award winning historian and teacher who currently works as an Assistant Professor of American History and African American Studies at Wake Forest University.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2018 where he co-founded the highly-unauthorized scholarly team that uncovered the University of Chicago’s historical ties to slavery while organizing alongside residents of the South Side of Chicago for reparations.  Previously he also served Assistant Professor of African American history at Auburn University where he was named the Outstanding Graduate Mentor of 2022.  His current book manuscript, Black Elsewheres: Slavery, Empire, and Reconstruction in the Black Pacific, is currently under peer-review at Yale University Press.  It promises to be the first book-length project to narrate the end of American slavery in conjunction with the birth of America’s overseas empire in the Pacific.  His most recent publication, based on his book, was named article of the year in 2024 by the Society of Civil War Historians.  Previously his work has received recognition from the American Historical Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, among others.  His paper for this symposium is titled “Elsewheres, Nowheres, and the World Ending Tendencies Within W.E.B. Du Bois’s Religious Thought” and revisits some of his older work on Du Bois’s relationship to the Baha’i Faith in light of new research he and others have done on the ontology of blackness and a Black religious thinking that trends less towards the prophetic and more towards the apocalyptic.