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637 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2011)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0637 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION
Democracy's
Anxious
Returns
By
DAVID KYUMAN KIM
and
JOHN L. JACKSON JR.

Keywords: race; religion; secularism; neoliberalism;
public sphere; democracy
American Negro history . .. testifies to nothing
less than the perpetual achievement of the
impossible.... And here we are, at the center
of the are, trapped in the gaudiest, most valu-
able, and most improbable water wheel in our
hands; we must have no right to assume other-
wise. If we-and now I mean the relatively
conscious whites and the relatively conscious
blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or cre-
ate, the consciousness of the others-do not
falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful
that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and
achieve our country, and change the history of
the world. If we do not now dare everything,
the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created
from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us:
God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more
water, the fire next time!
-James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1998)
How does democracy say race and religion?
In light of recent and not-so-recent political devel-
opments across the globe, one might proclaim,
David Kyuman Kim is an associate professor of reli-
gious studies and American studies at Connecticut
College; senior advisor at the Social Science Research
Council; editor-at-large of The Immanent Frame; and
coeditor, with John L. Jackson and Rudy Busto, of the
Stanford University Press series RaceReligion. He is the
author of Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit
of Politics (Oxford University Press 2007), and he is
currently writing The Public Life of Love.
John L. Jackson Jr is Richard Perry University Professor
of Communication and Anthropology at the Unirersity of
Pennsylvania. He has published three books, most reently
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of
Political Correctness (Basic Civitas Books 2008). He is
completing a manuscript on global black Hebrewism and
an ethnographic film  (codirected with  Deborah
A. Thomas) on state violence against Pastafari in Jamaica.
DOJ: 10.1177/0002716211408277

ANNALS, AAPSS, 637, September 2011

6

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