Scriptural Pleasures: On Cruelty as Citizenship

Citizenship and Scripturalizing Anti-Blackness in the Americas

This was the third and final session of the Spring 2026 season for the Institute for Signifying Scriptures' podcast, Scriptures Everywhere. We concluded our conversation about Cruelty as Citizenship by Cristina Beltrán. The participants reflected on why Latina/o/e/x people both complicate and reinforce whiteness in U.S. democracy and considered the historical context of racial categorization in both Latin America and the United States. The participants concluded by discussing how scriptural politics and interpretation are used to maintain power structures, by turning to arguments around birthright citizenship where the Trump administration demonstrates an approach to scriptural authority that is not strictly textual.

Scriptural Pleasures: On Cruelty as Citizenship

In this episode, we move from Stephen Best's None Like Us (2018) to a kind of flip side of diasporic belonging, the violent practices that constitute citizenship. We focus our discussion on Cristina Beltrán's Cruelty as Citizenship (2020) as we consider how the pleasures of cruelty are scripturalizing practices, and scriptures are that "something significant," that sanctified border, that binds citizenship together through exclusion.

3.1 None Like Us: Diasporic Desires and Demystifying Scriptures

In this first episode of our spring 2026 season, we speak live from the Institute for Signifying Scriptures Annual Meeting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We discuss the introduction to Stephen Best's None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke, 2018) with a focus on how scriptures make diasporas and what it takes to demystify and "decode" the scriptural traditions of social life. Special thanks to Richard Newton, University of Alabama Department of Religious Studies, for organizing this annual meeting and conversation.

On Finishing a Book: Memory, Loss, and the Future

In our final episode of the fall 2025 season, we discuss the role of memory, of how and why we try to forge a sacred past and communal memory, how gender matters to the dynamics of Barracoon as a site of memory, and what it might mean to find messier ground. We look ahead to our meeting in person in Alabama in February 5-7, 2026.

Do you understand? Rethinking the grounds of scriptures

In this episode, we discuss different forms of knowing and understanding, and how Hurston makes Kossula into scripture even as his stories depict for us strategies for navigating distinct, and sometimes conflicting, scriptural worlds. We particularly examine the language of understanding, and the photograph of him at the end of Hurston's narrative about Kossula.