Metals and Movens of Colored Television: The Spirit is a Bone: A Response to Marla F. Frederick’s Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global

I read Professor Marla Frederick's Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global as a continuation of her excellent scholarship that aims to understand, describe, and explain the "spirit" (the fine distillation) of the black church, even as she contests the meaning of that spirit, rejects the essentialization of black religion, or insists that there is no spirit or essence to the black church. It appears that in Frederick's scholarship the not of positioning and prohibiting the spirit coincides, suggesting there is no need for the spirit, the "thing-in-itself" of the black church. But this entitative or non-entitative process that is simultaneously necessary and impossible as a Lacanian Real provides the analytical frame for my engagement with her old and new books.