being interracial, even if only for a fl eeting few months, to being racially
segregated as a movement? Even if only pockets of early Pentecostalism
were ever interracial, why didn’t the majority of Pentecostals embrace it
as the Pentecostal distinctive? Hermeneutical strategies of Todorov and
Honig will be employed to complicate the analysis of interraciality in
early Pentecostalism by offering an analysis along with congruent theo-
logical and historical tropes that avoid fl at, reductionistic uses of racism.
Hermeneutical maneuvers of Todorov and Honig will be deployed to
offer insight into the ways that interracial Pentecostalism resisted the racial
order. Hermeneutical devices of Todorov and Honig will be used to engage
theological and historical tropes within Pentecostal historiography that
warrant scrutiny: the early Pentecostal community as a community of fools
for Christ or an uncanny community; as a carnival community or a fantas-
tic community; as a subversive community or a marvelous community; and
as a transcending community or a miraculous community. Broached from
another angle, the question can be framed: How did Pentecostal inter-
racial communities relate to the dominant order? Did Pentecostal lunacy
conjure up their own rules, Pentecostal liminality prompt fl ights from the
racial zones into refugee camps on the borderlands, Pentecostal anarchy
disrupt and subvert the racial zones, or Pentecostal wonder-working tran-
scend the racial order by fashioning peoplehood in an emancipatory style? 2
Each hermeneutic will be used to demonstrate how early interracial
Pentecostalism confronted the racial reasoning of the era, framed by the
concept of the hierarchy of the races. It will be argued that early interracial
Pentecostalism resisted the dominant racial order of the early twentieth
century, marked with legalized racial segregation. The four hermeneutics
of Todorov and Honig lead toward inquires which probe how the “inter-
racial” way of racial relating differed from the dominant racial reason-
ing and order that the majority of the Pentecostal movement reproduced.
According to Todorov:
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know ... there occurs an
event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The
person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solu-
tions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the
imagination—and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else
the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then
this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. 3
VINTAGE PHOTO, VISUAL EXEGESIS, AND 1917 INTERRACIAL... 213
