Paul Gilroy argues that conviviality has the capacity to transcend racial
subjectivity. For Gilroy, conviviality registers a “radical openness that
brings conviviality alive makes a nonsense of closed, fi xed, and reifi ed iden-
tity and turns attention toward the always-unpredictable mechanism of
identifi cation.” Gilroy further defi nes conviviality as not “the absence of
racism or the triumph of tolerance.” What is critical for Gilroy is that con-
viviality is set in the context of “cosmopolitanism as a ‘network of inter-
connectedness and solidarity that could resonate across boundaries, reach
across distances, and evade other cultural and economic obstacles.’” 25
What is a theology of Pentecostal conviviality? How might one con-
strue where a 1917 convivial Pentecostal photograph of the miraculous fi ts
within theological world of early Pentecostalism? A Pentecostal theology
framed by conviviality engages the shifting ensemble of social markers and
probes other Pentecostal worlds beyond the racial order. In this account,
the Bible is a book of social and political miracles. The canon in the canon
would especially accent the social and political “miracles” of Scripture such
as the church as the community which exceeded the boundaries of “race/
ethnicity”, class, and gender in the third chapter of Galatians.
How might one construe where a convivial Pentecostal photograph of the
miraculous fi ts within the narrative arc of early Pentecostalism? The narrative
of Pentecostalism birthed by the Azusa Street Revival could be construed as
polyvalent. The polyvalent Pentecostal photograph of 1906 with Seymour
and the Apostolic Faith staff where gender, region, age, class, nationality,
marital status and race cluster becomes the genesis of the movement. To
migrate from a polyvalent Pentecostal genesis of 1906 to the designated
1917 Pentecostal photograph, Pentecostals blazed new trajectories which
detoured from the path of the polyvalent 1906 genesis; these new trajectories
marked an historical arc where Pentecostals in predominantly white denomi-
nations made race a defi ning marker of their organizational life.
To employ the hermeneutic of the miraculous in interpreting the 1917
photograph of early Pentecostal interracialism points Pentecostal Studies
to a congruent theological focus on a transcending ecclesiology and a his-
toriographical trajectory of Pentecostalism as a convivial movement.
CONCLUSION
In this essay, hermeneutical devices were used to discern or classify a
1917 interracial Pentecostal photograph and interracial Pentecostalism
itself as an authentic form of Pentecostal, and Christian, life. The
224 D.D DANIELS III