Minor Revolution: From Marxist Hermeneutics to Wayward Theology

This essay develops a distinction between “major” and “minor” revolution through Amaryah Armstrong’s interventions in Black theology and Saidiya Hartman's intervention in the Black radical tradition. Major revolution—exemplified by Marxist historical materialism and liberation theology—imagines emancipation as a promised cataclysmic event. Such models, however, inadequately address racial and sexual subalternity. This is either because of their allegorical/analogical construction, or due to the selectiveness and incompleteness of God's redemptive gestures. Indeed, Armstrong’s wayward reading of Hagar reframes her as a limit figure who exposes the contradictions of redemption and allegorical universality. Hagar’s ambivalent naming of God underlines the violence of freedom-as-promise. An isomorphic ambivalence lies in Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “revolution in minor key," which recasts revolution as nonevental, fugitive, and recurrent. This is a minor revolution that foregrounds survival in brutal conditions, where structural liberation remains unrealized but a freedom as otherwise material conditions is discernible.