My dissertation, "Blackness and the Problem of Belonging: Political Theological Readings of the Family," rethinks how blackness and belonging are related by highlighting how white racial claims to be chosen people and black appropriations of those terms are inflected by theological and national debates over the family. Focusing on how 19th century black women Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Angelina Weld Grimkè use theological concepts to stage their political critiques of white supremacy in terms of the family, I position their work as interventions in discourses of domesticity that are used to manage claims of belonging. Through this reframing, I extend black critiques of supersession by showing how the racial imagination of chosen people links the management of gender to the management belonging. Thus, I forward a theory and practice of reading that not only foregrounds black women’s literary and intellectual contributions as fruitful for political theological analysis, but also reads these women’s interventions as theopolitical contributions that are instructive for black struggle and black study. As the question of black oppression continues to indict our contemporary theological and national imaginations of belonging, my dissertation argues that Harper, Hopkins, and Grimké present a theopolitical challenge that demands serious engagement today.