Theologians from the Black communities in the USA, South Africa and other places, and Dalit groups in India have struggled with a dialectic between the retrieval of subjectivity within political spaces inflected by ‘race’ and ‘caste’ and the opposition to these essentialist categorisations. On the one hand, their politics of resistance has been predicated on their specific Black or Dalit identities, while, on the other hand, the postulation of such identities has often been criticised for being essentialist and homogenising. It would seem, therefore, that such patterns of ‘theologies of liberation’ have to steer clear of the Scylla of a postmodern-style dissolution of subjectivities in which the Black or Dalit identities are effaced in a ‘raceless’ or ‘casteless’ amorphousness, and the Charybdis of ‘ontologizing’ the experiences of Blackness or Dalitness in a manner that may re-entrench these binaries that arguably cannot be fitted into the Christian eschatological vision of the reconciliation of humanity. In our analysis of some Black and Dalit theologies, we shall seek to illuminate the distinctive ways in which they assert hitherto repressed subjectivities, while seeking at the same time to avoid ontological dualisms between sections of humanity, now fractured along the lines of race and caste.