Journal of Africana Religions

01/14/2022

Archives of Conjure (2020) by Solimar Otero is awarded the Albert J. Raboteau book prize. Congratulations Professor Otero!

05/13/2021

Dear All:

Kindly circulate the Special Issue Call for Papers announcement with your networks and friends. Thank you very much.

https://tinyurl.com/JARspecialissuecfp

Special Issue Call For Papers Theme: Africana Religions and Public Health The Journal of Africana Religions invites article manuscripts for a special issue on “Africana Religions and Public Health.” The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of understanding the relationship between re...

03/04/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1 (2021) - Review

Reviewed Work: Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes by Hansjörg Dilger, Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

Review by: Nathanael J. Homewood

JSTOR- https://bit.ly/3sMWL0D
Project Muse- https://bit.ly/308V8yb

Excerpt from the Review:

"The affective turn has ably demonstrated that the human is made, and remade, in unconscious or preconscious ways. We feel what being is, what it has been, and even what it could or should be. The rise to prominence and widespread acceptance of affective knowledge has dramatically reshaped the study of religion as the field aims to better understand that religious beliefs and experiences are a matter of affective congruences. Affect, which is a deep preconscious structure of feeling, provides us a way to discuss and tie together experiences, bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts. And yet, religion in Africa—often characterized by and through colonialism as excessively emotional—has mostly been ignored in this theoretical shift. It is, in the words of the editors of this work, "a blank spot" (2). This is no longer true with the important publication of Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes. This book, filled with thick descriptions of various religions, places, and people, is an argument for taking affect seriously for the way it structures religious experience and beliefs."

Author Bio - Nathanael Jedidiah Homewood is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, DePauw University, Indiana.

Image Credits : Untitled, March 30, 2019 | © Courtesy of D Mz from Pixabay via Signs, Modes, Assemblages / Hypotheses(dot)org

03/03/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1 (2021) Review

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic by Herman L. Bennett

Review by: Joseph da Costa

JSTOR- https://bit.ly/3c1tlVE
Project Muse - https://bit.ly/3eicSj1

"Herman Bennett's African Kings and Black Slaves challenges the liberal philosophy that he argues has come to define historiography on the African continent and the enslavement of African peoples. In so doing, he shifts the focus of analysis to the role of absolutist states in the enslavement of African peoples. Histories of African slavery in general "have been rendered as a singular phenomenon mediated through liberalism's nineteenth-century prism" (154). As such, connected perceptions of the jointly shared African-European past have been left largely unwritten, with the author arguing that it is "for this reason, deconstructing Europe's epistemological hegemony still represents a precondition for inscribing the story of Africa and Africans" (80)." - Excerpt from the Review

Author Bio - Dr. Joseph da Costa, King’s College London

Image Credits- Atlanta Black Star/ Artist Gregory Manchess

03/02/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1, 2021 Article

An Afro-centric Approach to Public Health:
Africana Religions and Public Health in Graduate Education by Amanda Furiasse

This article outlines the need for an interdisciplinary graduate program in Africana religions and public health at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The program would trace the colonial histories of these fields, train students through internships, and create partnerships between health officials and African diasporic communities in the Twin Cities that promote the insights of Africana ritual practices for hygiene, sanitation, and well-being.


JSTOR Link - t.ly/y3x6
Project Muse Link - t.ly/hlFQ

Dr. Amanda Furiasse, PhD, is a visiting professor of religion whose work unfolds at the convergence of religion, technology, and public health with a particular focus on the health and healing practices of Native American and Africana religions.

Image Courtesy - Seattle Times

03/01/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1, 2021 Article

The Place of Christianity in the Critical Debates of Africana Religious Studies by Joshua Settles

The massive accession to Christian faith in postcolonial Africa is leading to the ongoing creation of distinctively African forms of Christian thought and practice that differ in significant ways from those of the West—a trend anticipated by developments in Black American Christianity. Africana religious studies has been imagined as a field that would “generate credible scholarship on indigenous African religious traditions,” yet the rise of African Christianity raises questions about what constitutes indigeneity. If the Ethiopian church represents “Africa indigenously Christian,” do these more recent developments suggest Christianity indigenously African? Can Christianity be considered indigenously African? Is there a need for Africana religious scholarship to reassess the widespread notion of Christianity as a cultural product of the West and an imposition alien to Africana peoples? If so, what does the rise of African Christianity indicate about both the nature and structure of Christianity, understood as an Africana religion?

JSTOR: t.ly/4Ado
Project Muse: t.ly/iXN7
Image Credits- t.ly/Ad9c (Black Youth Project)

Author Bio - Rev. Dr. Joshua D.Settles is Research Fellow at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute (ACI) of Theology, Mission and Culture in Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana.

02/25/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1, 2021 Article

The Prosperity Gospel: Debating Modernity in Africa and the African Diaspora by James Kwateng-Yeboah

Debates over the role of Pentecostalism in effecting modernity through its widespread “prosperity gospel” remain inconclusive. Though Weber's Protestant Ethic has been persistently invoked, sociological analyses reveal that the prosperity gospel challenges dominant Weberian conceptualizations of modernity. On one hand, the doctrine refutes Weber's central claim of modern societies by its pervasive “enchantment.” On the other hand, the prosperity gospel shares modern traits of human autonomy and entrepreneurship. Does the prosperity gospel demonstrate simultaneously modern and antimodern themes? Using cases from Africa and the African diaspora, this essay critically reviews how modernity has functioned as a complicated category for analyses of the prosperity gospel and for Pentecostalism. Showing that modernity is mediated irreducibly by the historical and cultural backgrounds of the society it encounters, the essay argues for the potency of the “multiple modernities” paradigm as an analytical framework that better captures realities of Africana contexts, notably Pentecostalism and the prosperity gospel.

JSTOR Link - t.ly/mW65
Project MUSE Link - t.ly/RrI9

James Kwateng-Yeboah is a doctoral student in the Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary program at Queens, with research interests in religion, migration, and development. His doctoral work explores how Pentecostal-Charismatic spirituality emerges in African migration aspirations and experiences across Ghana and its diaspora in Canada.

Image Credits - Quartz Africa - t.ly/Isoi

02/24/2021

Journal Article from Volume 9, Number 1, 2021.

No Condition Is Permanent: Time as Method in Contemporary African Christian Theology by Professor David Ngong

JSTOR URL - t.ly/AqCv
Project Muse URL - t.ly/9Ekk

This article argues that contemporary African Christian theology has largely understood time from a modern, linear perspective, which sees history as progress. Interestingly, the perception of history as progress is the straitjacket into which the story of Africa in the modern world has been told, often depicting the continent as needing to catch up with the progressive time of the modern world. This progressive, linear view of time is, however, quite problematic. This article argues that time is palimpsestic, rendering discourses of progress problematic but without nullifying the quest for improved overall well-being. The palimpsestic view of time fits the popular West African outlook that “no condition is permanent” and is demonstrated especially in the work of African women theologians such as Mercy Amba Oduyoye and Musa Dube, whose use of story as method challenges the linear view of time and is thus methodologically instructive for African theology.

Dr. David Ngong is the Associate Professor of Religion & Theology/Chair of Religion & Theology.

Image Credits - Pew Research Center

By 2060, more than four-in-ten Christians and 27% of Muslims around the world will call sub-Saharan Africa home.

02/24/2021

Missa Luba 1965: Gloria (B2)
Arrangement by Father Guido Haazen

Youtube Link: t.ly/t9Tl

Stereo-ized 1965 Phillips mono Missa Luba: Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin perform an arrangement by Father Guido Haazen. The entire album has never been rei...

02/23/2021

The Missa Luba is an African setting of the Mass sung in Latin.
Arrangement by Father Guido Haazen.

Missa Luba 1965: Kyrie (B1)

Youtube Link - t.ly/uZlq

Stereo-ized 1965 Phillips mono Missa Luba: Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin perform an arrangement by Father Guido Haazen. The entire album has never been rei...

02/23/2021

Journal Article from Volume 9, Number 1, 2021.

Missa Luba, An American Mass Program, and the Transnationalism of Twentieth-Century Black Roman Catholic Liturgical Music by Professor Kim R. Harris

JSTOR Link - t.ly/Douk
Project Muse Link - t.ly/gXzP


This article explores the movement of Black Catholic liturgical music across the Black Atlantic, examining the creation in the 1950s of the Missa Luba in Belgian-occupied Congo, its subsequent popularity among Black U.S. Catholics, and the ways in which it inspired Roman Catholic priest Clarence Rivers to compose his own Black American Mass. Rather than seeing the proliferation of "indigenized" African and African American Catholic liturgical music as a response mainly to changes at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, I argue that African and African American people's compositions of liturgical music and their popular reception among Black and white Catholic audiences established a tradition of ethnic resurgence before Vatican II.

Dr. Kim Harris is the Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, CA, US Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts.

12/18/2020

Get ready for our new issue. Are you subscribed? If not, ask your favorite library: https://www.press.jhu.edu/cart/for-sale?oc=2276&client=penn

11/18/2020

Review by co-editor Edward Curtis of "With This Root about My Person: Charles H. Long and New Directions in the Study of Religion," Edited by Jennifer Reid and Davíd Carrasco

https://academic.oup.com/jaar/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jaarel/lfaa051/5980587 #.X7VTC6MN270.twitter

This book was in the works long before Charles H. Long died in February, 2020, but its publication during the year of his death, which coincides with powerful m

10/29/2020

We are thrilled to announce that is now included in the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS):

https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/erihplus/periodical/info.action?id=499600

09/02/2020

BREAKING NEWS: Monique Bedasse, Danielle Boaz, and Youssef Carter To Edit Journal of Africana Religions

Indianapolis, Ind.— September 2, 2020 — The Journal of Africana Religions has announced that Professors Monique Bedasse, Danielle Boaz, and Youssef Carter will join Edward Curtis and Sylvester Johnson as general co-editors.

“These three brilliant and accomplished scholars model the journal’s scholarly focus on the global reach and transnational significance of African and African diasporic religions,” said Drs. Curtis and Johnson, who founded the journal in 2011. “The future of the journal is even brighter today.”

Profs. Bedasse, Boaz, and Carter, along with Curtis and Johnson, will oversee the peer review of submissions, select topics for future special issues, and bolster the journal’s outreach to readers and contributors. The journal’s other key personnel include book review editor Dr. S. N. Nyeck and managing editor Dr. Jeremy Rehwaldt.

Modeling Transnational Study of Africana Religions

Dr. Monique Bedasse is associate professor of history and of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research on Africa and the African diaspora moves betwixt and between regions that have traditionally been calcified into separate fields of study. Bedasse’s first book, Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (UNC Press, 2017) won the American Historical Association’s Wesley-Logan Prize for best book on the African Diaspora as well as the Anna Julia Cooper and CLR James Award for best book in Africana Studies from the National Council for Black Studies.

Dr. Danielle Boaz, assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, is an historian of Africa and the African diaspora and a legal studies scholar. Her first book, Banning Black Gods: African Diaspora Religions and the Law in the 21st Century (Penn State University Press, forthcoming), examines the legal persecution of followers of Africana religions such as Candomblé, Obeah, Lukumí, Rastafari, and Vodou in a variety of nations. In addition, she partners with grassroots activists and scholars to document acts of religious racism in Brazil.

Dr. Youssef Carter, assistant professor of religious studies and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is an anthropologist of religion. He is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled “The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self on the Mustafawi Sufi Path,” a multisite ethnography of a transatlantic spiritual network of African American and West African Sufi Muslims. Dr. Carter also leads the editorial team at the online magazine, Voyages Africana Journal, a visual and literary space that serves as a creative educational and cultural tool for students and lovers of the Africana World.

About the Journal
This peer-reviewed journal published semi-annually by the Penn State University Press offers critical analysis of Africana religions, including the religious traditions of African and African Diasporic peoples as well as religious traditions influenced by the diverse cultural heritage of Africa. The journal is co-sponsored by the African Association for the Study of the Religions and Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. Funding for the journal is provided by Virginia Tech University and the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI.

For more information, go to www.africanareligions.org or write to [email protected].

07/28/2020

NEW! Martin Tsang, "The Art of Sweeping Sickness and Catching Death: Babalú Aye, Materiality, and Mortality in Lukumí Religious Practice"

Project MUSE:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760159
JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0292

This article explores the ritual act of sweeping away sickness from the body as associated with Babalú Aye, the deity of healing and miracles. Babalú Aye is worshipped by adherents of Yorùbá and Dahomean groups and their descendants worldwide, and this article focuses on the curative arts and articulations of this orisha/fodun in Cuba's Afro-Atlantic religious complex. Babalú Aye's materiality and rites encompass unique vernaculars of space, performativity, and materiality within Lukumí religion; I show how the deity crosses borders and boundaries unlike any other in the pantheon. Through an examination and focus on Babalú Aye's broom, and associated ritual and medicinal technologies his priests and devotees employ in his healing rites, I posit that Babalú Aye's aesthetics and ceremonies reorder and equilibrate the body, removing death and sickness. Sweeping and carefully choreographed actions that are designed to detach, catch, and remove Ikú/death and Arun/sickness are the means by which his priests restore health, acts that comprise a Lukumí response to the need for a spiritually aligned system of healthcare. By extension, the modalities of divination, initiation, offerings, sacrifice, herbalism, music, dance, and prayer are composite strategies that form part of Babalú Aye's healing repertoire––they are the foundational elements of practice that are ultimately employed to restore health and to promote and prolong life in Lukumí worship.

07/27/2020

Read the latest from former fellow Jazmin Graves in Journal of Africana Religions!

You can read Jazmin's reflection on her fellowship research at: https://www.indiastudies.org/fellow-profile-jazmin-graves-on-devotional-sufi-music-and-african-diaspora-in-western-india/

"NEW! Jazmin Graves, "Filling the Pot: Remembrance of Ancestor-Saints + Reclamation of African Historical Heritage in Ahmedabad, , " vol. 7, no. 1 (2019), 94-104.
JSTOR: https://jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.7.1.0094
Project MUSE: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/715865
"

07/26/2020

W Gabriel Selassie I, "Rethinking Garveyism as Religion: The UNIA Universal Negro Ritual and UNIA Universal Negro Catechism"
JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0266
ProjectMUSE:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760158

New developments in anthropology since the publication of Randall K. Burkett's Garveyism as a Religious Movement (1978) have led to new directions within ritual studies. Criticized by the NAACP as “silly rituals,” the theology of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) is probably the least studied and most misunderstood aspect of the UNIA's religious life, which was centered around the African diaspora. However, the ritual and catechism of the UNIA was arguably the motivating factor driving people to become members. The ritual and catechism supported and sustained the spiritual life of the group. Here I reexamine the theological framework of the UNIA ritual and catechism and the ways in which the ritual life was interpreted and understood by the members of both the UNIA and the African Communities League (ACL).

07/24/2020

JUST PUBLISHED!

Jeremy Jacob Peretz, "Manifest Heritages of Family and Nation: Embodying 'All the Ancestors' in Guyanese Komfa"

Project MUSE:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760157
JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0232

This article offers comparative ethnographic exploration of Komfa ritual engaged to "entertain the ancestors" that is central to the way of life of Spiritualists in Guyana. Practiced primarily by Guyanese of African descent and considered an Africa-derived tradition, Komfa worldview nonetheless draws on cultural inheritances of various Guyanese backgrounds. Embracing Komfa worlds serves as historical and genealogical inquiry into often indistinct, polysemous pasts wherein spirit guides lead devotees through emancipatory journeys of familial and personal (re)discovery. Komfa can best be understood through comparative analyses foregrounding "adjacent" Black Atlantic religious idioms. Frameworks developed in interrogating practices at the "margins" of Candomblé, Lukumí, and Vodou situate Komfa and the spectrum that African-inspired religions encompass. In particular, existing ethnographic literature on Espiritismo as practiced in Cuba and elsewhere furnishes critical perspectives through which to understand Komfa that are more adequate than the bodies of scholarship consulted by researchers studying Komfa thus far.

Photo credit: Eddie Osei

07/22/2020

NEW! Alicia L. Monroe, "Kongo Symbols, Catholic Celebrations: Adornment and Spiritual Power in Nineteenth-Century Religious Festivals in São Paulo, Brazil"

JSTOR:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0202
Project MUSE:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760161

This paper investigates the use of religious paraphernalia based on West Central African charms in the bodily adornment of participants commemorating the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary in late nineteenth-century São Paulo, Brazil. Our Lady of the Rosary constituted a popular patron saint for Black confraternities across imperial Brazil (1822–1889). During festivals for this patron saint, West Central African forced laborers and their descendants clad themselves and their children in fine clothes and conventional symbols of orthodox Catholicism, such as crosses and rosary beads, but also with locally sourced materials and objects including pacová, olho de cabra seeds, and jaguar teeth, which referenced or constituted symbols of authority and fertility in West Central Africa. Afro-Brazilians in the city of São Paulo crafted and wore material expressions of religiosity that demonstrated engagement with Catholicism and concurrent reliance on and public celebration of spiritual knowledge from West Central Africa.

The Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD)

07/21/2020

JUST OUT: Timothy Landry argues that is part of a larger African Atlantic "Forest Complex".

Project MUSE :
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760160
JSTOR:
https://jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.8.2.0173

Vodún has been described as indefinable, endlessly flexible, and borderless. In this paper, I develop an analytical framework for understanding global Vodún, thereby challenging claims that Vodún is, at its core, inexplicable. To accomplish this, I combine over a decade of ethnographic research in Bénin and Haiti with my status as an initiate of Haitian Vodou and my time as a diviner's apprentice in Bénin. Joining these three modalities, I explore the centrality of the forest as a key symbol in Vodún cosmology, how the forest's symbolic and ontological potency is maintained in Bénin and beyond, and how a forest-focused analysis of Vodún offers anthropologists new insights into how and why African Atlantic forest religions have been so successful globally. I lay out a new strategy for understanding Vodún that reframes the religion as an ontological product of forest cosmologies, and, in so doing, I argue that Vodún is best understood as a smaller part of a greater African Atlantic religious system that I call the “African Atlantic Forest Complex.

07/17/2020

Photo credit: Eddie Osei

06/29/2020

What a journal! What an editorial board!

06/27/2020

Very excited about our new issue about to drop!

Subscribe here: https://rb.gy/ggxuk5

05/18/2020

The fifth of five finalists for the 2020 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for Best Book in Africana Religions is Spencer Dew, *The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali* (University of Chicago Press).

“Citizenship is salvation,” preached Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America in the early twentieth century. Ali’s message was an aspirational call for black Americans to undertake a struggle for recognition from the state, one that would both ensure protection for all Americans through rights guaranteed by the law and correct the unjust implementation of law that prevailed in the racially segregated United States. Ali and his followers took on this mission of citizenship as a religious calling, working to carve out a place for themselves in American democracy and to bring about a society that lived up to what they considered the sacred purpose of the law.

“Citizenship is salvation,” preached Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America in the early twentieth century. Ali’s message was an aspirational call for black Americans to undertake a struggle for recognition from the state, one that would both ensure protection for all ...

05/18/2020

The fourth finalist for the 2020 Albert J. Raboteau Best Book in Africana Religions is Philip F. Esler, *Ethiopian Christianity: History, Theology, Practice* ( Baylor University Press).

Ethiopian Christianity begins with ancient accounts of Christianity’s introduction to Ethiopia by St. Frumentius and King Ezana in the early 300s CE. Esler traces how the church and the monarchy closely coexisted, a reality that persisted until the death of Haile Selassie in 1974. This relationship allowed the emperor to consider himself the protector of Orthodox Christianity. The emperor's position, combined with Ethiopia’s geographical isolation, fostered a distinct form of Christianity—one that features the inextricable intertwining of the ordinary with the sacred and rejects the two-nature Christology established at the Council of Chalcedon.

In Ethiopian Christianity Philip Esler presents a rich and comprehensive history of Christianity’s flourishing. But Esler is ever careful to situate th...

05/16/2020

The third of five finalists for the 2020 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for Best Book in Africana Religions is Gwyneth H. McClendon, New York University, and Rachel Beatty Riedl, Northwestern University, *From Pews to Politics: Religious Sermons and Political Participation in Africa* (Cambridge University Press - Academic).

Does religion influence political participation? This book takes up this pressing debate using Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa as its empirical base to demonstrate that religious teachings communicated in sermons can influence both the degree and the form of citizens' political participation. McClendon and Riedl document some of the current diversity of sermon content in contemporary Christian houses of worship and then use a combination of laboratory experiments, observational survey data, focus groups, and case comparisons in Zambia, Uganda, and Kenya to interrogate the impact of sermon exposure on political participation and the longevity of that impact. Pews to Politics in Africa leverages the pluralism of sermons in sub-Saharan Africa to gain insight into the content of cultural influences and their consequences for how ordinary citizens participate in politics.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/from-pews-to-politics/D179340535C60EC6EC4830B0E5ED650D

05/16/2020

The second of five finalists for the 2020 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for Best Book in Africana Religions is Traci C. West, (Drew Theological School) for *Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence* (NYU Press).

How activists in Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil provide inspiration and strategies for combating the gender violence epidemic in the United States How can t...