Literary Expressions of African Spirituality

Contributions by Beauty Bragg, James Manigault-Bryant Professor and Chair, Africana Studies, Williams College, Mario Chandler, Darryl Dickson-Carr, John C. Hawley, Kameelah L. Martin, Georgene Bess Montgomery Clark Atlanta University, Melvin Rahming, Erica L. Still, Roberto Strongman, Artress Bethany White Edited by Carol P. Marsh-Lockett, Elizabeth J. West Georgia State University

Publication date:

11 April 2013

Length of book:

248 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

236x158mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739181423

With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.

Chapter 1: Introduction: African Spirituality and the Ameri-Atlantic World
Carol Marsh-Lockett and Elizabeth J. West

Section 1: Imagining African Faith Systems in the Postmodern World
Chapter 2: The Gods Who Speak in Many Voices, and in None: African Novelists on Indigenous and Colonial Religion
John C. Hawley
Chapter 3: Reading Spirit: Cosmological Considerations in Garfield Linton’s Voodoomation: A Book of Foretelling
Melvin Rahming
Chapter 4: From “Pythian Madness” to an “Inner Ethic of Self-Sacrifice”: The Spirits of Africa and Modernity in Du Bois’s Late Writings
James Manigault-Bryant
Chapter 5: Rituals of Remembrance: Trauma, Memory, and Spiritual Practice in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness
Erica L. Still

Section 2: Integrations of the African and the Western in New World Black Atlantic Writing
Chapter 6: The Body of Vodou: Corporeality and the Location of Gender in Afro-Diasporic Religion
Roberto Strongman
Chapter 7: Hoodoo Ladies and High Conjurers: New Directions for an Old Archetype
Kameelah Martin
Chapter 8: From Africa to America by Way of the Caribbean: Fictionalized Histories of the Diasporic Slave Woman’s Presence in America
Artress Bethany White

Section 3: African Deities and Divinations as Forces in New World Black Works
Chapter 9: Expressions of African-Based Spirituality in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory
Beauty Bragg
Chapter 10: Waiting for Olodumare: Ishmael Reed and the Recovery of Yoruba”
Darryl Dickson-Carr
Chapter 11: Testing and Changing: Esu and Oya ‘Making it Do What it Do’ in The Best Man
Georgene Bess Montgomery
Chapter 12: Cuban Utopianism and Haitian Messiah: Spiritual Provocations of Collective Catalyst in Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew
Mario Chandler

The 11 essays in this collection explore ways in which indigenous African faith systems inform--and are treated in--black Atlantic literature and film. Most contributors deal with African American and Anglophone black Caribbean texts, so the title is overbroad, and the ambition of editors Marsh-Lockett and West (both Georgia State Univ.) to rethink "critical approaches to African works and their counterparts across the Atlantic" is a little too grand, but there are noteworthy essays here. The leadoff, for instance, by John Hawley--one of only two focusing on African literature--is a concise overview of novelistic engagement with indigenous spiritualities, Islam, and Christianity, referencing dozens of examples from around the continent. Kameelah Martin contributes an informative survey on conjure women in African American novels and films. In a different vein, Artress Bethany White's and Beauty Bragg's essays employ postcolonial, diasporist, feminist, and religious studies discourses in their thoughtful literary critiques of, respectively, Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison, and Edwidge Danticat. Melvin Rahming offers a fascinating "Egyptian/Kametic" reading of a too-little-known collection of short stories, Voodoomation, by Garfield Linton, but it is marred by shoddy proofreading--the title of the book is variously misspelled throughout. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.