The contributors to 'Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas' investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifa practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexual and gender politics. In this way, the body is a crucial site of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent.
YOLANDA COVINGTON-WARD is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo, also published by Duke University Press.
JEANETTE S. JOUILI is Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University and author of Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe.
Author(s): Yolanda Covington-Ward, Jeanette Selma Jouili
Series: Religious cultures of African and African diaspora people
Publisher: Duke University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Commentary: scantailor optimized
Pages: 362
City: Durham and London
Tags: embodied culture;black religion;african diaspora;embodiment
Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas
Contents
Foreword
Editors’ Acknowledgments
Introduction: Embodiment and Relationality in Religions of Africa and Its Diasporas (Yolanda Covington-Ward and Jeanette S. Jouili)
PART I. Spiritual Memories and Ancestors
1. Spirited Choreographies: Embodied Memories and Domestic Enslavement in Togolese Mama Tchamba Rituals (Elyan Jeanine Hill)
2. Alchemy of the Fuqara: Spiritual Care, Memory, and the Black Muslim Body (Youssef Carter)
3. Spiritual Ethnicity: Our Collective Ancestors in Ifa and Orisha Devotion across the Americas (N. Fadeke Castor)
PART 11. Community, Religious Habitus, and the Senses
4. Faith Full: Sensuous Habitus, Everyday Affect, and Divergent Diaspora in the UCKG (Rachel Cantave)
5. Covered Bodies, Moral Education, and the Embodiment of Islamic Reform in Northern Nigeria (Elisha P. Renne)
6. Embodied Worship in a Haitian Protestant Church in the Bahamas: Religious Habitus among Bahamians of Haitian Descent (Bertin M. Louis Jr.)
PART III. Interrogating Sacredness in Performance
7. The Quest for Spiritual Purpose in a Secular Dance Community: Belé’s Rebirth in Contemporary Martinique (Camee Maddox-Wingfield)
8. Embodying Black Islam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Afro-Diasporic Muslim Hip-Hop in Britain (Jeanette S. Jouili)
9. Secular Affective Politics in a National Dance about AIDS in Mozambique (Aaron Montoya)
PART IV. Religious Discipline and the Gendered and Sexual Body
10. Wrestling with Homosexuality: Kinesthesia as Resistance in Ghanaian Pentecostalism (Nathanael J. Homewood)
11. Exceptional Healing: Gender, Materiality, Embodiment, and Prophetism in the Lower Congo (Yolanda Covington-Ward)
12. Dark Matter: Formations of Death Pollution in Southeastern African Funerals (Casey Golomski)
Contributors
Index
