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
Publication date:
11 April 2013Length of book:
248 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
236x158mm6x9"
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.
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.