Literary Expressions Of African Spirituality

Author : Carol P. Marsh-Lockett,Elizabeth J. West
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780739181423

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Literary Expressions of African Spirituality by Carol P. Marsh-Lockett,Elizabeth J. West Pdf

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.

Author : Jacob Kẹhinde Olupona
Publisher : Herder & Herder
Page : 520 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Africa
ISBN : UOM:39076002079999

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African Spirituality by Jacob Kẹhinde Olupona Pdf

As Africa moves into the 21st century it faces new spiritual, social, and economic challenges.

Author : Carol P. Marsh-Lockett,Elizabeth J. West
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2013-04-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780739181430

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Literary Expressions of African Spirituality by Carol P. Marsh-Lockett,Elizabeth J. West Pdf

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.

Author : Georgene Bess Montgomery
Publisher : Africa Research and Publications
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Africa
ISBN : UCSC:32106019409926

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The Spirit and the Word by Georgene Bess Montgomery Pdf

Author : Elizabeth J. West
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2012-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780739179376

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African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction by Elizabeth J. West Pdf

African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being is the nexus to scholarship on manifestations of Africanisms in black art and culture, particularly the scant critical works focusing on African metaphysical retentions. This study examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers. Beginning with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction traces applications and transformations of African spirituality in black women's writings that culminate in the conscious and deliberate celebration of Africanity in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The journey from Wheatley's veiled remembrances to Hurston's explicit gaze of continental Africa represents the literary journey of black women writers to represent Africa as not only a very real creative resource but also a liberating one. Hurston's icon of black female autonomy and self realization is woven from the thread work of African spiritual principles that date back to early black women's writings.

Author : Brian Steensland,Jaime Kucinskas,Anna Sun
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780197565001

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Situating Spirituality by Brian Steensland,Jaime Kucinskas,Anna Sun Pdf

"Spirituality is in the spotlight. While levels of religious belief and observance are declining in much of the Western world, interest in spirituality is surging. This volume advances our understanding of contemporary spirituality by highlighting its profoundly social dimensions. It demonstrates how spirituality is shaped by its religious, cultural, and political contexts; how embodied and collective spiritual practices undergird spiritual life and intersect with social characteristics (e.g., race, gender, and sexuality); and how spirituality is impacted by power relations and institutional arrangements. The contributors are leading international scholars and their chapters address spirituality in a wide range of religious and global contexts"--

Author : Donald H. Matthews
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 1998-07-02
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780195358049

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Honoring the Ancestors by Donald H. Matthews Pdf

Donald Matthews affirms once and for all the African foundation of African-American religious practice. His analysis of the methods employed by historians, social scientists, and literary critics in the study of African-American religion and the Negro spiritual leads him to develop a methodology that encompasses contemporary scholarship without compromising the integrity of African-American religion and culture. Because the Negro spiritual is the earliest extant body of African-American folk religious narration, Matthews believes that it holds the key to understanding African-American religion. He explores the works of such seminal black scholars as W. E. B. DuBois, Melville Herskovits, and Zora Neale Hurston, tracing the early development of the African-centered approach to the interpretation of African-American religion. This approach involves "cultural/structuralism", the author's term for the method used by DuBois, Herskovits, and Hurston that emphasizes the thick reading of narrative expressions. Such a reading allows the scholar to identify the cultural significance of particular oral and written texts and serves as a point of identification and a cultural link between African and African-American religion. Matthews' close analysis of the spiritual employs a dialectical and postmodernist reading and reveals a religious philosophy that addresses the deepest concerns and desires of Africans in America. These concerns are cultural, political, and psychological, but are ultimately related to African religious structures of meaning. This book poses a challenge to end the battle between Afrocentrists and multiculturalists by acknowledging their common intellectual heritage in the works of DuBois, Herskovits, and Hurston. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of African-American religion and culture and those interested in Afrocentric literature.

Author : Toyin Falola
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2022-03-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781350271968

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African Spirituality, Politics, and Knowledge Systems by Toyin Falola Pdf

Focusing on the three leading religious traditions in Africa (African Traditional Religion, Islam, and Christianity), this book shows how belief in the supremacy of sacred words compels actions and influences practices in contemporary Africa. "Sacred words” are taken to mean holy texts as in divination, the Quran and the Bible. Toyin Falola evaluates how religious leaders engage with sacred words, both orals and texts, engendering practices that reveal the expression of religious beliefs, the impact of those beliefs, and the knowledge contained in them. Attention is given to the key ideas in the words chosen by religious leaders, and how they form a continuous knowledge system, impacting the politics of managing society and people.

Author : Eddie S. Glaude (Jr.)
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780195182897

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African American Religion by Eddie S. Glaude (Jr.) Pdf

"African American Religion offers a provocative historical and philosophical treatment of the religious life of African Americans. Glaude argues that the phrase "African American religion" is meaningful only insofar as it singles out the distinctive waysreligion has been leveraged by African Americans to respond to different racial regimes in the United States. That bold claim frames how he reads the historical record. Slavery, Jim Crow, and current appeals to color blindness serve as a backdrop for histreatment of conjure, African American Christianity and Islam"--

Author : J. David Lewis-Williams,David G. Pearce
Publisher : Rowman Altamira
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 0759104328

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San Spirituality by J. David Lewis-Williams,David G. Pearce Pdf

At the intersection between western culture and Africa, we find the San people of the Kalahari desert. Once called Bushmen, the San have survived many characterizations-from pre-human animals by the early European colonials, to aboriginal conservationists in perfect harmony with nature by recent New Age adherents. Neither caricature does justice to the complex world view of the San. Eminent anthropologists David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce present a instead balanced view of the spiritual life of this much-studied people, examining the interplay of their cosmology, myth, ritual, and art.

Author : LaJuan Simpson-Wilkey,Sheila Smith McKoy,Eric M. Bridges
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 153 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2020-12-04
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781793640949

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Recovering the African Feminine Divine in Literature, the Arts, and Practice by LaJuan Simpson-Wilkey,Sheila Smith McKoy,Eric M. Bridges Pdf

Recovering the African Feminine Divine in Literature, the Arts, and Performing Arts: Yemonja Awakening provides context to the myriad ways in which the African feminine divine is being reclaimed by scholars, practitioners and cultural scholars worldwide. This volume addresses the complex ways in which the reclamation of and recognition of Yemonja facilitates cultural survival and the formation of African -centric identity. These cultural practices are symbolically represented by Yemonja, the African female deity who is the mother of the entire world of the Orisha. Also known as Yemaya, Iemanya and Yemaya-Olokun, Yemonja is the deity whose province is the ocean and, given that the Middle Passage was the cultural and spatial crossroad to Africa’s numerous diasporas, this deity links the shared histories of African and African –descent cultural praxis worldwide. Since Yemonja also references sexual, creative, spatial and spiritual energies, the editors and contributors see her as pivotal to this project as an expansive and original cartography of impact of the African feminine divine globally. This work provides the context for understanding how the spiritual conceptualizations of the African feminine divine underpin critical cultural forms, even when it has been previously unacknowledged and despite the cultural encounters with European and Western models of being. Scholars of African diaspora studies and the arts will find this book particularly interesting.

Author : Kameelah L. Martin
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2016-09-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781498523295

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Envisioning Black Feminist Voodoo Aesthetics by Kameelah L. Martin Pdf

In the twenty-first century, American popular culture increasingly makes visible the performance of African spirituality by black women. Disney’s Princess and the Frog and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are two notable examples. The reliance on the black priestess of African-derived religion as an archetype, however, has a much longer history steeped in the colonial othering of Haitian Vodou and American imperialist fantasies about so-called ‘black magic’. Within this cinematic study, Martin unravels how religious autonomy impacts the identity, function, and perception of Africana women in the American popular imagination. Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. She develops the framework of Voodoo aesthetics, or the inscription of African cosmologies on the black female body, as the theoretical lens through which to scrutinize black female religious performance in film. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Positioning the black priestess as another iteration of Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images, Martin theorizes whether film functions as a safe space for a racial and gendered embodiment in the performance of African diasporic religion. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Conceptually, Martin recalibrates the scholarship on black women and representation by distinctly centering black women as ritual specialists and Black Atlantic spirituality on the silver screen.

Author : Jacob K. Olupona
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199790586

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African Religions by Jacob K. Olupona Pdf

This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.

Author : Beauty Bragg
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2014-11-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780739188798

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Reading Contemporary African American Literature by Beauty Bragg Pdf

This book covers several distinctive moments of the post-civil rights era; the black power period, the affirmative action period, and the neoliberal period. It inspects representative texts and critical approaches associated with each period, covering a variety of authors and genres from Toni Morrison’s mythic fiction to Wahida Clark’s street lit.

Author : Nina Morgan,Alfred Hornung,Takayuki Tatsumi
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 380 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2019-04-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351672627

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The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies by Nina Morgan,Alfred Hornung,Takayuki Tatsumi Pdf

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice. In more than 30 essays, the volume offers a history of the concept of the "transnational" and takes readers from the Barbary frontier to Guam, from Mexico's border crossings to the intifada's contested zones. Together, the essays develop new ways for Americanists to read events, images, sound, literature, identity, film, politics, or performance transnationally through the work of diverse figures, such as Confucius, Edward Said, Pauline Hopkins, Poe, Faulkner, Michael Jackson, Onoto Watanna, and others. This timely volume also addresses presidential politics and interpictorial US history from Lincoln in Africa, to Obama and Mandela, to Trump. The essays, written by prominent global Americanists, as well as the emerging scholars shaping the field, seek to provide foundational resources as well as experimental and forward-leaning approaches to Transnational American Studies.