Women and Religion in the African Diaspora
Knowledge, Power, and Performance
Women and Religion in the African Diaspora
Knowledge, Power, and Performance
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Paperback / softback
£25.50
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801883705
Number of Pages: 400
Published: 17/11/2006
Width: 15.2 cm
Height: 22.9 cm
This landmark collection of newly commissioned essays explores how diverse women of African descent have practiced religion as part of the work of their ordinary and sometimes extraordinary lives. By examining women from North America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Africa, the contributors identify the patterns that emerge as women, religion, and diaspora intersect, mapping fresh approaches to this emergent field of inquiry. The volume focuses on issues of history, tradition, and the authenticity of African-derived spiritual practices in a variety of contexts, including those where memories of suffering remain fresh and powerful. The contributors discuss matters of power and leadership and of religious expressions outside of institutional settings. The essays study women of Christian denominations, African and Afro-Caribbean traditions, and Islam, addressing their roles as spiritual leaders, artists and musicians, preachers, and participants in bible-study groups. This volume's transnational mixture, along with its use of creative analytical approaches, challenges existing paradigms and summons new models for studying women, religions, and diasporic shiftings across time and space.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Diasporic Knowledge
Chapter 1. É a Senzala: Slavery, Women, and Embodied Knowledge in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé
Chapter 2. "I Smoothed the Way, I Opened Doors": Women in the Yoruba-Orisha Tradition of Trinidad
Chapter 3. Joining the African Diaspora: Migration and Diasporic Religious Culture among the Garífuna in Honduras and New York
Chapter 4. Women of the African Diaspora Within: The Masowe Apostles, an African Initiated Church
Chapter 5. "Power in the Blood": Menstrual Taboos and Women's Power in an African Instituted Church
Part II: Power, Authority, and Subversion
Chapter 6. "The Spirit of the Holy Ghost is a Male Spirit": African American Preaching Women and the Paradoxes of Gender
Chapter 7. "Make Us a Power": African American Methodists Debate the "Woman Question," 1870–1900
Chapter 8. "Only a Woman Would Do": Bible Reading and African American Women's Organizing Work
Chapter 9. Exploring the Religious Connection: Black Women Community Workers, Religious Agency, and the Force of Faith
Part III: Performing Religion
Chapter 10. The Arts of Loving
Chapter 11. "Truths that Liberate the Soul": Eva Jessye and the Politics of Religious Performance
Chapter 12. Shopping with Sister Zubayda: African American Sunni Muslim Rituals of Consumption and Belonging
Chapter 13. "But, It's Bible": African American Women and Television Preachers
Notes
About the Contributors
Index
