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Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age

Online ISBN:
9781531504175
Print ISBN:
9781531502980
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age

Kenneth N. Ngwa (ed.),
Kenneth N. Ngwa
(ed.)
Drew Theological School
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Aliou Cissé Niang (ed.),
Aliou Cissé Niang
(ed.)
Union Theological Seminary
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Arthur Pressley (ed.)
Arthur Pressley
(ed.)
Drew University
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
5 September 2023
Online ISBN:
9781531504175
Print ISBN:
9781531502980
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously written by early and later diaspora people of African descent. Their essays arise from critical disciplinary and interdisciplinary reflections on the depth of their experiences under the Africana Baobab Tree, offering to the world voices of resilience, newness, resurrection, hope, and life. The volume weaves together an interlocution of intellectual substance and structure across time, space, and spirituality that is quintessentially “Africana” in its centering of multiplicity: methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and hermeneutical complexity that assumes non-linear and dialectic approaches to developing liberating epistemologies. The volume examines how Africana peoples understand their corporate lived experiences of the divine not as “religion” apart from lived experiential spirituality and, thus, signal that “religion” is intimately connected to social realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics, environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To that end, voices that echo Afro-Pessimist dimensions of life are balanced with robust forms of Afro-Optimism. To anchor this dynamic reality, the Baobab Tree functions as a suitable image for the manifest and complex theoretical engagements examining the how, where, when, and why people of African descent have faced challenges to their existence and produced improbable and probable futures out of profound rupture and fragmentation. The metaphor and substance of the Tree resists reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions on the nature of diasporic lived experiences, within the continent of Africa and in the African Diaspora.

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