Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age
Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age
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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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Front Matter
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Introduction: Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age
Kenneth N. Ngwa and others
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Part I Un/Folding Identities: Archangel Gabriel Speaks to Mary
Pamela Mordecai-
1.
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand: Mourning through Biracial Identities
Arthur Pressley
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2.
Body as Praxis: Disarticulating the Human from Ownership and Property
An Yountae
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3.
What It’s Like to Be a Blackened Body, And Why It’s Like That: A Preliminary Exploration
Desmond Coleman
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4.
The Rhizome and/as the Tree of Life: The Relational Poetics of Wisdom and Decolonizing Biblical Studies
A. Paige Rawson
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5.
Senghorian Négritude and Postcolonial Biblical Criticism
Aliou Cissé Niang
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1.
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand: Mourning through Biracial Identities
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Part II Africana Activism: Litany on the Line
Pamela Mordecai-
6.
God Killed! God Interrupted, Long Live the People!: Political Theory in Religious Act
Nimi Wariboko
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7.
“Doing the Will of God” as Loving God Whose Way Is Peace
Aliou Cissé Niang
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8.
Mysticism and Mothering in Black Women’s Social Justice Activism: Brazil/USA
Rachel Elizabeth Harding
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9.
A Theopoetics of Exodus and the Africana Spirit in Music
Sharon Kimberly Williams
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10.
Must We Burn Isaac? A Four-Part Hermeneutical Fantasy for Africana Epistemology
Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo
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6.
God Killed! God Interrupted, Long Live the People!: Political Theory in Religious Act
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Part III Africana Historiographies and Memories: Temitope Temitope
Pamela Mordecai-
11.
From White Man’s Magic to Black Folks’ Wisdom
Althea Spencer Miller
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12.
Solidarity by Sharing Power: An Inculturated Organic Storytelling of Jonah and Mami Wata
’Shola D. Adegbite
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13.
Envisioning Africana Religions: Seeking a Distinctive Voice for the Study of Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora
Salim Faraji
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14.
Interpreting from the Back/Black-Side: Exodus through the Shawl of Memory
Kenneth N. Ngwa
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15.
Conjuring Lost Books: (Re-)membering Fragmented Litanies at the Intersection of Africana and Biblical Studies
Hugh R. Page
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Afterword
Catherine Keller
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11.
From White Man’s Magic to Black Folks’ Wisdom
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End Matter
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