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.

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.

"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"--

Drawing on literary, musical, and visual representations of and by Rastafari, Darren J. N. Middleton provides an introduction to Rasta through the arts, broadly conceived. The religious underpinnings of the Rasta movement are often overshadowed by Rasta’s association with reggae music, dub, and performance poetry. Rastafari and the Arts: An Introduction takes a fresh view of Rasta, considering the relationship between the artistic and religious dimensions of the movement in depth. Middleton’s analysis complements current introductions to Afro-Caribbean religions and offers an engaging example of the role of popular culture in illuminating the beliefs and practices of emerging religions. Recognizing that outsiders as well as insiders have shaped the Rasta movement since its modest beginnings in Jamaica, Middleton includes interviews with members of both groups, including: Ejay Khan, Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah, Geoffrey Philp, Asante Amen, Reggae Rajahs, Benjamin Zephaniah, Monica Haim, Blakk Rasta, Rocky Dawuni, and Marvin D. Sterling.

Contributions by Cécile Accilien, Maria Rice Bellamy, Gwen Bergner, Olga Blomgren, Maia L. Butler, Isabel Caldeira, Nadège T. Clitandre, Thadious M. Davis, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Laura Dawkins, Megan Feifer, Delphine Gras, Akia Jackson, Tammie Jenkins, Shewonda Leger, Jennifer M. Lozano, Marion Christina Rohrleitner, Thomás Rothe, Erika V. Serrato, Lucía Stecher, and Joyce White Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat contains fifteen essays addressing how Edwidge Danticat’s writing, anthologizing, and storytelling trace, (re)construct, and develop alternate histories, narratives of nation building, and conceptions of home and belonging. The prolific Danticat is renowned for novels, collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and editorial writing. As her experimentation in form expands, so does her force as a public intellectual. Danticat’s literary representations, political commentary, and personal activism have proven vital to classroom and community work imagining radical futures. Among increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and containment and rampant ecological volatility, Danticat’s contributions to public discourse, art, and culture deserve sustained critical attention. These essays offer essential perspectives to scholars, public intellectuals, and students interested in African diasporic, Haitian, Caribbean, and transnational American literary studies. This collection frames Danticat’s work as an indictment of statelessness, racialized and gendered state violence, and the persistence of political and economic margins. The first section of this volume, “The Other Side of the Water,” engages with Danticat’s construction and negotiation of nation, both in Haiti and the United States; the broader dyaspora; and her own, her family’s, and her fictional characters’ places within them. The second section, “Welcoming Ghosts,” delves into the ever-present specter of history and memory, prominent themes found throughout Danticat’s work. From origin stories to broader Haitian histories, this section addresses the underlying traumas involved when remembering the past and its relationship to the present. The third section, “I Speak Out,” explores the imperative to speak, paying particular attention to the narrative form with which such telling occurs. The fourth and final section, “Create Dangerously,” contends with Haitians’ activism, community building, and the political and ecological climate of Haiti and its dyaspora.

This volume has as a cohesive argument the exploration of the different manifestations of the search for wholeness and spirituality in the writings of contemporary African American women writers, covering different literary genres such as fiction (both novels and short stories), drama and poetry. Together with the issue of spirituality, the African American search for wholeness is analyzed as a source of creativity and agency. As expressed in the contemporary literature of black women writers, starting in the 1980s, the search for wholeness reflects a beauty realized through the healing of the spirit and the body, and is a process that takes on dimensions of reconciling the past and the present, the mythical and the real, the spiritual and the physical—all in the context of an emerging world view that welcomes synthesis and expects both synthesis and generative contradictions. The book will be a valuable collection for scholars of African American literature, comparative American Ethnic literature, American literature, and spirituality, as well as women’s studies. In addition, it will be an important text for both undergraduate and graduate students in those fields. As Professor Johnnella Butler (2006) points out, the African American search for wholeness is tightly linked to the search for freedom and agency. Ever since the 19th century, African American writers have given expression to an African American self which functions in Western civilization simultaneously as a “colonized” other and an assertive “self.” Due to the continuous ordeal of the African Diaspora, this self is caught in between the binaries proposed by the material and the spiritual world, seeking a balance where the person can become whole. The search for wholeness feeds from cultural roots that imply the presence of ancestral spiritualism, rememory, and double consciousness. Contemporary black women writers reflect the metaphor of building spiritual bridges, seeking the possibilities of building a bridge to the archetypal African past that is carried in their memories as a presence that offers sustenance via spiritual reconnection. Their works seek to bridge the gap between the myths and traditions of the past and contemporary African American culture. The texts included in this collection are examples of writing as an exercise of what Vévé Clark calls “Diaspora literacy.” The texts written by contemporary African American women writers explicitly show how to recognize and read the cultural signs left scattered along the road of progress. In this way, material acquisition is achieved along with cultural dispossession, becoming a metaphor for the history of the African in America. The powerful message is that one should not exclude the other.

These traditional reads are brimming with spirited characters and positive values--but with a little extra excitement and bite, so hold on to your hats! Written expressly for the middle grade struggling reader, the series does not contain strong language, edgy themes, or dysfunctional families. In fact, family is the main theme of these titles. And one particular Latino family is the focus with their uncanny knack for finding humor, hope, and colorful personalities--even in unusual circumstances. Written at the lowest reading levels, the 50-page story structure is straightforward and moves the reader through the text quickly and efficiently. They were trapped. Then Ana remembered the old stone church. It was nearby. She knew the old building was the safest place for her family. It could withstand the high winds and rising water.

This book concerns the origins, structure, purpose, meaning, and significance of libation, developments and change within the ritual, and its distribution in the Afrikan world. Libation is a liquid offering by and behalf of all humanity, those living and those yet-to-be-born, to the Creator, to other divinities, to ancestors, and to the environment. Through this ritual Afrikans affirm and re-establish cosmic balance, interconnection and interdependence: the harmony and balance, connection and interdependency within, between and among humans, the environment, the spirit world, and the Creator. The text connects the practice of libation throughout the prodigious time/space correlation occupied by the Afrikan experience of life, connects Afrikans to their social history, and so to themselves across generations in different spaces and times. The methodology is at once both multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. The methods and techniques of history, linguistics, cultural studies, literature and other human sciences are deployed to develop a comprehensive reconstruction, description and analysis of a ritual that has long been antique, but has never become antiquated.

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.

This special collection assembles some of the most pre-eminent scholars in the field in African, African American, and American Studies to explore the ways writers reclaim the Black female body in African American literature using the theoretical, social, cultural, and religious frameworks of spirituality and religion. Central to these discussions is Black women’s agency within these realms—their uncanny ability to invent and reinvent themselves within individual and communal spaces that frame them as both outsider and insider, unworthy and worthy, deviant and sacred, excess and minimal. Scholars have sought to discuss these tensions, acknowledged and affirmed in prose, poetry, music, essays, speeches, written plays, or short stories. Forgiveness, healing, redemption, and reclamation provide entry into these vibrant explorations of self-discovery, passion, and self-creation that interrogate traditional views of what is spiritual and what is religious. Discussed writers include Toni Morrison, Phillis Wheatley, James Baldwin, Tina McElroy Ansa, Toni Cade Bambara, and Thomas Dorsey.