Journal of Africana Religions

01/14/2022

Archives of Conjure (2020) by Solimar Otero is awarded the Albert J. Raboteau book prize. Congratulations Professor Otero!

05/13/2021

Dear All:

Kindly circulate the Special Issue Call for Papers announcement with your networks and friends. Thank you very much.

Special Issue Call For Papers Theme: Africana Religions and Public Health The Journal of Africana Religions invites article manuscripts for a special issue on “Africana Religions and Public Health.” The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of understanding the relationship between re...

03/05/2021

Book Review

Reviewed Work: Prieto: Yoruba Kinship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions by Henry B. Lovejoy

Review by: Toyin Falola

JSTOR - https://tinyurl.com/ychtpzrk
Project MUSE- https://tinyurl.com/y944acdw

Review Excerpt - "This original and fascinating book connects Africa and Latin America in a world created by the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. The Oyo Empire, an expansive and notable empire that wielded power among the Yoruba and their neighbors, created a Pan-Yorubana, whose consequences in religion and world-view migrated to Cuba, where several of Oyo's cultural and religious practices and values were produced. The storyline is woven around a powerful central figure, a Yoruba with the new name of Juan Nepomuceno Prieto, whose life was dated from ca. 1773 to ca. 1835. The sources to sustain the work include slave trade narratives, registers of traffic in slaves, and trial records. The book contributes to the multiple fields of African diaspora studies, Latin American history, the Yoruba in the Atlantic world, and slavery and resistance.”

Author Bio - Dr. Falola: Professor; Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities; University Distinguished Teaching Professor - History Department University of Texas at Austin

Image - https://www.newworldencyclopedia(dot)org

03/04/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1 (2021) - Review

Reviewed Work: Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes by Hansjörg Dilger, Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

Review by: Nathanael J. Homewood

JSTOR- https://bit.ly/3sMWL0D
Project Muse- https://bit.ly/308V8yb

Excerpt from the Review:

"The affective turn has ably demonstrated that the human is made, and remade, in unconscious or preconscious ways. We feel what being is, what it has been, and even what it could or should be. The rise to prominence and widespread acceptance of affective knowledge has dramatically reshaped the study of religion as the field aims to better understand that religious beliefs and experiences are a matter of affective congruences. Affect, which is a deep preconscious structure of feeling, provides us a way to discuss and tie together experiences, bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts. And yet, religion in Africa—often characterized by and through colonialism as excessively emotional—has mostly been ignored in this theoretical shift. It is, in the words of the editors of this work, "a blank spot" (2). This is no longer true with the important publication of Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes. This book, filled with thick descriptions of various religions, places, and people, is an argument for taking affect seriously for the way it structures religious experience and beliefs."

Author Bio - Nathanael Jedidiah Homewood is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, DePauw University, Indiana.

Image Credits : Untitled, March 30, 2019 | © Courtesy of D Mz from Pixabay via Signs, Modes, Assemblages / Hypotheses(dot)org

03/03/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1 (2021) Review

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic by Herman L. Bennett

Review by: Joseph da Costa

JSTOR- https://bit.ly/3c1tlVE
Project Muse - https://bit.ly/3eicSj1

"Herman Bennett's African Kings and Black Slaves challenges the liberal philosophy that he argues has come to define historiography on the African continent and the enslavement of African peoples. In so doing, he shifts the focus of analysis to the role of absolutist states in the enslavement of African peoples. Histories of African slavery in general "have been rendered as a singular phenomenon mediated through liberalism's nineteenth-century prism" (154). As such, connected perceptions of the jointly shared African-European past have been left largely unwritten, with the author arguing that it is "for this reason, deconstructing Europe's epistemological hegemony still represents a precondition for inscribing the story of Africa and Africans" (80)." - Excerpt from the Review

Author Bio - Dr. Joseph da Costa, King’s College London

Image Credits- Atlanta Black Star/ Artist Gregory Manchess

03/02/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1, 2021 Article

An Afro-centric Approach to Public Health:
Africana Religions and Public Health in Graduate Education by Amanda Furiasse

This article outlines the need for an interdisciplinary graduate program in Africana religions and public health at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The program would trace the colonial histories of these fields, train students through internships, and create partnerships between health officials and African diasporic communities in the Twin Cities that promote the insights of Africana ritual practices for hygiene, sanitation, and well-being.


JSTOR Link - t.ly/y3x6
Project Muse Link - t.ly/hlFQ

Dr. Amanda Furiasse, PhD, is a visiting professor of religion whose work unfolds at the convergence of religion, technology, and public health with a particular focus on the health and healing practices of Native American and Africana religions.

Image Courtesy - Seattle Times

03/01/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1, 2021 Article

The Place of Christianity in the Critical Debates of Africana Religious Studies by Joshua Settles

The massive accession to Christian faith in postcolonial Africa is leading to the ongoing creation of distinctively African forms of Christian thought and practice that differ in significant ways from those of the West—a trend anticipated by developments in Black American Christianity. Africana religious studies has been imagined as a field that would “generate credible scholarship on indigenous African religious traditions,” yet the rise of African Christianity raises questions about what constitutes indigeneity. If the Ethiopian church represents “Africa indigenously Christian,” do these more recent developments suggest Christianity indigenously African? Can Christianity be considered indigenously African? Is there a need for Africana religious scholarship to reassess the widespread notion of Christianity as a cultural product of the West and an imposition alien to Africana peoples? If so, what does the rise of African Christianity indicate about both the nature and structure of Christianity, understood as an Africana religion?

JSTOR: t.ly/4Ado
Project Muse: t.ly/iXN7
Image Credits- t.ly/Ad9c (Black Youth Project)

Author Bio - Rev. Dr. Joshua D.Settles is Research Fellow at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute (ACI) of Theology, Mission and Culture in Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana.

02/25/2021

Vol. 9, No. 1, 2021 Article

The Prosperity Gospel: Debating Modernity in Africa and the African Diaspora by James Kwateng-Yeboah

Debates over the role of Pentecostalism in effecting modernity through its widespread “prosperity gospel” remain inconclusive. Though Weber's Protestant Ethic has been persistently invoked, sociological analyses reveal that the prosperity gospel challenges dominant Weberian conceptualizations of modernity. On one hand, the doctrine refutes Weber's central claim of modern societies by its pervasive “enchantment.” On the other hand, the prosperity gospel shares modern traits of human autonomy and entrepreneurship. Does the prosperity gospel demonstrate simultaneously modern and antimodern themes? Using cases from Africa and the African diaspora, this essay critically reviews how modernity has functioned as a complicated category for analyses of the prosperity gospel and for Pentecostalism. Showing that modernity is mediated irreducibly by the historical and cultural backgrounds of the society it encounters, the essay argues for the potency of the “multiple modernities” paradigm as an analytical framework that better captures realities of Africana contexts, notably Pentecostalism and the prosperity gospel.

JSTOR Link - t.ly/mW65
Project MUSE Link - t.ly/RrI9

James Kwateng-Yeboah is a doctoral student in the Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary program at Queens, with research interests in religion, migration, and development. His doctoral work explores how Pentecostal-Charismatic spirituality emerges in African migration aspirations and experiences across Ghana and its diaspora in Canada.

Image Credits - Quartz Africa - t.ly/Isoi

02/24/2021

Journal Article from Volume 9, Number 1, 2021.

No Condition Is Permanent: Time as Method in Contemporary African Christian Theology by Professor David Ngong

JSTOR URL - t.ly/AqCv
Project Muse URL - t.ly/9Ekk

This article argues that contemporary African Christian theology has largely understood time from a modern, linear perspective, which sees history as progress. Interestingly, the perception of history as progress is the straitjacket into which the story of Africa in the modern world has been told, often depicting the continent as needing to catch up with the progressive time of the modern world. This progressive, linear view of time is, however, quite problematic. This article argues that time is palimpsestic, rendering discourses of progress problematic but without nullifying the quest for improved overall well-being. The palimpsestic view of time fits the popular West African outlook that “no condition is permanent” and is demonstrated especially in the work of African women theologians such as Mercy Amba Oduyoye and Musa Dube, whose use of story as method challenges the linear view of time and is thus methodologically instructive for African theology.

Dr. David Ngong is the Associate Professor of Religion & Theology/Chair of Religion & Theology.

Image Credits - Pew Research Center

By 2060, more than four-in-ten Christians and 27% of Muslims around the world will call sub-Saharan Africa home.

02/24/2021

Missa Luba 1965: Gloria (B2)
Arrangement by Father Guido Haazen

Youtube Link:

Stereo-ized 1965 Phillips mono Missa Luba: Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin perform an arrangement by Father Guido Haazen. The entire album has never been rei...

02/23/2021

The Missa Luba is an African setting of the Mass sung in Latin.
Arrangement by Father Guido Haazen.

Missa Luba 1965: Kyrie (B1)

Youtube Link - t.ly/uZlq

Stereo-ized 1965 Phillips mono Missa Luba: Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin perform an arrangement by Father Guido Haazen. The entire album has never been rei...