Engendering Slave Religion: Methodology Beyond the Invisible Institution

Abstract

This article argues for a deprioritization of religious tradition in favor of practice-centered approaches to the study of religion among enslaved people in the United States as a means of rendering the African Atlantic and gendered dimensions more legible. In the wake of W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous argument for “the preacher, the music, and the frenzy” as the constitutive elements of African American religiosity in slavery, the historiography of slave religion has largely revolved around institutional manifestations of religion and the figures who powered them. To this end, religious traditions rooted in institutional models—with centralized authority figures, defined rites, and performative parameters—often serve as indices of religion among the enslaved. Surveying the historiography of slave religion, this article explores how the methodological prioritization of religious traditions has left the religious histories of women and others who resided outside of androcentric, heteronormative institutional frameworks largely hidden in the metanarrative of US religion and slavery. Methodologies aimed at the study of practices apart from institutions, however, prove generative for the recovery of woman-gendered and African Atlantic religious histories in the US South.