Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0057
D. Ngong
Abstract:The study of Africana religiosity has often focused on African influences on African diaspora religiosity but rarely the other way round, that is, on African diaspora influences on African religiosity. The rare instance when the focus was on African diaspora influence on African religiosity was the case of Black theology. However, when Black theology came to the continent, it was mired in the debate of its relevance to Africans. This debate was prosecuted by John Mbiti and James Cone in the 1970s. While the debate centered on Christian theology, this article reads it as raising the larger question of the relevance of African diaspora religiosity in Africa. It argues for the need to seriously study African diaspora religiosity in Africa, noting that such study may provide theoretical tools with which to understand the development of African religiosity in the continent and the African predicament in the modern world.
{"title":"The Mbiti-Cone Debate and the Study of African Religiosity","authors":"D. Ngong","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0057","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The study of Africana religiosity has often focused on African influences on African diaspora religiosity but rarely the other way round, that is, on African diaspora influences on African religiosity. The rare instance when the focus was on African diaspora influence on African religiosity was the case of Black theology. However, when Black theology came to the continent, it was mired in the debate of its relevance to Africans. This debate was prosecuted by John Mbiti and James Cone in the 1970s. While the debate centered on Christian theology, this article reads it as raising the larger question of the relevance of African diaspora religiosity in Africa. It argues for the need to seriously study African diaspora religiosity in Africa, noting that such study may provide theoretical tools with which to understand the development of African religiosity in the continent and the African predicament in the modern world.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"11 1","pages":"57 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46526819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0144
James R. Brennan
{"title":"Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan by Christopher Tounsel (review)","authors":"James R. Brennan","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0144","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"11 1","pages":"144 - 146"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41909359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0001
A. M. Beliso-De Jesus
Drawing on ethnography with police officers in the United States, this article explores the policing of Africana, Afro-Latinx, and diaspora religions. This article demonstrates how state secularism is involved in the simultaneous gendering and racializing of African diaspora religions as criminal and deviant. It illuminates the white-Christian Protestantism underlying the police state’s secularism. By exploring how police officers who secretly practice African diaspora religions see themselves as being “in the closet” to their departments, it demonstrates how white-Christianity and heteronormativity are implicit to American secularist policing, what I term here heterosecularism.
{"title":"Religion in the Closet: Heterosecularisms and Police-Practitioners of African Diaspora Religions","authors":"A. M. Beliso-De Jesus","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Drawing on ethnography with police officers in the United States, this article explores the policing of Africana, Afro-Latinx, and diaspora religions. This article demonstrates how state secularism is involved in the simultaneous gendering and racializing of African diaspora religions as criminal and deviant. It illuminates the white-Christian Protestantism underlying the police state’s secularism. By exploring how police officers who secretly practice African diaspora religions see themselves as being “in the closet” to their departments, it demonstrates how white-Christianity and heteronormativity are implicit to American secularist policing, what I term here heterosecularism.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45319373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0147
C. Coleman
{"title":"Performing Power in Nigeria: Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism","authors":"C. Coleman","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.11.1.0147","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43481477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0237
Zachary Wright
Abstract:Ideas of African cultural or racial distinction, most notably Négritude, largely have been dismissed as marginal to "ordinary" Africans, or the vast majority who did not have the opportunity to study in Paris or London and meet with ideologues of Black nationalism from the diaspora. Sub-Saharan African Muslims earlier responded to a process of racial othering, particularly in response to the prejudice of some Arab coreligionists. Even if Black African Muslims were reacting to decidedly different circumstances than African Americans or Black West Indians studying in Europe, Muslim articulations of Black cultural identity in the twentieth century successfully pivoted to the new historical discourse, both apprising and contributing to the discourse on Africanité emerging from the diaspora. This study considers the engagement with the question of Black racial identity by the prominent Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (1900–1975).
摘要：对于“普通”非洲人，或者绝大多数没有机会在巴黎或伦敦学习并与散居国外的黑人民族主义理论家会面的非洲人来说，非洲文化或种族差异的想法，尤其是Négritude，在很大程度上被认为是边缘的。撒哈拉以南非洲穆斯林早些时候对种族差异化的过程做出了回应，特别是对一些阿拉伯核心宗教主义者的偏见做出了回应。即使非洲黑人穆斯林的反应与在欧洲学习的非洲裔美国人或西印度群岛黑人截然不同，但20世纪穆斯林对黑人文化身份的阐述成功地转向了新的历史话语，既为散居国外的非洲人的话语提供了信息，也为其做出了贡献。这项研究考虑了塞内加尔著名穆斯林学者Shaykh Ibrāhi 772 m Niasse（1900-1975）对黑人种族认同问题的参与。
{"title":"Islam, Blackness, and African Cultural Distinction: The Islamic Négritude of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse","authors":"Zachary Wright","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0237","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Ideas of African cultural or racial distinction, most notably Négritude, largely have been dismissed as marginal to \"ordinary\" Africans, or the vast majority who did not have the opportunity to study in Paris or London and meet with ideologues of Black nationalism from the diaspora. Sub-Saharan African Muslims earlier responded to a process of racial othering, particularly in response to the prejudice of some Arab coreligionists. Even if Black African Muslims were reacting to decidedly different circumstances than African Americans or Black West Indians studying in Europe, Muslim articulations of Black cultural identity in the twentieth century successfully pivoted to the new historical discourse, both apprising and contributing to the discourse on Africanité emerging from the diaspora. This study considers the engagement with the question of Black racial identity by the prominent Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (1900–1975).","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"10 1","pages":"237 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49365287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0149
Ahmad Greene-Hayes
Abstract:This article explores the religious labor of Mother Estella Boyd (1914–2003), an African American Pentecostal preacher, faith healer, and prophetess widely known in and beyond Black Pentecostal circles for her special practice of laying on of hands, which she referred to as "shots of deliverance." Using the memoirs, interviews, and sermons of both Boyd and her spiritual children, this article uses a gendered analysis and argues that Boyd's laying on of hands, and the healing and deliverance from "sexual sin" and substance abuse that took place as a result, helped shape the religious careers of prominent Black Pentecostal leaders such as Bishop Marvin Winans and Prophetess Juanita Bynum. As a result of Boyd's imprint and legacy on their lives, I argue that even as Boyd never physically left the United States, her legacy transcended the U.S. nation-state, particularly through Bynum's contemporary global Black Pentecostalism.
{"title":"Shots of Deliverance: Mother Estella Boyd's Healing Hands and Global Black Pentecostal Reach","authors":"Ahmad Greene-Hayes","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0149","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the religious labor of Mother Estella Boyd (1914–2003), an African American Pentecostal preacher, faith healer, and prophetess widely known in and beyond Black Pentecostal circles for her special practice of laying on of hands, which she referred to as \"shots of deliverance.\" Using the memoirs, interviews, and sermons of both Boyd and her spiritual children, this article uses a gendered analysis and argues that Boyd's laying on of hands, and the healing and deliverance from \"sexual sin\" and substance abuse that took place as a result, helped shape the religious careers of prominent Black Pentecostal leaders such as Bishop Marvin Winans and Prophetess Juanita Bynum. As a result of Boyd's imprint and legacy on their lives, I argue that even as Boyd never physically left the United States, her legacy transcended the U.S. nation-state, particularly through Bynum's contemporary global Black Pentecostalism.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"10 1","pages":"149 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48751495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0266
J. Andreson
Abstract:From the 1980s onward, Candomblé leaders successfully adapted cultural heritage laws to protect historic temples and gain select rights in the construction of a Brazilian democracy. State technicians and anthropologists in dialogue with religious leaders defined African territoriality in Brazilian cultural heritage policies through sometimes conflicting principles of race, gender, and history. Black priestesses were fundamental to this process, leading their communities toward greater public respect, representation, and protection through political negotiation. This article argues that the adaptation of cultural heritage status to historic temples defined Black women's leadership as a central feature of African heritage in Brazil, while leaving the widespread issues of land insecurity and religious and environmental racism unexamined in the implementation of democratic policies. The Candomblé religion depends on healthy and sustainable material relationships to the land and community. Religious racism, land speculation, economic precarity, and environmental destruction continue to marginalize Candomblé temples and their leaders in Brazil despite nominal celebration by the state.
{"title":"African Territoriality in Brazilian Cultural Heritage Policies","authors":"J. Andreson","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0266","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:From the 1980s onward, Candomblé leaders successfully adapted cultural heritage laws to protect historic temples and gain select rights in the construction of a Brazilian democracy. State technicians and anthropologists in dialogue with religious leaders defined African territoriality in Brazilian cultural heritage policies through sometimes conflicting principles of race, gender, and history. Black priestesses were fundamental to this process, leading their communities toward greater public respect, representation, and protection through political negotiation. This article argues that the adaptation of cultural heritage status to historic temples defined Black women's leadership as a central feature of African heritage in Brazil, while leaving the widespread issues of land insecurity and religious and environmental racism unexamined in the implementation of democratic policies. The Candomblé religion depends on healthy and sustainable material relationships to the land and community. Religious racism, land speculation, economic precarity, and environmental destruction continue to marginalize Candomblé temples and their leaders in Brazil despite nominal celebration by the state.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"10 1","pages":"266 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48785596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0212
Amanda Furiasse
Abstract:At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Madagascar's government garnered international media attention for their herbal remedy to COVID-19, made from the Artemisia plant, called "Covid-Organics" (CVO). While global media outlets presented CVO as yet another example of an inherent conflict between traditional African medicine and Western medicine, this article hypothesizes that the release of CVO offers a rare window into the dynamic processes by which ecological, technological, and cultural developments in the production and distribution of artemisia and plant-based medicines in the country are giving rise to a multifaceted system of medical pluralism that attempts to strike a difficult balance between appeasing the rapidly growing global demand for plant-based medicines and preserving the country's unique religious heritage and biodiversity.
{"title":"Madagascar's Green Gold: Nature Religion, Biotechnology, and the Global Race against Covid-19","authors":"Amanda Furiasse","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0212","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Madagascar's government garnered international media attention for their herbal remedy to COVID-19, made from the Artemisia plant, called \"Covid-Organics\" (CVO). While global media outlets presented CVO as yet another example of an inherent conflict between traditional African medicine and Western medicine, this article hypothesizes that the release of CVO offers a rare window into the dynamic processes by which ecological, technological, and cultural developments in the production and distribution of artemisia and plant-based medicines in the country are giving rise to a multifaceted system of medical pluralism that attempts to strike a difficult balance between appeasing the rapidly growing global demand for plant-based medicines and preserving the country's unique religious heritage and biodiversity.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"10 1","pages":"212 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42973375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0174
Oludamini Ogunnaike
Abstract:Many scholars have pointed out that African religious traditions are typically treated as "data" to be interpreted by academic theories, and not as interpretive theories in their own right, leading to calls for the development of "decolonial" or "indigenous theory" to redress this dynamic. Yet, with certain glowing exceptions, these efforts to "decolonize theory" typically attempt to employ the same Euro-American theories and paradigms to critique themselves and "translate" the theories of African religious traditions into the terms of these academic theories. Taking the traditions of Sufism and Ifá as case studies, I would like to argue that while both have sophisticated hermeneutics, theories, and doctrines, both traditions are something other than academic theories. Using analogies of language and language acquisition, this article explores how best to represent, translate, and teach the former (Sufism and Ifá) in the context of the latter (undergraduate and graduate education in "Western" academia).
{"title":"From Theory to Theoria and Back Again and Beyond: Decolonizing the Study of Africana Religions","authors":"Oludamini Ogunnaike","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.10.2.0174","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Many scholars have pointed out that African religious traditions are typically treated as \"data\" to be interpreted by academic theories, and not as interpretive theories in their own right, leading to calls for the development of \"decolonial\" or \"indigenous theory\" to redress this dynamic. Yet, with certain glowing exceptions, these efforts to \"decolonize theory\" typically attempt to employ the same Euro-American theories and paradigms to critique themselves and \"translate\" the theories of African religious traditions into the terms of these academic theories. Taking the traditions of Sufism and Ifá as case studies, I would like to argue that while both have sophisticated hermeneutics, theories, and doctrines, both traditions are something other than academic theories. Using analogies of language and language acquisition, this article explores how best to represent, translate, and teach the former (Sufism and Ifá) in the context of the latter (undergraduate and graduate education in \"Western\" academia).","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"10 1","pages":"174 - 211"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48888350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.10.1.0020
C. Prempeh
Abstract:The object of this ethnographic study is to assess the contemporary debates surrounding the veil (hijab) and the cultural reinterpretation of the hair in Maamobi, an inner-city Muslim area of Accra, Ghana. Instead of reproducing the Orientalists’ view of the veil as oppressive to women in Islam, the paper analyses the significance of the veil and its appropriation within the Islamic faith in recent times. I maintain that in the midst of religious plurality and the widespread perception of a fast-declining morality in urban Accra, the “traditional” role of women as gatekeepers of religious values has been refashioned in the veil debate. This study is based on my position as a resident of Maamobi for more than three decades as well as twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2018 and 2019 to discuss the history and social use of the veil from the 1980s to contemporary times.
{"title":"“Hijab Is My Identity”: Beyond the Politics of the Veil: The Appropriations of the Veil in an Inner-City Muslim Area of Accra (Ghana) since the 1980s","authors":"C. Prempeh","doi":"10.5325/jafrireli.10.1.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.10.1.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The object of this ethnographic study is to assess the contemporary debates surrounding the veil (hijab) and the cultural reinterpretation of the hair in Maamobi, an inner-city Muslim area of Accra, Ghana. Instead of reproducing the Orientalists’ view of the veil as oppressive to women in Islam, the paper analyses the significance of the veil and its appropriation within the Islamic faith in recent times. I maintain that in the midst of religious plurality and the widespread perception of a fast-declining morality in urban Accra, the “traditional” role of women as gatekeepers of religious values has been refashioned in the veil debate. This study is based on my position as a resident of Maamobi for more than three decades as well as twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2018 and 2019 to discuss the history and social use of the veil from the 1980s to contemporary times.","PeriodicalId":41877,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Africana Religions","volume":"10 1","pages":"20 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45701459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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