Black is a church : Christianity and the contours of African American life / Josef Sorett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sorett, Josef, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Religion--History.

African Americans.

Protestantism--United States--History.

Protestantism.

Race--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Race.

African Americans--Social life and customs--History.

Slave narratives--History and criticism.

Slave narratives.

African Americans--Religion.

African Americans--Social life and customs.

United States.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

xiii, 239 pages ; 22 cm

Other Title:

Christianity and the contours of African American life

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023]

Summary:

"Across four chapters that proceed as chronologically organized episodes, Black is a Church maps the ways in which black American culture and identity has been animated by a particular set of, often unmarked, Protestant logics. In doing so, the book charts the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity constitutive of the content and forms of blackness. As such, Black is a Church accounts for the entangled logics of Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism that coalesced within the modern category of religion and which facilitated the emergence of black subjectivity and social life in North America. Chapter 1 argues that Afro-Protestantism relied upon literary strategies to enunciate itself since the earliest years of its formation. Through slave narratives and spiritual autobiographies, it shows how the content of Protestant Christianity was essential to the establishment of the earliest Black literary forms. Chapter 2 moves from the emergence of Afro-Protestantism to track its heterodox history in the convergence of literature, politics, and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter tracks a set of social movements to reveal how religious aspirations animated early calls for a "race literature" and how "the color line" provided an organizing logic for religious innovations as divergent as the practices of pluralism and Pentecostalism at the century's close. Chapter 3 surveys historical, sociological, and anthropological work during the 1930s and 1940s - focusing especially on the launch of Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture -- all at a moment when the academic study of African American religion and culture reached a degree of critical maturity. Finally, Chapter 4 presents three more recent episodes, across the spheres of scholarship, literature and politics, that illustrate the persistence of Afro-Protestant logics at the turn of the twenty first century"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The literary beginnings of Afro-Protestantism

Afro-Protestantism, pluralism and the problem of the color line

Afro-Protestantism and the politics of studying Black life

The Afterlives of Afro-Protestantism.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Sorett, Josef. Black is a church

ISBN:

9780190615130

0190615133

OCLC:

1355582618

Publisher Number:

99993820500