Literary Expressions of African Spirituality

Carol P. Marsh-Lockett is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University, where she teaches courses and pursues scholarship in African American, Caribbean, and Postcolonial Literatures. In addition to published essays and articles in these areas as well as articles on Seventeenth Century English Literature, she is the editor of Decolonising Caribbean Literature (Studies in the Literary Imagination 26.2) and Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage (Garland, 1999). She also co-edited (with Elizabeth J. West) Caribbean Women Writers in Exile: Anglophone Writings (Studies in the Literary Imagination 37.2). She is a former Womanist Scholar in Residence at The Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia.Elizabeth J. West received her PhD in English with a certificate in Women's Studies from Emory University. In her anthologized essays, as well as articles in American Studies Journal (Halle-Wittenberg, Germany), CLAJ, MELUS, JCCH, Womanist, Black Magnolias, SLI, and SCR, she focuses on gender, race and class, with particular interest in their intersections with the spiritual in early American and African American literary works. Her monograph, African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction (Lexington Books, 2011) traces specific African spiritual sensibilities from early to modern black women’s writings. She is among scholar interviewees for Georgia Public Broadcasting’s 2011 documentary on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Her article, “From David Walker to President Obama: Tropes of the Founding Fathers in African American Discourses of Democracy, or the Legacy of Ishmael,” has been recognized among “Featured Articles in American Studies” (American Studies Journals: A Directory of Worldwide Resources). She is a former AAUW Research Fellow and a ROOTS NEH Summer Seminar Participant (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and University of Virginia). She has served as a Special Delegate for the Modern Language Association, and she is currently Assistant Treasurer for the College Language Association.

The 11 essays in this collection explore ways in which indigenous African faith systems inform--and are treated in--black Atlantic literature and film. Most contributors deal with African American and Anglophone black Caribbean texts, so the title is overbroad, and the ambition of editors Marsh-Lockett and West (both Georgia State Univ.) to rethink "critical approaches to African works and their counterparts across the Atlantic" is a little too grand, but there are noteworthy essays here. The leadoff, for instance, by John Hawley--one of only two focusing on African literature--is a concise overview of novelistic engagement with indigenous spiritualities, Islam, and Christianity, referencing dozens of examples from around the continent. Kameelah Martin contributes an informative survey on conjure women in African American novels and films. In a different vein, Artress Bethany White's and Beauty Bragg's essays employ postcolonial, diasporist, feminist, and religious studies discourses in their thoughtful literary critiques of, respectively, Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison, and Edwidge Danticat. Melvin Rahming offers a fascinating "Egyptian/Kametic" reading of a too-little-known collection of short stories, Voodoomation, by Garfield Linton, but it is marred by shoddy proofreading--the title of the book is variously misspelled throughout. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: African Spirituality and the Ameri-Atlantic WorldCarol Marsh-Lockett and Elizabeth J. WestSection 1: Imagining African Faith Systems in the Postmodern WorldChapter 2: The Gods Who Speak in Many Voices, and in None: African Novelists on Indigenous and Colonial ReligionJohn C. HawleyChapter 3: Reading Spirit: Cosmological Considerations in Garfield Linton’s Voodoomation: A Book of ForetellingMelvin RahmingChapter 4: From “Pythian Madness” to an “Inner Ethic of Self-Sacrifice”: The Spirits of Africa and Modernity in Du Bois’s Late WritingsJames Manigault-Bryant Chapter 5: Rituals of Remembrance: Trauma, Memory, and Spiritual Practice in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of RednessErica L. StillSection 2: Integrations of the African and the Western in New World Black Atlantic WritingChapter 6: The Body of Vodou: Corporeality and the Location of Gender in Afro-Diasporic ReligionRoberto StrongmanChapter 7: Hoodoo Ladies and High Conjurers: New Directions for an Old ArchetypeKameelah MartinChapter 8: From Africa to America by Way of the Caribbean: Fictionalized Histories of the Diasporic Slave Woman’s Presence in AmericaArtress Bethany WhiteSection 3: African Deities and Divinations as Forces in New World Black WorksChapter 9: Expressions of African-Based Spirituality in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, MemoryBeauty BraggChapter 10: Waiting for Olodumare: Ishmael Reed and the Recovery of Yoruba” Darryl Dickson-CarrChapter 11: Testing and Changing: Esu and Oya ‘Making it Do What it Do’ in The Best ManGeorgene Bess MontgomeryChapter 12: Cuban Utopianism and Haitian Messiah: Spiritual Provocations of Collective Catalyst in Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the DewMario Chandler