Paul Griffith is professor of english at Texas Southern University.

Griffith’s book offers readers testimony of his deep intellectual immersion in Caribbean, African American, and African oral and performative art forms, with persistent meditations on the central constitutive work of the word in informing the divine order and creating the human realm. The author’s work here reminds us that the subject forms hold the power to endow matter and dailiness with the numinous and the magical, that there persists for all the ethical obligation to redeem the world from the chaos of hegemonic ideologies, to make the world comprehensible by creating a sustainable balance out of the “extreme antitheses” of matter and spirit.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsChapter One—Introduction: Journeys in Space and SpiritChapter Two—The Spirituals: The Nonduality of the SacredChapter Three—Animate Authority of Word and RiteChapter Four—Plots and CounterplotsChapter Five—The Quest for Divine FullnessChapter Six—Ritual Relocation of SelfChapter Seven— Alchemy as Transformational MagicConclusionBibliographyAbout the Author

Paul Griffith is professor of english at Texas Southern University.

Griffith’s book offers readers testimony of his deep intellectual immersion in Caribbean, African American, and African oral and performative art forms, with persistent meditations on the central constitutive work of the word in informing the divine order and creating the human realm. The author’s work here reminds us that the subject forms hold the power to endow matter and dailiness with the numinous and the magical, that there persists for all the ethical obligation to redeem the world from the chaos of hegemonic ideologies, to make the world comprehensible by creating a sustainable balance out of the “extreme antitheses” of matter and spirit.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsChapter One—Introduction: Journeys in Space and SpiritChapter Two—The Spirituals: The Nonduality of the SacredChapter Three—Animate Authority of Word and RiteChapter Four—Plots and CounterplotsChapter Five—The Quest for Divine FullnessChapter Six—Ritual Relocation of SelfChapter Seven— Alchemy as Transformational MagicConclusionBibliographyAbout the Author

Paul Griffith is professor of english at Texas Southern University.

Griffith’s book offers readers testimony of his deep intellectual immersion in Caribbean, African American, and African oral and performative art forms, with persistent meditations on the central constitutive work of the word in informing the divine order and creating the human realm. The author’s work here reminds us that the subject forms hold the power to endow matter and dailiness with the numinous and the magical, that there persists for all the ethical obligation to redeem the world from the chaos of hegemonic ideologies, to make the world comprehensible by creating a sustainable balance out of the “extreme antitheses” of matter and spirit.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsChapter One—Introduction: Journeys in Space and SpiritChapter Two—The Spirituals: The Nonduality of the SacredChapter Three—Animate Authority of Word and RiteChapter Four—Plots and CounterplotsChapter Five—The Quest for Divine FullnessChapter Six—Ritual Relocation of SelfChapter Seven— Alchemy as Transformational MagicConclusionBibliographyAbout the Author