Lauren Coyle Rosen – författare

For Hannibal Lokumbe, music is a profound source of spiritual liberation. A pathbreaking orchestral composer and visionary jazz musician, he composes resonant works that give voice to the freedom struggle of the African diaspora, the broader African American experience, Indigenous histories, and humanity. Many of his works address historical traumas, such as the Middle Passage, the Vietnam War, global environmental disharmony, and targeted racial violence, and focus on major figures, including Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Dr. Kim Phúc Phan Thị, and Anne Frank. This innovative book demonstrates that Lokumbe’s musical compositions, created in collaboration with his ancestors, are multisensorial spiritual soundscapes that aspire to chronicle, heal, and liberate. This is a captivating, vital portrait and spiritual biography of Lokumbe. The cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen draws on several years of close conversations with Lokumbe, as well as his journals, to provide a powerful collaborative account of his remarkable life and work. The authors explore Lokumbe’s creative journeys and the spiritual dimensions of his art. They trace Lokumbe’s entire career, from his early years in the Texas and New York City jazz scenes to his widely acclaimed orchestral compositions. The book also addresses Lokumbe’s work in prisons and schools with the Music Liberation Orchestra, founded in the 1970s. Illuminating his philosophies of music, spirituality, justice, and freedom, this book immerses readers in Lokumbe’s many revelatory worlds.

For Hannibal Lokumbe, music is a profound source of spiritual liberation. A pathbreaking orchestral composer and visionary jazz musician, he composes resonant works that give voice to the freedom struggle of the African diaspora, the broader African American experience, Indigenous histories, and humanity. Many of his works address historical traumas, such as the Middle Passage, the Vietnam War, global environmental disharmony, and targeted racial violence, and focus on major figures, including Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Dr. Kim Phúc Phan Thị, and Anne Frank. This innovative book demonstrates that Lokumbe’s musical compositions, created in collaboration with his ancestors, are multisensorial spiritual soundscapes that aspire to chronicle, heal, and liberate. This is a captivating, vital portrait and spiritual biography of Lokumbe. The cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen draws on several years of close conversations with Lokumbe, as well as his journals, to provide a powerful collaborative account of his remarkable life and work. The authors explore Lokumbe’s creative journeys and the spiritual dimensions of his art. They trace Lokumbe’s entire career, from his early years in the Texas and New York City jazz scenes to his widely acclaimed orchestral compositions. The book also addresses Lokumbe’s work in prisons and schools with the Music Liberation Orchestra, founded in the 1970s. Illuminating his philosophies of music, spirituality, justice, and freedom, this book immerses readers in Lokumbe’s many revelatory worlds.

Fires of Gold is a powerful ethnography of the often shrouded cultural, legal, political, and spiritual forces governing the gold mining industry in Ghana, one of Africa’s most celebrated democracies. Lauren Coyle Rosen argues that significant sources of power have arisen outside of the formal legal system to police, adjudicate, and navigate conflict in this theater of violence, destruction, and rebirth. These authorities, or shadow sovereigns, include the transnational mining company, collectivized artisanal miners, civil society advocacy groups, and significant religious figures and spiritual forces from African, Islamic, and Christian traditions. Often more salient than official bodies of government, the shadow sovereigns reveal a reconstitution of sovereign power—one that, in many ways, is generated by hidden dimensions of the legal system. Coyle Rosen also contends that spiritual forces are central in anchoring and animating shadow sovereigns as well as key forms of legal authority, economic value, and political contestation. This innovative book illuminates how the crucible of gold, itself governed by spirits, serves as a critical site for embodied struggles over the realignment of the classical philosophical triad: the city, the soul, and the sacred.

Fires of Gold is a powerful ethnography of the often shrouded cultural, legal, political, and spiritual forces governing the gold mining industry in Ghana, one of Africa’s most celebrated democracies. Lauren Coyle Rosen argues that significant sources of power have arisen outside of the formal legal system to police, adjudicate, and navigate conflict in this theater of violence, destruction, and rebirth. These authorities, or shadow sovereigns, include the transnational mining company, collectivized artisanal miners, civil society advocacy groups, and significant religious figures and spiritual forces from African, Islamic, and Christian traditions. Often more salient than official bodies of government, the shadow sovereigns reveal a reconstitution of sovereign power—one that, in many ways, is generated by hidden dimensions of the legal system. Coyle Rosen also contends that spiritual forces are central in anchoring and animating shadow sovereigns as well as key forms of legal authority, economic value, and political contestation. This innovative book illuminates how the crucible of gold, itself governed by spirits, serves as a critical site for embodied struggles over the realignment of the classical philosophical triad: the city, the soul, and the sacred.

Law in Light is a groundbreaking book on the resurgence and transformation of Akan path spiritual communities in the United States and Ghana. Drawing on extensive collaborative ethnographic research, the book offers powerful portraits of priestesses, priests, and others on their spiritual journeys, in their ancestral reconnections, and in their everyday lives. The book spotlights a queen mother, shrine elders, priests, and priestesses of a prominent shrine house in Maryland, as well as leaders at a legendary Asuo Gyebi source shrine in Ghana. In exploring worlds of healing, empowerment, and justice, Lauren Coyle Rosen argues for the importance of two novel theoretical concepts, which she calls copresent jurisdictions and constellations of subjectivity. The book urges a broader retheorization of alternative spiritual orders within contemporary theopolitical, cosmopolitical, and postjuristocratic debates.