Black is a Church

Abstract

AbstractAcross four chapters that proceed as chronologically organized episodes, Black is a Church maps the ways in which black American culture and identity have been animated by a particular set of often unmarked Protestant logics. In doing so, it tracks the entangled discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy as Christianity was made constitutive of the content and forms of black subjectivity and facilitated the emergence of black 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. As seen in slave narratives, Protestant Christianity was essential to the establishment of the earliest black literary forms. Chapter 2 follows Afro-Protestantism’s 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, revealing how religious aspirations animated early calls for a “race literature” and the “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—at a key moment in the study of African American culture. Finally, chapter 4 presents three recent episodes, across the spheres of scholarship, literature, and politics, to illustrate the persistence—that is, the afterlives—of Afro-Protestantism at the turn of the twenty-first century.