Hair, Roots, and Crystal Balls: Archival Viscerality, Black Conjuring Traditions, and the Study of American Religions

Abstract

Abstract Black studies scholars have long argued that archives are violent and dismembering, especially as the universities which house them preserve the physical and immaterial remnants of slavery. Religious studies scholars, especially historians of religion, have begun attending to this quandary while sifting through archives of slavery and religion. This article enters this discourse by focusing on the afterlives of slavery and their relationship to the religious innovations of Black religious actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article, then, centers the author’s visceral experience in an archival reading room of a university while consulting the material objects of religious practitioners Reverend John L. Reed and Sister Mamie Wade Avant. In the process, the article reconstructs a historical narrative about their lives and argues that religious studies must reckon with the archive of antiblackness and its capture of Black religions.