Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age

Introduction: Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age

KENNETH N. NGWA, ALIOU CISSÉ NIANG, AND ARTHUR PRESSLEY

Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age is a twenty-first century conversation of and by diaspora voices. These voices are in conversations about the meanings of our variegated experiences emerging from traditions that are complex and prophetic, religious and intellectual, artistic and revolutionary. These voices arise from specific contexts that ask questions about health care disparities, gender violence, and prison systems that reintroduce new forms of slavery. Some of these problems have continued since the middle passage, and the colonial exploitation of Africa. Some of the problems are shaped by current conditions such as gentrification and the resulting new migrations that reinscribe historical feelings of erasure, invisibility, and lack of community. These variegated voices seek new strategies and hermeneutics that are reflected in the dialectics of afropesssimism and afrofuturism. These voices/conversations on the nature of Blackness, Caribbeanness, gender identity, and other Afro-cultural traditions, examine the processes of becoming, meaning making, identity formation, significations, and political movements in the face of historic and psychological erasures.

The intellectual substance and structure of these conversations is—in important ways—quintessentially Africana in its centering of multiplicity: methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialectic approaches to developing liberating epistemologies. This volume emerged from papers presented at the 2017 annual Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium (TTC) at Drew Theological School. The TTC is committed to the long-range transformation of religio-cultural symbolism, and the books in its series engage historical, biblical and cultural hermeneutics, current philosophy, practices of social justice and experiments in theopoetics.¹ The chapters in this volume reflect the central commitments of the TTC.

Several important events have visited the world since 2017: especially a global health pandemic (COVID-19) and its exacerbation of racial and health inequities; the multiracial uprising in the wake of the killing of George Floyd; and an insurrection in the United States. Africana scholars of religion have continued to labor to put forth credible and compelling analyses of these events for the purposes of engendering and enhancing justice and liberation for humankind and the ecosystems we all share.²

This book can be understood as an interlocutor—an articulation of Africana experiences and responses to material realities of the world of Africana/Black subjects; and creative enunciations of the theological and political imaginaries that infuse Africana lives with purpose and meaning and productivity. This conversation is the essence of what Gilroy considers a critical dynamic of Blackness/Africana thought that assumes that what is most essential is the gathering of diasporic voices whose body, subjectivity, and identity must always be created in the midst of psychological, political, and social struggle. This struggle, which includes questions of the nature of identity formation and community across time and space, necessarily involves some discussion of what Paul Zeleza has identified as constituent pieces to diaspora scholarship: the continuous processes by which a diaspora is made, unmade and remade, the changing conditions in which it lives and expresses itself, the places where it is moulded and imagined, and the contentious ways in which it is studied and discussed.³

The use of the word religion in this volume, as a loanword from antiquity, is heuristic and captures much of its intended meaning in Cicero’s Natura deorum I.I, 2.71–72. As a construct deployed by colonial Christian missionary supersessionism, the locution religion would have been foreign to precolonial sub-Saharan people of African descent who practiced African spirituality. They would not have named their corporate lived experiences of the divine as religion but Lived Experiential Spirituality; thus, they signal that religion is intimately connected to social realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics, environment, violence, and war, and so on. For most Diola of Senegal, West Africa, this phenomenon is called Butin bat’ èmit, divine path,⁴ a locution that enshrines or conceptualizes ontological experience as in What We Do collectively that permeates all dimensions of life—a symbiotic divine-nature relationship. As Jacob Olupona has argued, this integrated understanding and study of religion has been rigorously engaged by scholars interested in African and African Diaspora engagement with racism, colonialism, and African cosmologies.⁵ Such work continues around issues of methodology as well as hermeneutics around precolonial religious traditions, encounters between African religions and Christianity and Islam, and with the modern world. Such work continues to unfold with individual scholars as well as within Pan-African organizations such as the African Association for the Study of Religion (AASR); and it continues in the work of African Diaspora religions, including the works of Tracey Hucks and Yvonne Chireau, among others.⁶

Within this discussion, form and content of scholarship intersect in transdisciplinary and hopefully transformative ways. Poems by Pamela Mordecai frame the three sections of this manuscript. Yet those three poems also function as windows (pathways) into unlocking and extending the variegated dimensions of Africana studies. Echoing liberative Hebrew poems and Second Testament angelic visitations, they enshrine resilient hopes and reimage life beyond crushing lived experiences of peoples of African descent—the distasteful and inhumane forms of dehumanization—slavery, colonization, gender objectification, and racism. Tenacious as the Baobab tree, they deploy daring voices of violent and nonviolent resistance to all forms of oppression, and proclaim a promissory phoenix-like resurrection to conscientize and incubate lasting freedoms. Readers with an eye for detail may perceive the genius in the poems of Mordecai and the essays that frame and spearhead a defiant voice beyond the so-called Door of No Return to a creative return inspired by living memory—memory that is also generative.

This compendium has many parents, not just as a matter of course, but with a predisposition toward community and the largess of generative generosity. In other words, the compendium is intentionally structured and entrenched in the notion that Black lives are legion—and what Michelle Wright in her groundbreaking book, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology,⁷ argues —that the time, place, and gender of Blackness matter. This conversation is critical since the focus on any one context, or time and place, tends to re-create existing hegemonic structures and ideology. Consequently, this compendium sought to be as global as possible and attempted to lean on the four Pan-African conferences,⁸ the Harlem Renaissance,⁹ and conferences held with a view to unify African independent states and relate to diasporic communities in the Americas.¹⁰ In and through those gatherings and movements, Black subjects gradually moved forward against the odds—pushing back on multifarious colonial, neocolonial, imperial, geopolitical discourses that objectified us as less than human beings and perpetually moved us to liminal spaces. These antecedent strivings foreground this volume and bind all the essays therein; they provide the interpretive framework for the core concerns in this volume; and they provide the conceptual rationale for our deployment of the towering and complex image of the Baobab Tree as its working metaphor.

Why the Baobab Tree? Nicknamed the upside-down tree, the Baobab Tree represents sturdiness and variation. First, it is a tree naturally endowed with the capacity to thrive in wilderness spaces. Second, its foliage manifests the living rhythm of dry and rainy seasons. Its roots conquer the toughest, rockiest, and most arid soils one can imagine. This makes the Baobab Tree a suitable image that in many ways manifests the complex lived experience of the peoples of African descent. As such, the metaphor resists reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions on the nature of diasporic lived experiences. In a world in profound transition in which identity is in constant construction, resisting othering, adjusting to resurging nationalism, Life Under the Baobab Tree offers an alternative way of making sense of these times by anchoring, affirming, contextualizing, and recontextualizing Africanness either at home (continental Africa) or home away from home (diaspora) to deliberate on what it means to be persons of African descent. Speaking from lived experiences away and still connected to their roots in many ways, each contributor—as a living Baobab worthy of that name, reflects their resilience to weather seasonal diasporic and diasporizing storms.

When this Africana Conference was being formed, it was instructive that the image that united scholar/practitioners was that of a tree. Trees are wonderful since in form, size, and structure, they are always similar and different. For example, the palm tree represents multipurpose existence: the stem is resourced for palm wine, the red palm nuts produce oil and kernels (for snack or for oil/lotion), the nut shells are used for fire fuel, the branches are used for making brooms and storage huts. Beyond their nutritional, social, and cosmetic utility, palm trees are wonderful because of the relational poetics of their spatial form: They simultaneously grow in three dimensions— downward, as they are rooted and grounded; outward, as they become wider and expansive; and upward, as they become taller and transcendent. Thus, even differently, trees of different sizes, shapes, and species all represent vivid illustrations of the simultaneity of geospatial and communal dimensions of life: They interact with, and contribute to, the production, quality, and security of the ground, water, and air. The poetics of trees is relationality of simultaneous multiplicity; in musical terms (applicable to literary and Africana postcolonial theory), they represent simultaneous polyphony, intersubjectivity, and creativity. As their roots navigate the subterranean world (interacting with and drawing from the wells of watery memory), trees also prevent surface erosion of the ground, and their leaves contribute to the regulation and production of quality air/wind. In desert spaces, trees are the potent visual and material signs of life—of harmonious interaction of water, land, and air. In tropical regions, trees offer cooling shade and help to slow down rushing winds; that is, they regulate the ecosystem. No wonder large trees attract human attention and social gathering. They represent the poetics of transdisciplinarity as communal. The image of the poetics and tree-ness of Africana and Blackness is reflected in this text as it was in our conference. Those at the conference included poets, musicians, and drummers, along with biblical, theological, and ethics scholars, with social scientists and historians from a range of social and political contexts, all with the aim of acknowledging and repairing the rupture that has taken place with diasporic people. The repair is no longer searching for a place—a return to our place—but we have concluded that our new home is in the conversation, in these compendiums. This compendium is now a form of Baobab Tree that has multiple functions.

In her captivating book, A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand remembers, as a thirteen-year-old, trying to help her grandfather remember what people we came from. They worked through a few possible African ethnic names, but settled on none. That unresolved search and conversation, on this side of the Atlantic, opened a small space in Brand and, over time, came to reveal a tear in the world. We quote Brand:

I would have proceeded happily with a simple name. I may have played with it for a few days and then stored it away. Forgotten. But the rupture this exchange with my grandfather revealed was greater than the need for familial bonds. It was a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being. It was also a physical rupture, a rupture of geography.¹¹

More than physical spaces across several countries along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, the doors of no return have become a powerful symbol of ruptured identity in African Diasporic studies—not just for those who were forcefully removed from their homes and placed on slave ships, but also for those who remained—for whom the doors they never physically entered nevertheless represent a gateway to unclaimed and unclaimable loss of familial kin and community, captured and taken. Identity is forever fractured. And the fracturing is coded in bodies and stories—official and unofficial—but also in the structures that hold the doors. And its institutional embodiment in the constructed slave castle’s architecture performs the story of fracture and its layers of nightmare premised on political, religious, and racial patronage: the governor’s residence at the very top, a chapel at the middle level, and dungeons at the bottom, all designed to compel the captured mind and body to bend and even break (cf. Exod. 6:9).

As an upside-down tree, the Baobab is also a metaphor for non-unilinear thinking and belonging. That is how this compendium also draws on the legacy of Pan-Africanism, Blackness, Négritude, neo-Négritude, and the intellectual and political traditions and movements galvanizing global Africana work. In and around the Baobab, the questions of diaspora and return are present, immanent, and urgent. As depicted, for example, in the epic of Sundiata of Old Mali, the Baobab immediately conjures diaspora-home discourse: Can the diasporic subject make a return? Should it attempt to make a return? What does return look like? Does the home space and subject have the intellectual, cultural, political, and religious resources to receive and host the returning self and subject? The multidimensionality of the Baobab becomes both a planetary metaphor and a communal metaphor for precisely those sorts of questions. These questions about home, the space for community, identity, and subjectivity, are developed in some depth in the chapter by Arthur Pressley, who examines a novel by Nella Larsen, a biracial (read African American Woman) searching for home, identity, repair of personal and family ruptures, who does so in part by criticizing how various Black communities have attempted to find home and identity.

The movement of humans, animals, and plants within and beyond the continent has a long history, as has been been theorized in relation to the economic realities and systems that have developed in and beyond the continent for thousands of years.¹² Thus, in the edited volume, African Migrations: Patterns and Perspectives, authors examine modern realities and theories about African migrants, moving beyond the push-pull economic theories to include psychosocial, cultural, and political factors; identify and assess intra- and inter-regional migrations; examine gender dynamics of postcolonial African migrations, and so on.¹³ The rhythmic character of migration—especially when explored in relation to the rhythms of seasonal changes and the geography of land itself—also provides an entry point into the generative and contested character of migration. African migration has thus been studied and theorized around a musical perspective—how music occupies a position of pride in African diaspora imaginary, but also attends to the contestations that define local and global audiences, gender categorizing, culture, and politics.¹⁴

The rhythmic—and musical—character of migration is vividly embodied in the sounds of flowing water, especially as it navigates uneven terrain and rocks. The creation story in Genesis puts the reader in the face of water, with the priestly writer’s transformation of that watery space into a rhythmic narrative around day and night. The creating deity is hovering over the face of the water, as if to signal that water itself is the space of reflection about beginnings, but also the subject of beginnings. In fact, in the second creation story, the water becomes four heads—four beginnings. This requires not just thinking about water but also thinking with water and its ability to engender multiple genealogies—genealogies that escape ethnonationalism.

In the opening chapters of Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, the oppressed Hebrews struggle to survive the standing law authorizing the killing of sons at birth. The Hebrews rely on the compassion of midwives but also learn (?) how not to cry out loud at childbirth (Ah, it is awful when a woman cannot even cry out in childbirth),¹⁵ a recurring act that also transitions into a secretive lifestyle of debating and hiding from the menacing threats of a governing structure bent on erasing Hebrew life. During one of these moments of debate between the Hebrews and Pharaoh, Hurston theorizes on memory, citizenship, creativity, and unrelenting demands for freedom to be and create new homes:

Give us a chance, Great Pharaoh. We proved ourselves builders and generally constructive under the last regime. We love Egypt. It is the only home we know. Trust us and see if we are good citizens or not.

Why should I trust people without monuments and memories? It looks bad to me—a people who honor nobody. It is a sign that you forget your benefactors as soon as possible after the need is past.

We don’t build monuments, but we do have memories.

How is anyone to know that? Take for instance your great man Joseph. As long as you have been in Egypt you have not raised one stone to his memory.

Look at it another way. Perhaps we do not need stones to remind us. It could be that some folks need stones to remind them. It could be that memorial stones are signs of bad memories. We just don’t trust our memories to stones.

Pharaoh’s face darkened at this. He laughed in a harsh way.¹⁶

For Africana, the crisis of the diaspora-home struggle is the crisis of a world/space where home becomes somehow uninhabitable because its resources are extracted to feed an insatiable beast of violent global landscaping. The cosmology of travel and its multidirectional character not only affords a fuller understanding of human experience but also provides a useful cognitive map for hermeneutics. That is, global mapping is not just the aggregate of different forms of travel and their associated phenomena; nor is it simply an aggregate of disparate places and stories. Rather, this global mapping from the back/black-side is the phenomenon of study and analysis that gathers around broken spaces, broken bodies, and broken stories. It is hermeneutics that examines the trans of transatlantic and trans-Sahara as a form of narrative and spatial lacunae, not narrative and spatial transition. Here, return is possible as a form of hindsight hermeneutic, a form of self-positioning that ensures and explains survival but also propels accountable inquiry.

In Black Diasporic texts, transatlantic travel prioritizes (for good reasons and for bad) east-west movement, and immediately associates that movement with the quest for something superior. It fits into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European celebration of exploration as heroic acts of self-affirmation and the discovery/conquest of the unknown world. Because travel, by definition, dislocates, a certain form of narrative beginning and chronicling is unavoidable—that is, if history is understood as something that happens when things move. And then to also assume, almost in the spirit of Newtonian laws of thermodynamics, that things will remain in their state of rest or uniform motion unless something else causes them to act otherwise. But there is also another form of history, experienced and defined not by change and movement, but by stagnation; it is a history of permanence, and for those who are marginalized, that is a history of unchanging reality; it is a history that does not go away, and that is best understood by the metaphor of depth than horizon, a history best accessed and challenged through excavation rather than exploration. Only upon such returns and only in the wake of such engagements with returns do the narratives in the backside of history and their political force begin to participate in the transformation of erasure into life-forms.

In the colonial travel model, with each European passing—which partially and temporally eclipsed Africa and Africans, and left them watching and seeing mostly from the backsides—Africa was not only blackened, but blackness was deployed as an ideological and embodied subsidy for preserving the exclusivity of the white face, the extraterritorial face, that could not be encountered face-to-face without leaving a trail of death. Because colonial passing included intentional eclipsing of the African body and space, postcolonial preservation of Africa also manifests itself as a form of resistance to linear chronicling in which Africa is not in front; it is a probing and exploration of Africana that did not simply pass into the oblivion of an unknown future. For the Africana hermeneut, colonized and diaspora Africa was both restrained and displaced: It saw something pass in front of it, and it experienced something that displaced it. Having survived both violent episodes, it could deploy memory—of its preexistent self and its surviving self—to forge new futures.

In his writing on history and memory, the French historian Pierre Nora speaks of les lieux de memoire (sites of memory), les milieux de memoire (environments of memory) in relation to history. For Nora, part of modern Western understandings and studies of history and memory have included reflections on methodologies of the study of the history of memory and even the history of history. This ability to step back, organize, and structure the memory of a highly forgetful community has contributed to a deep fracture between memory and history. Thus, Nora argues that the remnants of experience [that] still lived in the warmth of tradition, the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral, have been displaced under the pressure of a fundamentally historical sensibility.… We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left.¹⁷ A form of doing history mounts an assault on memory: On the one hand, writes Nora, we find an integrated dictatorial memory—unself-conscious, commanding, all-powerful, spontaneously actualizing, a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth—and on the other hand, our memory, nothing more in fact than sifted and sorted historical facts.¹⁸ With the introduction of a trace or separation, the community on the other side of that trace is no longer in the realm of actual memory but rather in the realm of history. History and memory perform different functions. Memory creates a bond with that which appears eternal, perpetual; history severs that bond; memory links the act of remembering to the sacred; history releases that sacredness and introduces criticism and analyses. In the end, history is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.¹⁹

Set in his analyses of the political crisis in France in the 1930s—a crisis moment that, for Aimé Césaire, Leon Damas, and Léopold Senghor, led to the creation of Négritude—Nora argued that history, which had become a tradition of memory, was transformed into a self-knowledge of society, and thus was able to highlight many kinds of memory and even transform itself into a laboratory of past mentalities. Nora situates his lieux de memoire at the intersection of historiographical work, a kind of self-reflexive turning of history upon itself, and proper historical movement, which constitutes the end of a tradition of memory. These moments of crisis and ensuing movements cause people to go both to the library and museum and dictionary, as well as to commemoration ceremonies and ritual activities and celebrations.²⁰

Remembering has a political and social function, particularly for marginalized communities:

The defense, by certain minorities, of a privileged memory that has retreated to jealously protected enclaves … illuminates the truth of lieux de memoires—that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away. We buttress our identities upon such bastions but if what they defended were not threatened, there would be no need to build them. Conversely, if the memories that they enclosed were to be set free they would be useless; if history did not besiege memory, deforming and transforming it, penetrating and petrifying it, there would be no lieux de memoire. Indeed, it is this very push and pull that produces lieux de memoire—moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.²¹

Whether Nora’s reference to certain minorities includes the founders of the Négritude movement in Paris in the early 1930s is unclear. But what it highlights is the ethical and political functions and forms of memory studies over time and space, and the deployment of memory for the purpose of survival of colonial erasure and diasporic alienation, the double impetus for the creation of Négritude.

At the intersection of race and gender, bell hooks’s stimulating book Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics speaks of language as a place of struggle. Because struggle takes place in space and location, bell hooks remembers the recurring phrase in the Freedom Charter for the struggle against apartheid in South Africa: Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting. This statement, bell hooks argues, is a politicization of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as once it was, a kind of useless act, from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present.²² This is memory work of spatial construction, one that continuously navigates the institutional and cultural barriers that threaten to alienate or even destroy what is considered unfamiliar, strange. The pressures that accompany the act of moving from one place to another often compel people to indulge in loneliness or nihilism and despair. But to survive these tight spaces requires the ability to invent spaces of radical openness because our living depends on our ability to conceptualize alternatives, often improvised. For bell hooks, this radical space of openness is a margin—a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a ‘safe’ place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.²³ Marginality—the space and lived experience that create oppositional thinking for the oppressed and marginalized—is not something that one wants to abandon for the center, or when one gets to the center. Instead, marginality functions as the impetus for continuing radical openness. Marginality is the space and the process of returning to the place of deprivation or commodification created and legislatively enshrined by the center. Yet, ironically, the move to the center does not result in a desire to abandon or flee marginality; instead, marginality is a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.²⁴

Yes, it is possible to have conversations across the material and proverbial door of no return. This compendium, and the essays therein, are an attempt to forge just such conversations. It is structured in three parts.

Part I, Un/Folding Identities, consists of five chapters. In chapter 1, Arthur Pressley examines Nella Larsen’s novel Quicksand and her use of the trope of mulatto. A critical feature of this biomythography is how the trope of a mulatto is used to suggest new possibilities for Black subjectivity. This chapter illustrates how the figure of a mulatto demonstrates how creoleness, colorism, and Pan-Africanism are crucial in the healing of colonial oppression and creating complex identities. In Nella Larsen’s protagonist, Helga Craine, she foreshadows and extends the racial dynamics analyzed by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Larsen reveals that mulattos do not merely live between Black and white worlds, but express the racial melancholia later examined by theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Anne Cheng. This racial melancholia, a dread of self and others, a fear of both loss and gain, a denial of life, death, and resurrection, continues to direct intraracial and interracial dynamics that never entirely become (post) colonial. Last, the subjectivity of the mulatto always challenges and destabilizes traditional Africana tropes of home, mother/daughter, middle passage, and racial identity in a manner that makes each of these more of an ethical, rather than psychological, social, or political commitment. Although Nella Larsen’s book moves through several times and places, Africana hermeneutics used in this study would suggest that a more compelling understanding of this work assumes that sequencing and linear understanding of the text hides the richness of the work. This article approaches the multiple events and places of the novel as representing the creoleness of all racial, ethnic, and gender identities.

In chapter 2, Body as Praxis: Disarticulating the Human from Ownership and Property, An Yountae argues that Western intellectual and religious history, and consequently that of European humanity, is developed on the negation of the full humanity of non-Europeans. An’s thesis is that posthuman scholarship, as well as that of J. Butler and F. Fanon, does not go far enough to emphasize the importance of the body in rethinking the human. This chapter points out how abstract concepts of the human obscure the processes by which necropolitics affirms some bodies as rational subjects and relegates other bodies for labor and death. In this work An proposes, much like Sylvia Wynter, that we understand being human as a praxis that moves toward liberation. The praxis of humanity offered by An breaks the double binds of the Hegelian master-slave dialect and essentialist definitions of the relationship of humanness to the body.

Desmond Coleman’s "What It’s Like to Be a Blackened Body, and Why It’s Like That: A Preliminary Exploration addresses a major focus in Africana scholarship, which gives increased attention to understanding the interconnectedness between identity, the body, and how these are located within a historical, social, and religious process. The sociogenic process unfolded by Coleman is essential to understanding (in ways similar to those of Wynter, Fanon, and Vasquez) how exterior material-socio-historic conditions become the interiority of the Black body/self. The exterior-interiority of Black identity as a sociogenic process is a praxis and parasensory. The term parasensory" describes how even material artifacts and environment shape neurological and cognitive processes. This is an exciting article that moves between alchemy, neuroscience, and contemporary film analyses, and expands what it means to be an embodied self and the transmuting process of blackening.

Paige Rawson’s chapter The Rhizome and/as the Tree of Life gives a creative and engaging analysis of the Genesis passage on the Tree of Life and the discussion of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs. Rawson’s creation of an original biblical hermeneutic presents Wisdom, the (Baobab) Tree of Life, as affect, relational, and a vital component that unifies our archipelagic state of existence. In this chapter, Rawson interprets Wisdom through the lens of Creoleness and views Wisdom as a relational and unfolding possibility for an identity that is affective, justice-seeking, diverse, and seeks to tear down old boundaries even as it builds new revolutionary ways of existence. From this perspective, Rawson’s work fits squarely within the context of Un/Folding Identities. Like most Africana, postcolonial, and critical thought, Rawson’s thought crosses several disciplinary and discursive boundaries critiquing and exploding traditional scholarly parameters. Rawson’s engagement with Rhizome and/as the Tree of Life unfolds a relational poetics of wisdom for decolonizing biblical studies. It builds on the work of Édouard Glissant and Dorothy Akoto-Abutiate to develop a biblical hermeneutic and theopoetics she defines as Bibliorality. Rawson’s Bibliorality uses Africana, Afro-Caribbean, and Queer philosophical traditions anchored around the Baobab Tree.

Aliou Cissé Niang writes another fascinating chapter, similar to that of Paige Rawson’s, on the poetics of biblical hermeneutics and interpretation. Niang presents Léopold Sédar Senghor as an intellectual Baobab Tree who developed a proto-postcolonial theory as a forerunner to those of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha. Niang creatively demonstrates that the Négritude of Senghor as a poetic of biblical hermeneutics adopts and then destabilizes and subverts colonial epistemology. What is more important, Senghor’s proto-postcolonial theory engages the entirety of African culture and its vital life force to liberate and rehabilitate the oppressed. Niang suggests that Senghor’s postcolonial theory offers a direction forward, although it does not provide answers. After delivering a fresh and innovative analysis of Senghor, Niang then illustrates the liberating conscientization that emerges with his proto-postcolonial theory.

The essays in Part II, Africana Activism, present that activism as partly nebulous, partly concrete, partly theoretical and epistemological, and even partly fantastical. It is political as it is religious; it reads and unfolds from readings of sacred texts as well as narrative lacunae. To that work of reading alternatively, perhaps even noncanonically, yet communally and rationally, the essays in this part constitute, as a cluster, a form of Africana activism that is deconstructive and creative in its engagement with history, religious experience, interpretation of texts (written and aural). In short, it is activism that not only moves but seeks to create meaningful movement and progress and then reexamine that movement and its underside, for the purposes of more fully embodying worldviews of creative and productive lives.

Nimi Wariboko’s God Killed! God Interrupted, Long Live the People!: Political Theory in Religious Act reads the historical act of deicide effected by the Kalabari people (Izon, Niger Delta, Nigeria) on September 27, 1857, as a disruptive event that also signaled the role of a community in determining questions of divine self-autonomy, the movement of the Spirit, and the political identity formation around the notion of peoplehood. For Wariboko, this revolutionary act, when read alongside national epic narratives (such as the Ozidi Saga of the Ijo people), offers fruitful diagnostic entry points into analyzing the political systems and structures in Africa, with an eye toward democratic forms of accountability and resistance against autocratic rule. Precisely, argues Wariboko, the killing of the deity represents a form of disincarnation of power, meaning that political leadership cannot claim either external or internal mandates (divine, political) to justify the use of power without the consent of the community. This disincarnation of power creates a void that creates space for Indigenous forms of freedom, which reside in the capacity to act in ways that affect divine-human relations. If a god becomes too violent, the people can cause it to cease to exist and, with it, the political and religious systems that oppress. The people create something new, the very essence and process of democracy. This transition, Wariboko argues, is not without its own risks of becoming imperial and totalitarian.

Aliou Cissé Niang’s ‘Doing the Will of God’ as Loving God Whose Way Is Peace is an ethical epistemology on what he calls the ability for a Christian to embrace healthy ethical values exercised by Muslim and African Traditionalists. It comes out of his experience of missionary Christianity in Senegal; but mostly, it unfolds as a reflection on his formative religious praxis, rooted as much in the influence of his parents as in the philosophical and epistemological writings of Léopold Senghor on Négritude and the reality of his political leadership of Senegal after official colonization. The ethos of love, variously articulated in the Abrahamic traditions as well as in African Traditional Religion, provides the impetus for resilient hope for a healthier action-oriented future. In this way, Niang argues that the religious texts are part of how one gets to recognize Jesus as potentially the Good Samaritan in the New Testament parable, the Samaritan as "God incognito, extending mercy to the needy." With this epistemological framing, Niang explores concrete ways/actions by which the world can be transformed into a hospitable place. These include peace building, interreligious dialogue for the divine and the human, and an illustration of interreligious dialogue in the history and politics of Senegal. The work is also a hermeneutical display of the scholarly rigor that is necessary to unmask the ethnocentrisms and ethnonationalisms, terrorism, corruption, and ecological exploitation that ravage our world. For Niang, a historiography of religious thought and biblical interpretation is necessary to harness the deep cultural and religious values and praxis of peace and love, which are fragile, but invaluable for a healthy world.

Drawing on the role of spectral guides in Stephan Palmié’s work, Wizards and Scientists, Rachel Elizabeth Harding’s chapter, Mysticism and Mothering in Black Women’s Social Justice Activism: Brazil/USA, examines the moral and ethical universe of Black women’s involvement in creating and nurturing social activism in the United States and in Brazil. Rooted in a history of religions approach to Afro-Brazilian religious thought and life, Harding’s essay combines critical theory and praxis around womanism, mysticism, and mothering to understand history differently, or, as Harding puts it, to find ways to disocclude what lies hidden, muted in the interstices of conventional understandings of how the world we live in came to be and at what sacrifice it continues. What unfolds is a disocclusion and a recovery of some other kinds of intelligence about the New World. To illustrate this theory, Harding examine and profiles four women from the USA and Brazil, whose work represents the intersections of womanism, mysticism, and mothering—all in the service of social transformation.

In A Theopoetics of Exodus and the Africana Spirit in Music, Sharon Kimberly Williams proposes to explore the diasporic movement of Africans to the West as a disruptive and traumatic movement that nevertheless becomes stitched and gathered together into a rhythm that effects and affects a liberation ethos, exodus. As Williams articulates, Exodus movement allows the African Diaspora to animate itself as Spirit for the sake of its own survival and the survival of the world. The cost is enormous and compels engagement with the divine, and even with divine purpose. It is this repurposing that makes exodus possible, and hopeful; it is this kind of exodus narrative and narration that moves the African Diaspora from an off beat rhythm of despair to a soaring song of hope bound together by one transcendent, ancestral spirit. This move, this flow, continues to wrestle with entrenched systems, whether they be colonialism, patriarchy, imperialism, or environmental subjugation. These are the Way Down places that are captured in Negro Spiritual songs, but also the Sunken Places of science fiction out of which liberation is forged. The rhythm between lament and praise is constantly attempting to go from the offbeat of trauma to new breath. For Williams, the Spirit of Africana music gives voice, theory, energy, and life to this relation between lament and liberation.

Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo’s essay, Must We Burn Isaac?: A Four-Part Hermeneutical Fantasy for Africana Epistemology, locates itself not so much in the tension between canonical and noncanonical modes of interpretation and episteme, but rather in counter-reading that is activated as much in the centers of power as in the marginal and marginalized spaces. Khumalo locates this work in conversation with notions of gaze as developed by bell hooks, interpretive excavation and resistance advocated by Vincent Wimbush, and the vitality of Black experience. All of this to activate her own agency, and that of others, seeking to create what she calls livable lives. Khumalo’s question, Must we burn Isaac? is an epistemological and a hermeneutical question that asks about the costs we are willing to pay for solidarity among Black folk and the kinds of (potentially violent) demands our struggles make of each other but also about whether we are to "burn bridges with (dominant) white epistemological perspectives, lest we crash and burn under the weight of trying to serve Black communities through writing and thinking that takes place within and is even curated by/for predominantly white institutions." With this epistemological and hermeneutical framing, Khumalo presents an oppositional gaze reading (or retelling) of the Hagar and Ishmael story that resists singular narration, resists finality, and instead irrupts into fantasy about the communal, where the work of self-definition, survival, and perhaps even flourishing may yet be a fantastical possibility for livable Africana lives.

The closing essays in Part III, Africana Historiographies and Memories, are anchored by an embodied memory, symbolized by the Baobab Tree, that gives birth to transgressive hopes for life against life-domineering and negating forces. These negating forces are often constructed as normative by productions of knowledge and philosophical investigative methods that the marginalized and people of African descent must adopt if they were to be counted as humans. These closing essays call for alternative modes of inquiry—binding transcultural conversations and dialogues that embrace a diverse unity by a people acquainted with suffering and objectifications of all kinds simply because they are othered bodies.

Althea Spencer Miller initiates this part by guiding readers through a complex and yet fascinating conversation with Vincent Wimbush’s Theorizing Scriptures. Spencer Miller offers a dense argument about heroic ancestral negotiations of life in diaspora spaces. Just as the roots of the baobab tree transcend arid wilderness spaces, creolization, as a creative literary trope, rhythms and vitalizes diasporic life in such a way that it embeds African roots and living memory. In the end, Spencer Miller rightly and persistently calls for a genuine and broader Africana conversation without which Africana self-actualization cannot survive the insidious, schismatic, and alienating anti-pluralism wiles of Western imperialism ever tilted toward the negation of otherness. Such a conversation might incubate equity, namely an intratelluric shout for kinship and recognition, erupting with the heat of magmatic hope for the igneous strength of an amphictyony plurality—completely its own indigene.

’Shola D. Adegbite’s Solidarity by Sharing Power offers insights into sub-Saharan African orature. Introducing her argument with the too familiar story of American police brutality she feels is inspired by racialized injustice that leads to the murder of numerous people of African descent and is epitomized by the public lynching of George Floyd, Adegbite delves into the power of storytelling that incarnates and conveys practical and spiritual truths that cannot be told in any other way except through truth-telling myths. Inculturation is inspiringly corrective of imperial missionary hermeneutics in that Jonah’s story can be read as an encounter with Mami Wata. Adegbite astutely hears the voice of Jonah in Wata and proceeds to craft a contextual hermeneutics worthy of African sensibility manifested in the practice of solidarity. Using a psychoanalytic investigative approach defined as a multi-method Africa-centric that builds on key African thinkers such as David T. Adamo, Justin Ukpong, Alphaeus Masonga, and Gerald O. West, Adegbite rejects the imperial construction of Wata as inimical, cunning, and satanic and portrays Wata as a complex figure who is anything but inimical. Inspired by a new locution, marine power, a term arising from vernacular hermeneutics, Adegbite argues that the role of the fish in rescuing Jonah the prophet from marine power echoes Wata’s unfailing role to assist humans to adapt and negotiate life in various contexts. In other words, Wata shapes humans into baobab trees to weather harsh spaces.

Envisioning Africana Religions is Salim Faraji’s intriguing autobiographical journey and determination to document the inception, development, and contribution of Africana Religious Studies. Faraji is clear about the influences that key thinkers of African descent in America and Africa made in shaping life and thought. Faraji’s aim is broad but builds on his education—an experience that equipped him with a unique lens that enables him to unearth what is lacking as well as what is needed to ensure a lasting future for the burgeoning field of Africana studies. His call for a clear interdisciplinary methodology is indispensable if Africana studies are to survive and guide people of African descent. This is quintessential by virtue of the fact that the innovative nature of African Traditional Religion and its worldview as he sees it is a function of its flowering adaptability in new contexts—a multivalence the baobab embodies.

Kenneth N. Ngwa conceptualizes a fascinating picture of God’s journey with Israel and people of African descent as Interpreting from the Back/ Black-Side: Exodus through the Shawl of Memory. Israel and people of African descent struggle while safely positioned on God’s hindered back—a metaphor daily performed by many childbearing African mothers. To Ngwa, this is a collective identity story of survival being created out of chirographic text about the future reimaged as embodied that lives on through the creative arts of its telling and retelling in and above the fray of the liminal at home as well as in diasporic spaces. Back/Black-Side Hermeneutics draws the works of concerned hermeneuts to reposition Africana hermeneutics above the threat of oppressive erasure and exercise exile-exodus modes of seeing, namely to see, hear, remember, and move to deliberative practical actions. Ngwa’s Cameroonian postcolonial optic informs his fascinating argument—a rereading of the exodus story that insightfully delves into the creative side of trauma and yields trauma-hope and ultimately exodus that transcends and resists identity annihilation.

Hugh R. Page’s Conjuring Lost Books, (Re-) membering Fragmented Litanies at the Intersection of Africana and Biblical Studies speaks of a biblical autobiography in which the metaphor of the open door functions as a resilient work of trailblazing against oddities of identity erasure and paves the way for others. Page guides readers in how helping to ensure that people of color and others marginalized in the academy are guaranteed access might be achieved—a form of farming baobab trees that would not only continue to resist but also change what Page terms the arid terrain of biblical and theological studies. Echoing the Jewish Haggadah, Page shows how his autobiographical theological story is programmatic for diasporic would-be baobabs. Introspective journeys into the depths of our academic journeys might yield some actionable insights to form, sharpen, and reimage our variegated Africana studies methodologies.

Catherine Keller’s Afterword provides a summative and reflective analysis of the volume but also locates the volume within the ongoing work of the Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium. As Keller notes, the critical work of Africana religious studies continues to unfold at the intersections of memory and future-making, transgressing multiple temporal and spatial demarcations.

NOTES

1.Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, https://depts.drew.edu/tsfac/colloquium/index.html (accessed April 12, 2022).

2.See, for example, Stacy M. Floyd-Thomas, ed., Religion, Race and Covid-19: Confronting White Supremacy in the Pandemic (New York: NYU Press, 2022).

3.Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic, African Affairs 104, no. 414 (2005): 41.

4.Le R. P. Edouard Wintz, Dictionnaire Français-Dyola et Dyola-Français (Paris : Mission Catholique, 1909), 94, 128.

5.Jacob K. Olupona, African Religions: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), xxii–xxiv. See also Afe Adogame and Jim Spickard, Religion Crossing Boundaries: Transnational Religious and Social Dynamics in Africa and the New African Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2010); J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). The dynamic nature of religion, as conceptualized and described in these volumes, emerges in what these works frame as translocal and transnational phenomena and practices.

6.Tracey E. Hucks, Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012); Yvonne Patricia Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

7.Michelle Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

8.Colin Legun, Pan-Africanism: A Short Political Guide (London: Pall Mall Press, 1962, 1965), 24–37.

9.Legun, Pan-Africanism, 93-111; 128–30; Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pay natal, 2nd ed., ed. Abiola Irele (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000); U. O. Umozurike, International Law and Colonialism in Africa (Enugu, Nigeria: Nwamife Publishers, 1979).

10.Legun, Pan-Africanism.

11.Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage, 2001), 4–5.

12.Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

13.Abdoulaye Kane and Todd H. Leedy, eds., African Migrations: Patterns and Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

14.Ingrid Monson, African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2004), 2–3.

15.Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 9.

16.Neale Huston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, 22.

17.Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: les Lieux de Mémoire, Representations 26 (1989), 7.

18.Nora, Between Memory and History, 8.

19.Nora, Between Memory and History, 8–9.

20.Nora, Between Memory and History, 11–12.

21.Nora, Between Memory and History, 12.

22.bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 205.

23.hooks, Yearning, 206.

24.hooks, Yearning, 207.

PART I

Un/Folding Identities

ARCHANGEL