Challenging monolithic approaches to culture and literacy, this book looks at the roots of African-American reading and writing from the perspective of vernacular activities and creolization. It shows that African-Americans, while readily mastering the conventions and canons of Euro-America, also drew on knowledge of their own to make an oppositional repertoire of signs and meanings. Distinct from conventional script literacy on the one hand, and oral culture on the other, these "creolized" vernacular practices include writing in charms, use of personal or nondecodable scripts, the strategic renunciation of reading and writing as communicative tools, and writing that is linked to divination, trance, and possession. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the Southeastern United States and the West Indies, Gundaker offers a complex portrait of the intersection of "outsider" conventions with "insider" knowledge and practice.

Examining the interplay of cultural trajectories and sign systems in the African diaspora, particularly in the U.S., Gundaker shows that African Americans, while readily mastering the conventions and canons of Euro-America, also drew on knowledge of their own to make an oppositional repertoire of signs and meanings.

Providing an excellent example of why folk artists can be appreciated as carriers of knowledge, even if they are unaware of it, this book could change the ways we understand and appreciate American folk arts. Connecting a sharecropper from Georgia in the Southern United States to a protector and healer in Touba, Senegal, West Africa, the holy city of Mouridism, and the final resting place of its founder, Shaikh Ahmadou Bàmba Mbàcke, it makes an interesting link while examining the cultural aspects of two very different and yet similar paths of life. Historians and art historians alike will find this investigation of African American art and folk culture both interesting and insightful. Not only does this book trace the characteristics of art through the African Diaspora, but it also traces Islam through those same diasporic transportations of colonial exploration and slavery.

Perhaps no other group of people has been as much formed by biblical texts and tropes as African Americans. From literature and the arts to popular culture and everyday life, the Bible courses through black society and culture like blood through veins. Despite the enormous recent interest in African American religion, relatively little attention has been paid to the diversity of ways in which African Americans have utilized the Bible. African Americans and the Bible is the fruit of a four-year collaborative research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush and funded by the Lilly Endowment. It brings together scholars and experts (sixty-eight in all) from a wide range of academic and artistic fields and disciplines--including ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies as well as art, music, film, dance, drama, and literature. The focus is on the interaction between the people known as African Americans and that complex of visions, rhetorics, and ideologies known as the Bible. As such, the book is less about the meaning(s) of the Bible than about the Bible and meaning(s), less about the world(s) of the Bible than about how worlds and the Bible interact--in short, about how a text constructs a people and a people constructs a text. It is about a particular sociocultural formation but also about the dynamics that obtain in the interrelation between any group of people and sacred texts in general. Thus African Americans and the Bible provides an exemplum of sociocultural formation and a critical lens through which the process of sociocultural formation can be viewed.

Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat: Crossroads as Ritual employs nature, literary tradition, and the cosmogram to examine Danticat's fiction as textual sites imbued with ritual and conducive for healing and clarifying Africana diasporic consciousness.

The spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of Native Americans and African Americans have long been sources of fascination and curiosity, owing to their marked difference from the religious traditions of white writers and researchers. Matter, Magic, and Spirit explores the ways religious and magical beliefs of Native Americans and African Americans have been represented in a range of discourses including anthropology, comparative religion, and literature. Though these beliefs were widely dismissed as primitive superstition and inferior to "higher" religions like Christianity, distinctions were still made between the supposed spiritual capacities of the different groups. David Murray's analysis is unique in bringing together Indian and African beliefs and their representations. First tracing the development of European ideas about both African fetishism and Native American "primitive belief," he goes on to explore the ways in which the hierarchies of race created by white Europeans coincided with hierarchies of religion as expressed in the developing study of comparative religion and folklore through the nineteenth century. Crucially this comparative approach to practices that were dismissed as conjure or black magic or Indian "medicine" points as well to the importance of their cultural and political roles in their own communities at times of destructive change. Murray also explores the ways in which Indian and African writers later reformulated the models developed by white observers, as demonstrated through the work of Charles Chesnutt and Simon Pokagon and then in the later conjunctions of modernism and ethnography in the 1920s and 1930s, through the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkala Sa, and others. Later sections demonstrate how contemporary writers including Ishmael Reed and Leslie Silko deal with the revaluation of traditional beliefs as spiritual resources against a background of New Age spirituality and postmodern conceptions of racial and ethnic identity.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.