I welcome Spirit in the Dark for the seriousness with which it opens new prospects for the study of religion and literature in African-American contexts. Toward these ends it represents the right book at the right time, prescient of so much work in ferment during its own preparation, and occupies a rising curve of renewed interest in religious dimensions of cultural production. Religion and literature is not new, of course, though its locus within respective fields of religious and literary studies (their own intellectual borders often stringently patrolled, even if artificially demarcated) has tended to focus on European traditions. Or, when thinking more broadly, it considered issues of comparativity across East and West rather than the racial matters so historically resonant during the subfield’s former prominence—roughly coterminous with Sorett’s periodization from the Harlem Renaissance to Motown. Spirit in the Dark offers a corrective for this historical omission and a template for forward progress.
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Fluid indigeneity: Indians, Catholicism, and Spanish law in the mutable Americas
by
J. Michelle Molina
In this forum, “indigeneity” faces off against European “settler colonialism.” If the twenty-first century mode of conceptualizing indigenous resistance to dominant forms of settler power is primarily construed via claims to the land’s sacrality and traditional ritual relationships to it, then the history of the "Indians" of the Spanish Americas appears strange indeed. This will be no surprise to scholars of the colonial Spanish Americas, whose history never fits a model that, implied or stated, is the history of British imperial expansion. This essay all too briefly sketches a history of indigeneity in which Catholic actors made excellent use of the Spanish legal system to negotiate a cultural framework that was hierarchical yet ethnically fluid. Their experiences and strategies fall athwart the dominant narrative of racial "fixity" that is the hallmark of the very peculiar history of US race relations, a template whose export erases the heterogeneity of experiences across the hemisphere.
Josef Sorett and the idea of a racial aesthetic
by
Robert Gooding-Williams
Josef Sorett’s Spirit in the Dark is a marvelous book, not least of all due to its meticulous, incisive, and historically informed treatments of the literary sources it assembles. Sorett says that the primary aim of the book is “to narrate the history of the idea of a racial aesthetic” and that the book is written, first and foremost, “with scholars of African American religious history in mind.” Sorett’s story is a specifically religious history of the idea of a racial aesthetic, the point of which is to relate that idea, in its various incarnations, to the evolution of African American and other religious practices in North America from the 1920s through the 1960s. In addition to weaving together “history and literature,” Sorret tells us he hopes also to attend to “theoretical concerns.” In this essay, I take up those concerns, and some of the issues they raise, for I come to Josef’s book not as a scholar of African American religious history, but as a philosopher with an interest in literary aesthetics generally and in the idea of a racial aesthetic, specifically.
