Out there: Perspectives on the study of Black metaphysical religion

Cocurated by Matthew Harris (University of California, Santa Barbara) and J.T. Roane (Arizona State University) and edited by Mona Oraby (TIF editor and Howard University), the forum on Black metaphysical religion explores religious histories and spiritual practices that have been left out of representative accounts of Black life. As Harris and Roane write in their introductory essay, “This forum offers ‘Black metaphysical religion’ as an analytical historical frame to bring into view the widespread and varied occult interests and mystical orientations of Black communities in the twentieth century.” The forum draws together scholars who recover and analyze the worldmaking efforts of Black communities in quotidian spaces “within and between masajid, temples, store fronts, and street corners.” The forum is “a provocation to think with and through Black metaphysical traditions of everyday life and worldmaking, to consider how attending to the horizons produced by the esoteric, the arcane, and the heterodox recircuit our accounting of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black life and politics.”

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