This forum offers “Black metaphysical religion” as an analytical historical frame to bring into view the widespread and varied occult…
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.”
zzTuning the religio-racial mind
The religio-racial metaphysical imagination, however varied, was particular to the conditions of Black people. The goal was to detach them…
Rastafari women’s early-twentieth-century world-making
Rastafari women not only innovated ways to critique the dominant societal structure, but also gender oppression within the Rastafari movement.…
Uranus and I are pretty good friends
Mumford’s embrace of Africana esotericism invites us as scholars of Black religions to return again and again to two pivotal…
Crystal ball gazers, dream books, and the occult
In the face of ubiquitous inequalities and anti-Black violence, spiritual cultivation became paramount to African Americans’ emotional survival and stability…
Prophetic blackness: The legendary tale of Alexander Bedward, “the flying preacher”
Anthony Bogues describes Bedward as a “prophetic redemptive figure” whose only insanity was his attempt to “break” and “reorder the…
Healing hands in Black religion
Rev. Fannie Elizabeth Burgin Harris. She was a healer. She was a pastor, and while not ordained by any denomination,…
Death, definitions, and ontological design
What roles do naming and self-definition play in the liberation or oppression of a people? One might argue that words…
Finding the metaphysicians in Black metaphysical religion, ft. Azealia Banks
With the fervor of the converted, Banks has promoted Afro-Caribbean religions—including lesser-known ones, like the Dominican 21 Divisions—by educating African…
The possibilities of a Black religious multiverse
Deciphering and traveling the multiverse with Black religious people invites observers to retheorize Blackness beyond culture, color, and history—allowing the…