Author-Meets-Critics Roundtable: Ralph H. Craig III, Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner

This roundtable brings author Ralph H. Craig III together with scholars of Buddhism and African American Religion to discuss Craig’s 2024 book Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner. The book explores the place of religion in the life and career of pop culture icon Tina Turner. To explain her religious sensibilities Turner drew on a synthesis of African American Protestantism, American metaphysical religion, and Nichiren Buddhism. She invoked this synthesis on albums, in media profiles, allowed it to be represented in film and theatre, and evoked it onstage. In the process, Turner’s labors brought Black Buddhism to the fore of American popular culture and American religious history. This book provides a genealogical study of Turner’s religious influences and of her as a religious influence in her own right.

Across six chapters, the book makes four interrelated arguments. First, Turner exemplifies what Anthony B. Pinn (2010) called the religious pluralism that characterizes African American religious life. Though Turner was raised in a religious culture shaped by forms of Afro-Protestantism, her religious trajectory goes beyond these forms by incorporating metaphysical ideas and her eventual conversion to Buddhism. This argument intervenes in the perception that the Black church is the primary locus of African American religiosity, a perception increasingly challenged by scholars of African American religion, but still widely held. With this understanding, the book makes a second argument about what conversion means for Black Buddhists. Conversion is a contested notion, given its specifically Christian connotation of a person’s complete break with their prior religious orientation and a subsequent exclusive commitment to Christianity. The book argues that Turner’s use of the language of conversion is best understood as her formation of a religious repertoire that combines Afro-Protestantism, American metaphysical religion, and Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism. In so doing, the book joins the work of Rima Vesely-Flad (2022) in arguing that Black Buddhists often incorporate prior religious convictions into their practice of Buddhism.

Third, the book argues that Turner joined the growing list of prominent Black Buddhist teachers. This list includes figures like bell hooks, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Jan Willis, and others. Turner differs from these figures though in that she has invoked her practice on albums, in a wide array of media profiles, allowed it to be represented in film and theatre, and evoked it onstage during concerts that function as arenas of numinous experience for her fans. In so doing, her career success augmented and partially constituted her religious authority. Finally, the work argues that through Turner’s public sharing of her story of abuse, abandonment, and ultimate triumph, precipitated by her conversion to Buddhism, she has done much to bring Buddhism to the fore of American popular culture and American religious history. In this regard, more than a figure of popular culture, the book argues that Turner has been a significant catalyst for changes in American religion, bringing greater awareness and acceptance of Buddhism to the mainstream. Turner, then, demonstrates that Buddhism is a vital dimension of African American religious life. Turner has contributed immensely to this vitality. With the book’s fourth argument, it offers an intervention and a correction to the neglect of the voices, presence, and significance of African Americans to the history of American Buddhism.

The book concludes with a meditation on the need for scholars of religion to augment their work in the archives with detailed attention to popular culture where they will find that figures like Turner—that is, figures who develop complex religious repertoires and use those repertoires as the foundation for their religious authority—are more the rule than the exception.

This roundtable, comprised of scholars from the subfields of Buddhist Studies and African American Religions with diverse research foci, will consider the implications of Craig’s book for the study of religion and popular culture, American Buddhism, and African American Religion. Panelist 1 is a scholar of Buddhist philosophy whose work especially attends to ethics and meaning in Buddhist approaches to social thought. Panelist 2 is a social ethicist whose work examines how Black Buddhist teachers and practitioners utilize classical Buddhist doctrines in Black cultural frameworks toward the aims of Black liberation. Their work challenges scholars to consider the role of Black Buddhists in the history of Black liberatory projects. Panelist 3 is a chaplain and scholar of Buddhism whose research centers on contemporary Asian American Buddhist communities. This scholar’s research challenges the whitewashing of American Buddhism by demonstrating the significance of these communities to American Buddhist history and historiography. Panelist 4’s research examines notions of Buddhist modernity, translocal religion, postcolonialism, and the historiography of Buddhism in Western contexts. Together, these five participants will be able to engage the book’s concern with Turner’s role as a Black Buddhist teacher, how Turner provides interpretations of Buddhist doctrines to explicate social issues, her synthesis of multiple religious traditions, and the ways in which the religious labor and authority of Black and brown people is marginalized in the study of Buddhism in Western contexts. Panelist 5 is a historian of religion whose research examines notions of popular culture, race representation, and religious authority in twentieth-century African American religions. Their work decenters the Black church as the primary locus of Afro-Protestant religiosity. Panelist 6 is an Africana Studies scholar whose work focuses on the production of Black sacred sound, a focus that utilizes approaches drawn from both music and performance studies, and women and gender studies. Together, these two participants will be able to engage the book as an interdisciplinary project that examines Turner’s representation as a Black performer and Buddhist teacher whose religious authority draws on but is in no way limited to the Black church, and who makes such authority central to their brand as a recording artist. By placing these six panelists in dialogue, this roundtable will itself represent an intervention to the siloing of our respective fields and subfields, a siloing that prevents the discovery of heretofore unknown voices in the explication of Buddhism in the West, African American religions, and religious studies more broadly. The author will act as respondent.