African Diaspora Religions Unit
The Women Who Made Malcolm X Possible
2025 is the 100th anniversary of Malcolm X/el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, revolutionary, civil/human rights activist, and Muslim minister (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965). Centering his work on the work Black women do to usher in freedom, and resurrecting from history the love and teachings of his mother, wife, children, and other women who made him possible we have chosen to honor Malcolm by honoring the Black women of his world.
Writing on the beautiful intersections between Malcolm, Martin and James Baldwin and their mothers, “The Three Mothers,” author, Anna Malaika Tubbs asks, ‘How was Malcolm influenced by Louise Little’s roots from the rebellious Carib island nation of Grenada, she, who spoke several languages, her ‘home-training’ lessons in recitations of the alphabet in French, and admonitions to her children to study, and correct misinformation given by their white teachers?’
C. S’thembile West’s new book, Nation Women Negotiating Islam: Moving Beyond Boundaries in the Twentieth Century (2023), redeems the role of women, mothers, sisters, and daughters in the Nation of Islam (NOI). It sits at the intersection of Africana Studies, Religious and Islamic Studies providing the necessary counternarrative to past transgressive discourses. West recognizes and underscores the agency of NOI women in their negotiation of gender norms, sexual propriety, leadership models, education, and family building as a Black national project. Given our current political climate, this book can work as a tool for modeling equity and respectful scholarship on women’s roles as organizers, leaders, and change agents dedicated to uplifting and rehabilitating their communities as stewards of West’s arguments of a “politics of protection.” One of several potential questions to consider is how has the lack of attention to the role of women in X's life and work reflect a kind of cis/heteronormativity that is bound up with the white supremacy that X combatted? How might queer and trans analysis help us better understand this role?" We invite paper proposals in conversation with this theme and C. S’thembile West’s book.
Potential Co-sponsors: The Religion and Cities Unit, Queer Studies in Religion, Religion and Popular Culture, African Religions Unit, Afro-American Religious History Unit, Ethics Unit, Sociology of Religion Unit, Latina/o Religion, Culture, and Society Unit, Religion and Memory Unit, Study of Islam Unit, Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit, Contemporary Islam Unit, Women of Color Scholarship, Teaching, and Activism, and, Islam, Gender, Women Unit
Precarity: Being as Black Womanhood
Precarity as a threat to the poetics of women in power, of black and Latine women’s religious leadership, and in their overall relationship to womanhood, agency, and autonomy is at stake. The ongoing divisiveness that has polarized societal, racial, and gendered distinctions fostering a hyper state of unpredictability asserts a need “to be Sankofic,”. A mandate for looking back to where we came from, and learning from it to build futures in this age of terror. Despite the ever-present madness, we are simultaneously holding beauty and the terror with aspirations to override the uncertainty, perform generatively, ‘owning our social locations without assuming patriarchal affirmations as the explicit and implicit markers of significance in community, culture, and faith traditions’—to paraphrase Urban Bush Woman founder, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Potentially by embracing Afrofuturist aesthetics to express our agency, and freedom through art, creative works and activism that envision liberated futures for Black life. Can futurist theorization provide an effective alternative to create a safe place in/or outside of contested spaces for the diverse experiences and cultural narratives of the African and Latine Diasporas? We invite art practitioners and scholars to submit work related to this theme.
Potential Co-sponsors: Body and Religion Unit, Ritual Studies Unit, Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit, Women of Color Scholarship, Teaching, and Activism Unit, Latina/o Religion, Culture, and Society Unit, Religions in the Latina/o Americas Unit, Arts, Literature, and Religion Unit
Freedom By Another Name: Medicine & Healing in the Era of Slavery
Originating AAR Unit: Religions, Medicines & Healing—Possible AAR Unit Co-Sponsors: (1) African Diaspora Religions Unit, (2) African Religions Unit, (3) Afro-American Religious History Unit, and (4) Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence Unit
This panel highlights the 2024 presidential theme of “Freedom.” The panel is open to a variety of submissions, including analyses of the use of plant medicines, prayers, divination, laying of hands, ritual baths, and sacred ceremonies used for healing purposes among African descendants in the era of slavery. We welcome studies of slavery in Africa and/or the African Diaspora. We are especially interested in proposals that address how enslaved people experienced harrowing conditions of bondage, faced immense challenges of illness and physical suffering, but also sought freedom and empowerment through the sustained practice of African traditional healing rites.
“My childhood breakfast table memories amalgamated aromas of coffee brewing, bacon frying, and burning hair from overheated hot combs” – Scott Alves Barton
Today we recognize that along with other knowledge systems, foodways, and faith traditions traveled with Enslaved Africans, as they do within every individual or group in migration, immigration, or as refugees. Yet, we need to ask, “Who sources, cooks, and preserves our foods, and holds our culinary cultural traditions, whether sacred or profane, in feasting or in famine?” Who do we need to be thankful for that placed this food on our table?” In 1990, MacArthur Genius Carrie Mae Weems created her iconic social documentary “Kitchen Table” a photographic series imagining engagements of kith and kin at table. In addition to potential skirmishes, the kitchen table is always already foundational as a locus of commensality; particular ways of knowing, and intergenerational teaching and learning. Our foodways stories share how we are who we are, and what we hold dear, by lauding sacred rites of communion, sacrifice, and succor. Kitchen tables are also sites of homework, needlework, memorialization, putting food by, flirting, healthcare and beauty practices, gossiping, sharing grace, and prayer. Our tables are centers for healing and mourning, strategizing revolutionary change, or starting a radical feminist press…Quoting poet Joy Harjo, “The world begins at a kitchen table, perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing, crying, eating the last sweet bite…” We welcome folks to submit materials for this roundtable discussion.
Potential Co-sponsors: Religion and Food Unit, Religion and Memory Unit, Religion, Affect, and Emotion Unit, Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit, Women of Color Scholarship, Teaching, and Activism Unit, Queer Studies in Religion, and Religions, Medicines, and Healing Unit
Potential co-sponsorship with Space, Place, and Religions and Religion and Memory Units on the relationship between commemorative spaces and global freedom struggles, alterity and racial discrimination.
The African Diaspora Religions Unit aims to engage a wide range of disciplines and a variety of scholars who work on different aspects of African Diaspora religions. It considers the linguistic and cultural complexities of the African Diaspora, the importance of African traditional religions, Afro-Christianity, Afro-Islam, Afro-Asia, and Afro-Judaism, in the way they have and continue to inform an understanding of Africa, and also the way they have and continue to shape the religious landscape of the Americas, Europe, Asia and South Asia.
Our unit explores broad geographies, histories, and cultures of people of African descent and the way they shape the religious landscape, in the Caribbean and the Americas, Europe, and Asia. We define “Diaspora” as the spread and dispersal of people of African descent — both forced and voluntary — through the slave trade, imperial and colonial displacements, and postcolonial migrations. This Unit emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches and confluent/convergent [spiritual] belief systems which is central to its vision.