This Author-Meets-Respondents session will provide a forum for critical engagement with Ahmad Greene-Hayes’s book, Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (2025). Greene-Hayes illuminates the spiritual practices that flourished in Jim Crow-era New Orleans including ancestral veneration, faith healing, and spiritualized sex work, revealing how Africana esotericisms were employed to navigate and transcend the limitations of an anti-Black world. The book highlights the resilience and creativity of Black religious life in the face of state-sanctioned terror and legal and extralegal violence. Respondents of varying rank will offer insights on the book’s contributions to the study of African American religious history, queer studies in religion, and the intersection of religion and sexuality. Discussion will explore the book’s methodological innovations and theoretical interventions, its engagement with Black Atlantic traditions in the American South, and its implications for understanding Africana religious practices in the face of empire.
| Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Harvard University | ahmadg@hds.harvard.edu | View |