What counts as a Black religious archive? Whom do we encounter in the archive? And how do those affective encounters and relationships shape our research? This session brings together five scholars whose work invites us to reimagine the sites and sources for studying Black religious history. Drawing on oral histories of enslaved children's spiritual lives, FBI surveillance files of Black nationalist women, a Reconstruction-era freedom colony and its built environment, Elijah Muhammad's residence, and the political education curricula of the Republic of New Afrika, these papers collectively argue that the Black religious archive is neither singular nor stable. It is oral and mediated, fugitive and conjured, spatial and alive with living presence. Together they advance methodological and ethical frameworks that insist on research as a form of encounter, one through which foreclosed memories are resurrected and futures otherwise become imaginable.
This paper utilizes oral histories like Goodwater’s narrative to demonstrate children—as ideas and as living beings—shaped the development of Black Southern religious cultures from the antebellum period through the beginning of the twentieth century. Focused on nineteenth and early twentieth-century South Carolina, this paper argues Black communities often interpreted childhood as a period of heightened proximity to the more-than-human realm. The paper zooms into two distinct manifestations of this history. In the first section, I examine how Black elders, particularly women, drew on African-descended ritual systems when interpreting the distinctive markings and birth circumstances of certain children, which they viewed as indicative of metaphysical wisdom that was instructive for the entire community. In the next section, I highlight how Black community members carefully mediated children’s distance between the spirit world and the physical realm through ritual performance
After the 2018 discovery of ninety-five unmarked graves of Black convict laborers in Sugar Land, Texas, a process of re-membering began. The most prominent emergence is the African American Heritage Monument and Park—an Afro-futurist architectural feat and now one of the nation’s largest Black history sites. Situated on a Reconstruction-era Black cemetery in a Freedman’s town, integrating Ghanaian Adinkra symbolism, and structured to guide visitors into a pilgrimage-like practice which creolizes a “sankofa journey” with a “stations of the of cross” like contemplative encounter, Black religious history and Black religions are both recalled and enacted by the monument. This paper, AAHM’s lead historical researcher and drafter of interpretive installations, attempts to reflect on the communal processes through which this re-articulation of Black memory came to being and to trace the ways by which Black heritage funds an imagination of insurrectionary freedoms, thereby inaugurating the construction of futures otherwise.
This paper argues that the Black nationalist organization the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) cultivated a “captive spirituality” among its members. Founded in 1968, the RNA declared Black people in the United States a nation held captive by the U.S. government and demanded territorial sovereignty over five Southern states at the height of the Black Power era. Drawing on political education curricula, economic plans, meeting minutes, and internal memoranda from 1968 to 1975, I use “captive spirituality” as a theoretical lens to uncover the spiritual intellectualism shaping RNA leaders’ visions of a liberated Black future. This intellectualism was grounded in talk of soul evolution, esotericism, and ego death as ways of theorizing the modes of being required to build an independent Black nation. In contrast to scholarship that treats Black Power nationalism as the secular successor to earlier religio-racial movements, this paper shows how RNA organizing was grounded in metaphysical thinking that placed Black spirituality at the center of its aims and objectives.
As scholars engage sites of religious life, how should we understand unexpected moments of encounter that arise as we move through religious or sacred spaces? This paper explores the relationship between research and the archive in the process of discovery. Centering the residence of Elijah Muhammad as a site of lived religion and “living presence,” the paper considers not only the possibility of encounter within the archive but also advances a theory of presence; indeed, encounter as epistemology. In this construction, encounters within sacred archives reveal forms of knowledge about religious communities and illuminate how adherents articulate and perform their religious identities. Finally, the paper interrogates the notion of initiation as a form of permission to enter the archive and to experience the religious world it contains.
This paper reflects on what it means to encounter twentieth-century Black nationalist women’s spiritual lives within formal academic archives. Across mainstream repositories, traces of these women often appear fragmented, obscured, and fugitive, rarely foregrounding their religious visions or spiritual freedom dreams. Engaging these materials requires narrative interpretation and ethical, affective listening; i.e. reading for presence within archival absence and lack. Thinking with archival scholar Laura Helton, I ask how scholars might reclaim the genre of the Black archive by attending to the fugitivity of Black nationalist women’s spirituality across dispersed institutional collections. In doing so, I call for scholars to recover Black nationalist women as religious thinkers whose spiritual visions of freedom shaped twentieth-century freedom struggles. By approaching spirituality as a through-line ligamenting fragmented and surveillant archival records, I demonstrate how scholars can re-member the fugitive traces of Black nationalist women’s lives and authorize fuller historical narratives of their contributions.