Literary Expressions of African Spirituality

The 11 essays in this collection explore ways in which indigenous African faith systems inform--and are treated in--black Atlantic literature and film. Most contributors deal with African American and Anglophone black Caribbean texts, so the title is overbroad, and the ambition of editors Marsh-Lockett and West (both Georgia State Univ.) to rethink "critical approaches to African works and their counterparts across the Atlantic" is a little too grand, but there are noteworthy essays here. The leadoff, for instance, by John Hawley--one of only two focusing on African literature--is a concise overview of novelistic engagement with indigenous spiritualities, Islam, and Christianity, referencing dozens of examples from around the continent. Kameelah Martin contributes an informative survey on conjure women in African American novels and films. In a different vein, Artress Bethany White's and Beauty Bragg's essays employ postcolonial, diasporist, feminist, and religious studies discourses in their thoughtful literary critiques of, respectively, Maryse Condé and Toni Morrison, and Edwidge Danticat. Melvin Rahming offers a fascinating "Egyptian/Kametic" reading of a too-little-known collection of short stories, Voodoomation, by Garfield Linton, but it is marred by shoddy proofreading--the title of the book is variously misspelled throughout. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *
Literary Expressions of African Spirituality is a brilliant collection of well written and well-connected essays, a welcome addition to the tiny corpus of critical texts that examine African and African Diaspora spiritualities as reading paradigms of African and African Diaspora literatures. . . .[T]he theoretical postulates provide new ways of responding to African and African Diaspora Literatures. This is a great and welcome addition to African and African Diaspora literary studies. * Caribbean Studies *
The authors manage an impressive collective of spiritual literary history with literature reviews and bibliographies that cover a thorough cross section from related disciplines. The novel is the most consistent genre contributors analyze in the essays, followed by film, and the short story. The selections are regionally balanced, and editors admit its deliberate confinement to African, Caribbean, and African American worldviews with a hint of a future volume that would address the spiritual phenomenon in Afro-European, South American, and Canadian writing. . . .The volume is landmark because it summons our thinking toward myriad possibilities for framing the global African cultural pursuit of things spiritual through a multidimensional layering of comparative epistemology, philosophy, and religious practice that expand literary and artistic genres’ interdisciplinary effect. The collection features applications of not only spirituality but also cosmology, healing, transformation, restoration, and a much-needed interventional that reiterates the value of ritual and ceremony in the collective syncretism of African-based resilience and adaptation that responded to the effects of psychological and physical trauma and grief that beset African communities through enslavement, colonialism, and beyond. Represented well by Kameelah L. Martin’s essay on affirming the conjure woman as a prototype with early twentieth-century stability and post-1981 innovation, the volume’s contribution to literary historiography is valuable. The collection will stimulate debate and discussion on antithetical topics of atheism and pessimism that are also woven into contemporary African world points of view. * African Studies Quarterly *
Exploring the intersection of spirituality and aesthetics in literary texts by African and African-descended writers on the continent and in the Americas, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers a new conceptual framework for understanding African and diasporic agency and originality. The essays in this collection challenge, expand, and elaborate on previous conceptions of art, identity, and the African spiritual cosmos. -- Alma Jean Billingslea, professor, Department of English, Spelman College
The editors of Literary Expressions of African Spirituality have created a volume that is essential reading for serious scholars of African American literature and culture because its chapters genuinely enhance what we know about African influences on African American cultural production. This work contributes to interdisciplinary approaches to African American literature. In addition, scholars and students of Africana, Black Diaspora, and Black Transnational Studies, as well as students and scholars of Literary and Cultural Studies, generally, will find it highly relevant. The co-editors' introduction is brilliantly conceived and executed— perfectly setting up the illuminating contributions that follow. I highly recommend it. -- Lovalerie King, director, Africana Research Center, Pennsylvania State University
Marsh-Lockett and West have assembled an impressive collection of critical essays in Literary Expressions of African Spirituality.  These essays serve to illuminate a literary area that has too oft been relegated to the shadows of scholarly attention due to the complexity of spiritual memory emanating from members of the diaspora. In a well-wrought introduction and 11 additional chapters, Marsh-Lockett and West provide an open window of scholarly demystification of African Spirituality. -- Emily Allen-Williams, The University of the Virgin Islands