In Black is a Church, Josef Sorett maps the ways in which black American culture and identity have been animated by a particular set of Protestant ideas and practices in order to chart the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity essential to the very notion of blackness. In doing so, Sorett reveals the ways that Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism coalesced in the modern category of "religion" and became formative to the emergence of black identity in North America. Black is a Church examines the surprising alliances, peculiar performances, and at times contradictory ideas and complex institutions that shape the contours of black life in the United States. The book begins by arguing that Afro-Protestantism has relied upon literary strategies to explain itself since the earliest years of its formation. Through an examination of slave narratives and spiritual autobiographies, it shows how Protestant Christianity was essential to the establishment of the earliest black literary forms. Sorett then follows Afro-Protestantism's heterodox history in the convergence of literature, politics, and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. And he shows how religious aspirations animated early calls for a "race literature" and "the color line" provided an organizing logic for religious innovations as divergent as pluralism and Pentecostalism. From the earliest literary productions of the eighteenth century to the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the twenty-first, religion--namely Protestant Christianity--is seen to be at the very center of black life in North America.

About the Author
Josef Sorett is Dean of Columbia College and Vice President of Undergraduate Education at Columbia University, where he is also Professor of Religion & African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is the author of Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (OUP, 2016).

Reviews
Black is a Church is an ambitious and compelling account of the entanglement of Afro-Protestantism and blackness. In the tradition of Charles Long, the book is, at once, a provocation and an invitation to think differently about Black lives, about secularism, and Christianity. Sweeping in its scope, imaginative in its theoretical interventions, Sorett has written an important book that scholars of black life across a number of disciplines must confront and respond to. * Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., James S. McDonnell Distinguish University Professor, Princeton University *
Black is a Church is a clear, compelling, and brilliant explication of the centrality of Protestantism to the formation of Black art, politics, and identity. Sorett moves us beyond descriptions of why and how the church has mattered to Black people, to an understanding of how essential 'church' as a concept is to what it means to be Black in America, regardless of individual religious affiliation. This is a critically important work. * Imani Perry, author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation *
Josef Sorett's Black is a Church is a brilliant study from one of the nation's leading historians and theorists of black religion. With vivid detail, great imagination, and a deep engagement with the expansive literature on Black religion, Sorett demonstrates how Afro-Protestantism has shaped black subjectivity and social life from the late 18th century to our contemporary moment. This is a work of astonishing intellectual breadth, an indispensable and welcomed addition to the fields of Black Studies, Religious Studies, and American religious history. * Claudrena Harold, author of When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip Hop Eras *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190615130
Author Josef Sorett
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 408g
Dimensions(mm) 147mm * 212mm * 22mm