Description
A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms-ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more-to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.
About the Author
Ahmad Greene-Hayes is assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School at Harvard University.
Reviews
"Underworld Work recovers the beautiful complexity of Black religion in twentieth-century New Orleans, elevating the archives as sacred sites where the ancestors speak. Guided by Zora Neale Hurston-through faith healing, Hoodoo recipes, and ecstatic performances in Baptist, Spiritualist, and Sanctified churches-Greene-Hayes ushers us into spaces of historical disorientation where Africana spiritual traditions persist despite relentless policing and criminalization by salvage ethnographers and Christian race makers." -- Yvonne Chireau, Swarthmore College
"Greene-Hayes beautifully captures the religious strivings of Zora Neale Hurston and many of the varied manifestations of Black religion that were maligned as criminal and dangerous by conservative social forces terrified by the freedom and power of occult practices untethered from Protestantism, heteropatriarchy, and other life-denying orientations. Perceptive, remarkable, and innovative, Underworld Work is a must-read for anyone interested in the life-affirming practices Black people conjure in the face of state violence and the terrifying enclosures of this world." -- Terence Keel, University of California, Los Angeles
Book Information
ISBN 9780226838847
Author Ahmad Greene-Hayes
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 454g
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms-ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more-to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.
About the Author
Ahmad Greene-Hayes is assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School at Harvard University.
Reviews
"Underworld Work recovers the beautiful complexity of Black religion in twentieth-century New Orleans, elevating the archives as sacred sites where the ancestors speak. Guided by Zora Neale Hurston-through faith healing, Hoodoo recipes, and ecstatic performances in Baptist, Spiritualist, and Sanctified churches-Greene-Hayes ushers us into spaces of historical disorientation where Africana spiritual traditions persist despite relentless policing and criminalization by salvage ethnographers and Christian race makers." -- Yvonne Chireau, Swarthmore College
"Greene-Hayes beautifully captures the religious strivings of Zora Neale Hurston and many of the varied manifestations of Black religion that were maligned as criminal and dangerous by conservative social forces terrified by the freedom and power of occult practices untethered from Protestantism, heteropatriarchy, and other life-denying orientations. Perceptive, remarkable, and innovative, Underworld Work is a must-read for anyone interested in the life-affirming practices Black people conjure in the face of state violence and the terrifying enclosures of this world." -- Terence Keel, University of California, Los Angeles
Book Information
ISBN 9780226838847
Author Ahmad Greene-Hayes
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 454g
