Religion in African-American Culture

This volume focuses on the multi-faceted significance of religion in African-American literature and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The series of essays addresses religion as part of the self-empowerment of African-American women as itinerant preachers, the curious intermingling of Catholicism and Voodoo in Louisiana Creole culture, the representation of Obeah women, and the tradition of the folk sermon in James Weldon Johnson. The Harlem Renaissance provides the backdrop for the discussion of Afro-Modernism and religion in Claude McKay's and Jean Toomer's works, for the analysis of African-American folk plays by Richard Bruce and Georgia Douglas Johnson, and a comparison of Nella Larsen's and Ralph Ellison's critical views of religion as well as an illustration of the connections between spiritual search and the blues in Ellison's works. Discussions of the contemporary scene include the poetry of Robert Hayden, twentieth-century African-American intellectuals' views on religion and history and the acceptance of the Nation of Islam as an American religion.