African American Literature and Religion

This section is still in development and is in need of an editor.

Bibliography

Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early  African American Women’s Writing. Princeton University Press, 1999. 

—. Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible. University of Georgia Press, 2010. 

Brooks, Joanna. American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Christianity and African American Literature, special issue of Christianity and Ltierature, edited by Jennifer McFarlane-Harris and Peter Kerry Powers, vol. 73, no. 3, 2024.   

Coleman, James W. Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction. Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Connor, Kimberly Rae. Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women. University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Carter, Tomeiko Ashford. Powers Divine: Spiritual Autobiography and Black Women’s Writing. University Press of America, 2009.

Evans, James H. Spiritual Empowerment in Afro-American Literature: Frederick Douglass, Rebecca Jackson, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison. E. Mellen Press, 1987.

Harrell, Willie J., Jr. Origins of the African American Jeremiad: the Rhetorical Strategies of Social Protest and Activism, 1760-1861. McFarland, 2011.

Haynes, Rosetta. Radical Spiritual Motherhood: Autobiography and Empowerment in  Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Louisiana State University Press, 2011.

Henderson, Carol, editor. “My Soul Is a Witness”: Reimagining African American Women’s Spirituality and the Black Female Body in African American Literature. MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021.

Hoefer, Anthony Dyer. Apocalypse South: Judgment, Cataclysm, and Resistance in the Regional Imaginary. Ohio State University Press, 2021.

Hubbard, Dolan. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination. University of Missouri Press, 1994.

Levecq, Christine. Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion, and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution. University of Virginia Press, 2019.

Matthews, Donald Henry. Honoring the Ancestors: an African Cultural Interpretation of Black Religion and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Mellis, James S., editor. Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Conjure in African American Literature: Critical Essays. McFarland, 2019.

Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction. University Press of Florida, 1996.

Moody, Jocelyn K. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. University of Georgia Press, 2001.

Pierce, Yolanda. Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative. University Press of Florida, 2005.

Powers, Peter Kerry. Goodbye Christ?: Christianity, Masculinity, and the New Negro Renaissance. The University of Tennessee Press, 2017.

—. Recalling Religions: Resistance, Memory, and Cultural Revision in Ethnic Women’s Literature. University of Tennessee Press, 2001.

Prentiss, Craig R. Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II. New York University Press, 2014.

Romero, Channette. Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color. University of Virginia Press, 2012.

Sorrett, Josef. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Stave, Shirley A., editor. Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities. Peter Lang, 2006.

Valkeakari, Tuire. Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952-1998. University Press of Florida, 2007.

Wasserman, Bonnie S. Coming of Age in the Contemporary Afro-Latin American Novel: Blackness, Religion, Immigration. University of Rochester Press, 2022.

Weisenfeld, Judith. This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women’s Religious Biography. New York: Routledge, 1996.

West, Elizabeth J. African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature, and Being. Lexington Books, 2011.

Young, Josiah U. James Baldwin’s Understanding of God. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.