Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and the Supernatural in Twentieth Century African American Fiction, and: Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America (review)

The intersections of African-American literary and religious traditions have proven to be an extraordinary site of creative and critical energies. A first in all too many instances, W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the earliest black intellectuals to analyze the artistic and social significance of African-American religion. In his landmark 1903 text, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois offered the following observation:

The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American Soil. A leader, a politician, and orator, a “boss,” and intriguer, an idealist, —all these he is, and ever, too, the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preeminence, and helps him maintain it.

(191)

In addition to his sociological analysis of the charisma of black clergy, Du Bois’s attention to black worship practices and the theological dimensions of the Spirituals mapped a fertile terrain for future examinations of black religious aesthetics. More of a collection of improvisations based on his experience of the black folk preaching tradition, James Weldon Johnson’s 1927 volume God’s Trombones focused more specifically upon the creative powers exercised by black sacred poets on North American shores. According to Johnson, “The old-time Negro preacher was above all an orator, and in good measure an actor” (5). Recognizing the cultural authority accorded to black clerics, ten years later Richard Wright in effect called upon writers to replace preachers as the primary mythmakers in black communities in his essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” (1937). For Wright, in the face of what viewed to be morally compromised bourgeois preachers, it was the responsibility of the “Negro writer [ . . . ] to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die” (1384).

While writers like Du Bois, Johnson, and Wright focused their critical eyes upon black Christianity, others have attended to what the historian of religion Charles Long has referred to as “extra-church orientations” (7). For instance, Zora Neale Hurston’s novels and folklore writings, heavily informed by her ethnographic work with black communities in the rural South, illuminated the spiritual powers of Hoodoo, a tradition initially portrayed at the turn of the century in Charles Chesnutt’s collection of short stories The Conjure Woman (1899). Indeed, many black writers and critics have taken up the task of engaging the rich diversity of black religious life as a site worthy of both celebration and critical interrogation. Moreover, a tradition of scholarly engagements in this arena can be traced back to Benjamin Elijah Mays’s seminal work, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature (1938). Quite comprehensive in its scope, The Negro’s God scanned sermons, prayers, Sunday School curricula, and church music, all of which he classified under the rubric of “mass literature.” But Mays’s analysis also spanned the novels, poetry, and essays of African-American authors, most notably the luminaries associated with the Harlem Renaissance—including Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes—in whose shadows he wrote. All this towards the end of his aim of presenting a book that was “wholly representative of what the Negro thinks of God” (Preface).

The influence of religion on African-American literary traditions has not been lost in more recent black literary criticism. For example, in 1992, Marcellus Blount built on the arguments of Henry Louis Gates’s “trope of the talking book”—which, of course, centered around a text that was very likely the Christian Bible—to situate a performative tradition of black poetics. For Blount...