Black Atlantic Christianity

At the African Studies Association meeting in Washington, D.C. in early December 2016, I had a depressing experience when I spoke on an African Christianity panel with one other panelist, and only two people attended to listen to our papers. And this was the only African Christianity panel scheduled during the multi-day event. Seemingly, the African Studies community did not care any more about African Christianity—the largest religion on the continent, which claims more Christians now than anywhere else in the world. My pessimistic view has changed, however, with the recent publication of several excellent monographs and edited volumes on African Christianity since 2016.

The two reviewed edited books, Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora edited by Judith Casselberry and Elizabeth A. Pritchard and Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition edited by Cécile Fromont, are putting African Christianity back on the scholarly map as a significant topic within African and African Diaspora Studies. Spirit on the Move focuses on Pentecostalism, the newest and most explosive form of Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora, while Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas examines the oldest form of African Christianity in the Americas—Catholicism from the Kongo, which accompanied the enslaved from southwest Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. The first book details Pentecostalism in primarily ethnographic terms while focusing on gender (and black feminist studies more particularly), whereas the second examines African Christianity in historical context while examining performance and material culture.

Spirit on the Move is divided into four sections, the first being "Saving Race," which is composed of two chapters written by John Burdick and Elizabeth McAlister. These chapters examine race in the context of Pentecostal churches in Brazil and Haiti respectively, both of them focusing on the discourse of spiritual warfare. Burdick examines the way in which Brazilian gospel singers insist that their Blackness is central to God's salvific action in the world, while McAlister takes up similar Evangelical/Pentecostal notions of Christian citizenship by interrogating the ways in which race, in the context of spiritual warfare, is condemned as a demonic and idolatrous "African" tradition.

Part Two is titled "Scrutinizing and Sanctifying the Body"; it is also comprised of two chapters that investigate women's bodies as a field of political and cultural production and contestation within Black Pentecostal churches. Linda van den Kamp's chapter studies the ways in which Brazilian Pentecostalism in post-civil war Mozambique enrolls women's bodies in political battles over gender practices. Conversely, Deidre Helen Crumbley's chapter focuses on ways in which the strict gendered dress codes of a Sanctified Philadelphia church reflects African-American women's desire to recover a sense of control over and sacredness within their bodies.

Part Three is titled "Sonic Power," which demonstrates that women's singing and spirit-filled worship reestablishes a relationship with a God whom many believe has forsaken the world and/or has ignored the prayers of the faithful. Paula Aymer's chapter analyzes the efforts of the Wailing Women Worldwide, an interdenominational missionary organization that seeks to train women to become masculinized spiritual warriors while exploiting conventional feminine characteristics. Specifically, Aymer's chapter focuses on a Nigerian band of evangelizing women in Grenada. Judith Casselberry's chapter analyzes the messages that are conveyed by Christian women's bodies as they sing and labor through liturgical performances which create power for them, in contrast to men who claim authority at the pulpit within a New York City Pentecostal church.

The final section, Part Four, is titled "Modeling the State," and these chapters analyze spiritual...