Spirit in the Dark

Josef Sorett's Spirit in the Dark is an outstanding history and critique of the purported divide between the secular and the spiritual in African American literary history. The main title of his book is borrowed from Aretha Franklin's 1970 song, which encapsulated the blurring of sensuality and spirituality, and, more broadly, between the doctrines of racial aesthetics and religion that had characterized African American literary and intellectual culture in the twentieth century. Spanning the eras from the New Negro renaissance of the 1920s to the black arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Spirit in the Dark explains how and why “the aesthetics of black churches” and “the spirit” animated the creativity and mission of African American writers and critics (p. xi). Claiming that “African American literature has since its advent and across its history been cut from a religious cloth,” Sorett pays attention to Afro-Protestantism but does not conduct a comprehensively multidenominational review of African American religion (p. 2). (A chapter does cover Claude McKay's conversion to Catholicism, though.) Most important is Sorett's flexible notion of “the spirit”: of how it undergirds a genealogical bridge of “language, culture, and politics across history, time, and place through the shared and co-constituted modern discourses of race, religion, and literature” (p. 10

Aesthetics · Art · Humanism · Literature · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Race (biology · Sociology · Spirituality · The arts · Theology · Visual arts · Gender Studies · History · Law · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Religious studies