Conjuring Culture

Biblical Formations of Black America

Bibliographic Data

ID20009607
AuthorsT Smith (0000-0001-5882-1934, corresponding author), Theophus Harold Smith
Year1994
Pages287
Publication date1994-02-24
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
Reviewed byConjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America, Lewis V Baldwin, 1995
VenueConjuring culture (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York, NY (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780195067408.001.0001
WikidataQ113535374
OpenAlexW4388385656
Open LibraryOL1400395M
ISBN9780195067408
LanguageEN
Citations received75

This book provides a sophisticated new interdisciplinary interpretation of the formulation and evolution of African American religion and culture. Theophus Smith argues for the central importance of “conjure”—a magical means of transforming reality—in black spirituality and culture. Smith shows that the Bible, the sacred text of Western civilization, has in fact functioned as a magical formulary for African Americans. Going back to slave religion, and continuing in black folk practice and literature to the present day, the Bible has provided African Americans with ritual prescriptions for prophetically re-envisioning, and thereby transforming, their history and culture. In effect the Bible is a “conjure book” for prescribing cures and curses, and for invoking extraordinary and Divine powers to effect changes in the conditions of human existence—and to bring about justice and freedom. Biblical themes, symbols, and figures like Moses, the Exodus, the Promised Land, and the Suffering Servant, as deployed by African Americans, have crucially formed and reformed not only black culture, but American society as a whole. Smith examines not only the religious and political uses of conjure, but its influence on black aesthetics, in music, drama, folklore, and literature. The concept of conjure, he shows, is at the heart of an indigenous and still vital spirituality, with exciting implications for reconfiguring the next generation of black studies and black theology. Even more braodly, Smith proposes, “conjuring culture” can function as a new paradigm for understanding Western religious and cultural phenomena generally

Aesthetics · Art · Civilization · Drama · Exorcism · Folklore · Indigenous · Interpretation (philosophy) · Literature · Popular culture · Sociology · Spirituality · Anthropology · History · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies · 11.59 church history, history of doctrine: other · 73.58 magic (ethnology) · African americans · Bezweringen · Bibel · Bible · Bible, criticism, interpretation, etc · Bijbel · Christianity · Criticism, interpretation · Criticism, interpretation, etc · Culturele aspecten · History of doctrines · Influence · Kultur · Magic · Magie · Religion · Religion and culture · Religious aspects · Religious aspects of Magic · Typology (Theology) · united states · Western civilization

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