Hair, Roots, and Crystal Balls

Archival Viscerality, Black Conjuring Traditions, and the Study of American Religions

Bibliographic Data

ID8205164
AuthorsAhmad Greene-Hayes (0000-0002-9117-2785, Harvard Divinity School , 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 , USA, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume91
Issue4
Pages798-819
Publication date2023-12-31
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jaarel/lfae029
OpenAlexW4399380686
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited46

Black studies scholars have long argued that archives are violent and dismembering, especially as the universities which house them preserve the physical and immaterial remnants of slavery. Religious studies scholars, especially historians of religion, have begun attending to this quandary while sifting through archives of slavery and religion. This article enters this discourse by focusing on the afterlives of slavery and their relationship to the religious innovations of Black religious actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article, then, centers the author’s visceral experience in an archival reading room of a university while consulting the material objects of religious practitioners Reverend John L. Reed and Sister Mamie Wade Avant. In the process, the article reconstructs a historical narrative about their lives and argues that religious studies must reckon with the archive of antiblackness and its capture of Black religions

Art · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Race, History, and American Society

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