P eter K erry P owers . Goodbye Christ? Christianity, Masculinity, and the New Negro Renaissance

In Goodbye Christ? Christianity, Masculinity, and the New Negro Renaissance, Peter Kerry Powers has written a deeply researched and fine-grained study of how issues of masculinity and Christianity are entangled in the writing and worldviews of African American intellectuals in the twentieth century. He argues that the New Negro Renaissance was not a secular period as some have argued but one where secularism and Christian beliefs competed in shaping the struggle for leadership. Instead he demonstrates that the period was a moment when “Christian religious practices provide the backdrop, characters, imagery, and theme of most of the important work of the Renaissance, even when they are deployed to resist the religious traditions that they reference” (15). His study begins in the late nineteenth century and moves through most of the twentieth century, rejecting the limiting time frame of the 1920s and 1930s, which is more commonly used for studies of the Harlem Renaissance, a term he also uses.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Christianity · Islam · Masculinity · Period (music) · Secularism · Sociology · The Renaissance · Theme (computing) · Theology · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies