Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance (Lived Religions)

395 Pages·2006·2.32 MB·English

by  R. Marie Griffith

Women and Religion in the African Diaspora
lived religions
Series Editors:David D. Hall and Robert A. Orsi
Women and Religion
in the African Diaspora
Knowledge, Power, and Performance
Edited by
r. marie griffith
barbara dianne savage
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women and religion in the African diaspora : knowledge, power, and
performance /edited by R. Marie Griªth and Barbara Dianne Savage.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8018-8369-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8018-8370-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Women and religion. I. Griªth, R. Marie (Ruth Marie), 1967–
II. Savage, Barbara Dianne.
BL458.W56375 2006
200.89(cid:1)96—dc22
2005032618
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
part i diasporic knowledge
1 É a Senzala: Slavery, Women, and Embodied Knowledge
in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé 3
rachel elizabeth harding
2 “I Smoothed the Way, I Opened Doors”: Women in the
Yoruba-Orisha Tradition of Trinidad 19
tracey e. hucks
3 Joining the African Diaspora: Migration and Diasporic Religious Culture
among the Garífuna in Honduras and New York 37
paul christopher johnson
4 Women of the African Diaspora Within: The Masowe Apostles,
an African Initiated Church 59
isabel mukonyora
5 “Power in the Blood”: Menstrual Taboos and Women’s Power
in an African Instituted Church 81
deidre helen crumbley
part ii power, authority, and subversion
6 “The Spirit of the Holy Ghost is a Male Spirit”: African American
Preaching Women and the Paradoxes of Gender 101
wallace best
vi Contents
7 “Make Us a Power”: African American Methodists Debate
the “Woman Question,” 1870–1900 128
martha s. jones
8 “Only a Woman Would Do”: Bible Reading and African American
Women’s Organizing Work 155
anthea d. butler
9 Exploring the Religious Connection: Black Women Community Workers,
Religious Agency, and the Force of Faith 179
cheryl townsend gilkes
part iii performing religion
10 The Arts of Loving 199
lisa gail collins
11 “Truths that Liberate the Soul”: Eva Jessye and the
Politics of Religious Performance 222
judith weisenfeld
12 Shopping with Sister Zubayda: African American Sunni Muslim
Rituals of Consumption and Belonging 245
carolyn rouse
13 “But, It’s Bible”: African American Women and
Television Preachers 266
marla frederick-mcglathery
Notes 293
About the Contributors 357
Index 361
acknowledgments
This volume is part of a larger project on Women and Religion in the African
Diaspora, generously funded by the Ford Foundation and sponsored by the Cen-
ter for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. We are grateful to Ford and
to our visionary program oªcer Constance Buchanan for helping shape the proj-
ect from the beginning and supporting it thereafter. We also wish to thank Robert
Wuthnow, the Director of the Center for the Study of Religion, for his thorough-
going support of this project and for first suggesting the idea of this volume with
the two of us as co-editors.
William B. Hart, Melani McAlister, and Judith Weisenfeld served actively as
project advisers during the initial planning phase in 2000–2001. Anita Kline,
Barbara Bermel, Wendy Cadge, and Tisa Wenger provided vital administrative
and event-planning support throughout this project’s duration into 2005. The
center also sponsored several Ford-funded visiting research fellows whose work
appears in this collection. Scholars too numerous to name provided crucial
advice to us throughout the project; we are grateful to all of them, particularly
Jualynne Dodson, Frances Smith Foster, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Jacob K.
Olupona, Peter J. Paris, Martha Saavedra, Patrick Taylor, Joe William Trotter, and
David Wills.
The Program in African American Studies at Princeton University collabo-
rated with the Women and Religion in the African Diaspora Project in sponsor-
ing numerous public events. Many thanks to Nell Irvin Painter, Noliwe Rooks,
and Valerie A. Smith for their enthusiastic support and assistance. Several schol-
ars delivered public lectures or served as respondents under the auspices of this
project and also gave crucial feedback to it; these include Joan Dayan, Jacquelyn
Grant, Darlene Clark Hine, Laurie Maºy-Kipp, Elizabeth McAlister, Joycelyn
Moody, Jacob Olupona, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Oyèrónké Oye(cid:1)wùmí, and Peter
Paris.
viii Acknowledgments
The core of the Women and Religion in the African Diaspora project was the
collaborative research group of scholars whose work is featured in this volume.
We could not have put together a more extraordinary nor a more collegial as-
sembly. The group met three times over three years, culminating in a three-day
public conference in April 2004. Conference participants benefited from the
keynote address by Brent Hayes Edwards, the final commentaries by Farah
Jasmine Griªn and Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and the insightful comments delivered
by a broad range of discussants: Mia Bay, Kim D. Butler, Leslie Callahan, Bettye
Collier-Thomas, Yvonne Chireau, Sandra Greene, Nancy A. Hewitt, Lawrence
Little, Elizabeth McAlister, Cecilia Moore, Diane Batts Morrow, Albert J. Raboteau,
Valerie A. Smith, Margaret Rose Vendryes, Nicole von Germeten, and Timothy P.
Watson.
Artist Bill Gaskins provided our logo and did a marvelous job with the project’s
printed materials and website. Heather White provided skilled assistance during
the conference itself. Grey Osterud meticulously edited the conference papers
and the volume’s introduction during the summer of 2004. Her fine eye has
improved all of our work. Peter Agree of the University of Pennsylvania Press
generously provided us with indispensable early advice on the shaping of this
volume.
It has been a great pleasure to guide these essays into publication. We are
grateful to Catherine Brekus for her cogent comments on each and every piece
that appears here, and for her judicious support of this venture. Henry Tom, our
editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, ably directed the collection into print,
with assistance from Clare McCabe and copyeditor Julia R. Smith. We are grate-
ful, finally, to David D. Hall and Robert A. Orsi for supporting this volume as a
valuable addition to their new series on Lived Religions.
introduction
Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “To the Diaspora” evokes a journey from some un-
named point of departure to “Afrika,” a double movement that opens possibili-
ties for dialogue and reflection. It is a voyage of personal discovery and under-
standing that circles back to the self.
You did not know you were Afrika
When you set out for Afrika
You did not know you were going.
Because
You did not know you were Afrika.
You did not know the Black continent
that had to be reached
was you.
Africa becomes an imagined place within this diasporic view and thus returns
readers to themselves in a more integral way than any literal journey to places of
ancestral origin.
Brooks’s hopeful vision builds a bridge to possibilities beyond su¤ering, a
search that comes only through something as fragile and necessary as belief. This
creative task is only possible, after all, for those who believe it to be so. “You would
not have believed my mouth,” writes the poet.
When I told you, meeting you somewhere close
To the heat and youth of the road,
liking my loyalty, liking belief,
you smiled and you thanked me but very little believed me.
The poem closes with a call to venture forth into the uncertain, partly lit terrain
of diasporic identities in new lands.