The Journal of Africana Religions invites brief article manuscripts (approximately 3,500 words) examining the implications of Zora Neale Hurston’s writings for scholarship on Africana religions. Although Hurston is more widely remembered as a literary author, she produced a number of influential studies such as Tell My Horse and The Sanctified Church that richly and lucidly portrayed and analyzed Africana religions. As an anthropologist trained in the United States, Hurston devoted incisive attention to the practices and social textures of ritual and power in Haitian Vodou, Black Pentecostalism, and Black folk religion in the US South. The geographic scope of her research extended beyond the borders of the United States as she sought to understand African-derived religions in the Caribbean at a time when relatively few scholars were producing scholarship on Black religious formation beyond the pale of Christianity.
Hurston’s legacy, on the one hand, is resonant with that of other scholars such as Katherine Dunham and Melville Herskovits, who were examining the significance of African-derived religion in the Western hemisphere. On the other hand, her work also parallels that of authors such as Lorenzo Dow Turner whose attention to folk culture continues to inform the research of experts concerned with Black religion. Given her study of Black Pentecostalism, moreover, Hurston’s corpus on the whole is unequivocally a compelling and distinctive pillar in the history of scholarship on Africana religions.
The co-editors invite authors to examine a range of analytical themes and methodological implications that derive from Hurston’s corpus. Among these are the:
• significance of gender in scholarship, the politics of meanings about racial Blackness in the study of religion;
• methodological challenges of ethnographic practices and anthropology as a discipline in the study of Black religious populations;
• role of literature in scholarly dissemination or scholarly practices broadly; and
• Hurston’s role in promoting the study of African-derived religions
Because the Journal of Africana Religions is diasporic in scope and aims to promote the study of religion throughout Africa and the Black diaspora, we especially encourage attention to how Hurston’s work has influenced or might inform methods of transnational scholarship on Africana religions.
Interested authors should send a brief proposal for their essay to journalATafricanareligions.org. For more information, visit this website.
Completed manuscripts must be submitted by October 1, 2015.
Contact Info:
Sylvester A. Johnson and Edward E. Curtis IV, Co-Editors
Journal of Africana Religions
5-128 Crowe
1860 Campus Dr
Evanston, IL 60208-2209
Contact Email:
journalATafricanareligions.org