African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Structures

Front Cover
Vincent L. Wimbush
A&C Black, Jan 1, 2001 - Religion - 896 pages
A unique study of how the Bible "constructs" African Americans and how African Americans "construct" the bibleFrom literature and the arts to popular culture and everyday life, the Bible courses through black society and culture. Despite the enormous recent surge of interest in African American religion, scant attention has been paid to the diversity of ways in which African Americans have utilized the Bible. African Americans and the Bible is the fruit of a four-year collaborative research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush and funded by the Lilly Endowment. It brings together scholars and experts (sixty-eight in all) from a wide range of academic and artistic fields and disciplines-including ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies and also music, film, dance, drama, and literature. The book is less about the meaning(s) of the Bible than about the Bible and meaning(s), less about the world(s) of the Bible than about how worlds and the Bible interact-in short, about how a text constructs a people and a people construct a text. It is about a particular socio-cultural formation but also about the dynamics that occur in the interrelation between any group of people and sacred texts in general. African Americans and the Bible offers a critical lens through which the process of socio-cultural formation can be viewed.

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Contents

Reading Darkness Reading Scriptures
1
Part
34
PRETEXTS
45
The Study of the Bible as SocioCultural Hermeneutics
83
The Role of the Bible and Other Sacred Texts in African American
92
African American Social Cultural Formation the Bible
111
The Bible as Informant and Reflector in SocialStructural
123
Liberating Biblical Studies
138
W E B Du Bois Revisited
501
How African American Folk Oratory
514
Hamer King and the Bible
537
Biblical Metaphor in Spirituals Gospel Lyrics
546
The Rastafari as a
558
The Bible in a Congregation
577
African Americans the Bible and Spiritual Formation
588
The African American Catholic Community and the Bible
616

An Ethnography of African Indigenous Religious
163
Flight Or Cultural Deformation
203
On Genesis and Exodus
221
Origins of African American Biblical Hermeneutics in
236
Or Formation of Self and WorldsinMarronage
319
Through the Prism
342
NineteenthCentury Black Religious Women
355
The Bible in the Educational Philosophies of Fanny Jackson Coppin
404
Orishatukeh Faduma and
418
The Bible and the Aesthetics of Sacred Space in TwentiethCentury
433
The Great Migration and the Bible
448
African American Gospel Music
464
The Bible and Catholic Evangelization
650
Academic Biblical Interpretation among African Americans
696
Spiritual Apprehension in August Wilsons
743
Adventures of a Black Child in Search of Her God
773
Masculinity and the Use of the Bible in Rap Music
804
It Should Be a Black and a Church Thing
819
Its Not Just a Christian Thing
828
Some Things about It Are Disturbing
835
Ultimately Its Not a Change of Color
849
Index of Scripture References
857
Index of Subjects
870
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Vincent L. Wimbush is Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Paul the Worldly Ascetic; editor of Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook; Discursive Formations, Ascetic Piety, and The Interpretation of Early Christian Literature; and co-editor of Asceticism.

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