Spirit in the Dark tells the story of the many ways that ideas about religion animated and organized African American literary visions across the years between the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. In doing so, it unveils the contours of a literary history that remained preoccupied with religion even as it was typically understood by authors, readers, and critics alike, as modern and secular. Spirit in the Dark offers an account of the ways in which religion, and Afro-Protestantism in particular, remained pivotal to the very idea and aspirations of Africa ... More

Spirit in the Dark tells the story of the many ways that ideas about religion animated and organized African American literary visions across the years between the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. In doing so, it unveils the contours of a literary history that remained preoccupied with religion even as it was typically understood by authors, readers, and critics alike, as modern and secular. Spirit in the Dark offers an account of the ways in which religion, and Afro-Protestantism in particular, remained pivotal to the very idea and aspirations of African American literature across much of the twentieth century. From the dawn of the New Negro until the ascendance of the Black Arts, African American writers developed a spiritual grammar to theorize race and art at once; and they did so by drawing upon a pair of popular categories—namely “church” and “spirit,” as well as a range of related terms—that were part of the landscape of American religious history. In so doing, they celebrated and interrogated, critiqued and conjured, and revised and reimagined the idea of the “Negro Church” from the very first moment the term was taking form. Rather than a celebration of religious diversity or a racialized spirituality, Spirit in the Dark engages with writers who have typically been taken for granted as secular to trouble the boundaries of what counts as “religion.” Spirit in the Dark, in short, is a religious history of racial aesthetics.