Life Under the Baobab Tree

Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age

Kenneth N. Ngwa, Aliou Cissé Niang, Arthur Pressley, Kenneth N. Ngwa, Aliou Cissé Niang, Arthur Pressley

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781531502973, 9781531502980
• eBook ISBN: 9781531502997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism

Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously written by early and later diaspora people of African descent. Their speech arises from the depth of their experiences under the Baobab tree and offers to the world voices of resilience, newness/resurrection, hope, and life. Resolutely journeying on the trails of their ancestors, they speak about setbacks and forward-looking movements of liberation, social transformation, and community formation. The volume is a carefully woven conversation of intel­lectual substance and structure across time, space, and spirituality that is quintessentially "Africana" in its centering of methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialogical approaches to developing liberating epistemologies in the face of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance.A critical part of this conversation is a reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the concept of religion in its colonial and imperial forms. Life Under the Baobab Tree examines how Africana peoples understand their corporate experiences of the divine not as "religion" apart from its inti­mate connections to social realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics, environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To that end Afro-Pessimistic formulations of life placed in dialogic relation Afro-Optimism. Both realities constitute life under the Baobab tree and represent the sturdiness and variation that anchors the deep ruptures that have affected Afri­cana life and the creative responses. The metaphor and substance of the tree resists reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions about the nature of diasporic lived experiences, both within the continent of Africa and in the African Diaspora.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age | Kenneth N. Ngwa, Aliou Cissé Niang, and Arthur Pressley
• Part I: Un/folding Identities Archangel Gabriel Speaks to Mary | Pamela Mordecai
• Part II: Africana Activism Litany on the Line | Pamela Mordecai
• Part III: Africana Historiographies And Memories Temitope Temitope | Pamela Mordecai
• Afterword. Catherine Keller
• List of Contributors
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Ancient Documents