Life Under the Baobab Tree

Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age

Edited by Kenneth N. Ngwa, Aliou Cissé Niang and Arthur Pressley

Contributor(s): Shola Adegbite, Desmond D. Coleman, Salim Faraji, Rachel E. Harding, Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo, Althea Spencer Miller, Pamela Mordecai, Hugh R. Page Jr., A. Paige Rawson, Nimi Wariboko, Sharon Kimberly Williams and An Yountae

Afterword by Catherine Keller

Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia

Published: 2023

ISBN: 9781531502997

Page Count: 416

Formats:

Price: $39.99

Description: 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.
Reviews: Life Under the Baobab Tree goes a very long way in healing the wounds of people of African descent who in diverse ways collectively have been bruised and battered by homogenization, amputation, and erasure. The rich, complex, and variegated Africana experience is captured beautifully in this transdisciplinary anthology in which the powerful African image of the Baobab tree is the working metaphor that compellingly images the work. This text is a must-read for anyone who wishes to experience the fullness of the global African experience.---Emmanuel Y. Lartey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Pastoral Theology & Spiritual Care, Candler School of Theology & Graduate Division of Religion, Emory University

Breathtaking in its creative framing of Africanness and Blackness as vital, resilient remembrances of—and critical responses to—the abundance of life! This volume features a dazzling array of theoretical frameworks, voices, identities, practices, interpretive strategies, and expressions that augment the distinctive positioning of religious thinking and valuing within Africana Studies. While offering unflinching analyses of antiblackness and its defining disposition in the past and present, Life Under the Baobab Tree also intimates at possibilities emerging from the generative dimensions of life itself. The lucid accounts and claims of diasporic reality represented in these pages are both instructive and thought-provoking.---Carol Wayne White, author of Black Lives and Sacred Humanity Toward an African American Religious Naturalism
Details: ISBN-13 9781531502997
Published: 2023-09-05

Trim: 6.000in x 9.000in x 0.000in
Contributors: Contributions: Shola Adegbite
Contributions: Desmond D. Coleman
Contributions: Salim Faraji
Contributions: Rachel E. Harding
Afterword: Catherine Keller
Catherine Keller is a professor of constructive theology at the Theological School of Drew University. Her books include Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglements (2014) and Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (2018).
Contributions: Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo
Contributions: Althea Spencer Miller
Contributions: Pamela Mordecai
Edited: Kenneth N. Ngwa
Kenneth Ngwa is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Director of the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew Theological School. He is the author of Let My People Live: An Africana Reading of Exodus.
Edited: Aliou Cissé Niang
Aliou Cissé Niang is Associate Professor of Biblical Interpretation–New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York. His books include A Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude.
Contributions: Hugh R. Page Jr.
Edited: Arthur Pressley
Arthur Pressley is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology and Religion at Drew Theological School. His clinical practice is in the areas of childhood trauma, medical psychology, psychological testing, and psychotherapy with adults and children.
Contributions: A. Paige Rawson
A. Paige Rawson is a visiting assistant professor of religion at Wingate University in Wingate, North Carolina. She spent eight years in the ministry before transitioning into academia in order to study the Bible through feminist, queer, and poststructuralist theories. Paige’s research is animated by her commitment to social justice and antiracist epistemological activism and Africana and Afro-Caribbean philosophies; it eschews traditional Western European methodologies in favor of oraliturary interpretations of the Bible in a hermeneutic she refers to as bibliorality.
Contributions: Nimi Wariboko
Nimi Wariboko is Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University and the author of Nigerian Pentecostalism.
Contributions: Sharon Kimberly Williams
Contributions: An Yountae
An Yountae is Assistant Professor of Religion at Lebanon Valley College.