African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge Studies on the American South)
Cambridge University Press, 9/30/2012
EAN 9781107024090, ISBN10: 1107024099
Hardcover, 246 pages, 23.4 x 16.4 x 2.9 cm
Language: English
African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes, such as establishing new communities and incorporating American forms of Christianity into an African-based spirituality. This book illuminates how people of African descent engaged the spiritual landscape of the Lowcountry through their subsistence practices, religious experiences and political discourse.
1. Place, culture, and power
2. Land of the living
3. African spirits of the land and water
4. African landscapes of the Lowcountry
5. Spiritual guardians in the wilderness
6. Mermaid histories and power.
Advance praise: 'Brown brings a distinct expertise to scholarship on the religious heritages of African-descended peoples in North America and other regions of the Americas. His contributions to what we now know about the African religious cultures of enslaved Africans and African Americans on the US mainland are unparalleled. Brown breaks with stubborn research practices and assumptive standpoints in African-American religious history to expand our knowledge about African-American religion before the mid-eighteenth century and to rethink some of the established frameworks for interpreting African-American religion since the mid-eighteenth century.' Dianne M. Stewart Diakité, Emory University