Spirit in the Dark: Book Forum on The Immanent Frame

Yesterday the introduction to a forum on my book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics, went live on The Book Blog of The Immanent Frame. 

I am, of course, excited to see my work featured in this space. Among other things, for the past decade The Immanent Frame has hosted forums on books by an incredible list of scholars, including the likes of Charles Taylor, Elizabeth Shakman-Hurd, Kathryn Lofton, Webb Keane, Brad Gregory, Courtney Bender and Robert Bellah --- to name just a few. I want to thank The Immanent Frame's Editorial Board for the invitation to host a forum on Spirit in the Dark, as well as to extend special gratitude to the editorial staff (Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Olivia Whitener) for all of the work that went into making it happen.

Please keep an eye out for the series of responses to Spirit in the Dark, which will be posted to The Immanent Frame  in the weeks ahead.

For now, what follows is an excerpt from my introduction to the forum and a link to the full essay on The Immanent Frame. It's a short "original" essay that attempts to situate Spirit in the Dark in relationship to a couple of key theoretical questions that lie behind my efforts to narrate African American religious and literary histories as a shared story. I found this task -- of writing something new about my own work -- to be surprisingly difficult; but that's a topic for another day.  For now, I hope that you find The Immanent Frame's forum to be a fruitful and interesting conversation about my book and the broader themes of religion, race and the arts around which Spirit in the Dark is organized.

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Spirit in the Dark—An introduction
I have written elsewhere about a set of contemporary experiences and observations—although now aged by roughly two decades—that provided the first sparks of interest in the questions that led to my first book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. Travels back and forth between church services, on one hand, and open mics and poetry readings, on the other, during the 1990s provided the initial impetus for my efforts to bring religion and literature in conversation in the form of the longer story that Spirit in the Dark narrates. Admittedly, the religious history of black letters from the 1920s to the early 1970s that I offer is colored by “presentist” concerns.

To state the matter differently, Spirit in the Dark grew out of my desire for a better historical understanding of how things—things religious and things literary—came to be the way they are. So another way to account for (rather than obscure) the play between past and present, the personal and the historical, in Spirit in the Dark is to acknowledge the kinds of theoretical questions that animate my study of religion and the arts in twentieth-century (black) America.

As I was moving through doctoral studies, immersing myself in the fields of African American literary/cultural history and American religious history, two specific intellectual developments captured my imagination. Just one year before I began my PhD . . .

To continue reading, go to The Immanent Frame.

Spirit in the Dark featured on Religion Dispatches

Two days ago, on March 7, two pieces about my book were published on the popular religion website, Religion Dispatches. Thanks for the invitation, Evan Derkacz, and kudos on the great work that RD continues to publish!!!

The first is an interview, Poets and Preachers: How black Literature Blurs the Lines Between Sacred and Secular.

And the second is an excerpt -- "Religion and Gender Trouble in the Black Arts" -- from chapter 6 on the Spirit in the Dark, which focuses on Toni Cade Bambara's class 1970 anthology, The Black Woman, as an entry point into the how religion and gender converged in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Upcoming Event at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Harlem: Wednesday, February 15th at 6:30pm

I am looking forward to witnessing this performance (featuring Alicia Hall Moran) and moderating the dialogue that will follow it (with Onleilove Alston, Amy Butler, Serene Jones, and Lisbeth Melendez Rivera); as part of the month-long series, "Tomorrow is Still Ours Festival of Visionary Arts, Ideas and Activism," hosted at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Harlem.

New Review Essay: A Tapestry of Black Lives up on Public Books

Recently I had the opportunity to read and write a review of Jesmyn Ward's wonderful new edited volume, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks on Race, which pays obvious tribute to the great James Baldwin. It also features work by nineteen of today's most insightful and highly regarded writers--including Carol Anderson, , Mitchell S. Jackson, Emily Raboteau, Claudia Rankine, and Natasha Trethewey, and Isabel Wilkerson, Kevin Young. I've read the work of some of whom of these authors many times before (like Edwidge Danticat), and others for the first time, such as Garnette Cadogan.

I learned a great deal from each of the selections in this anthology. And about so many things. Perhaps most obviously, living while black and writing on race stand out; as would be expected in a book that takes cues for its title from James Baldwin's now classic book, The Fire Next Time (1962). 

Yet what resonated most powerfully with me while reading this new volume were the thoughtful reflections on the joys and anxieties attendant to raising children--and raising black children, in particular--in this peculiar historical moment. A moment when, now, a black president is at once an undeniable reality and a thing of the past even as the racial (that is, the overtly anti-black) pasts that many thought (or hoped and wished) were long behind us are the stuff of the everyday news cycle.

So much more that could be said... For now, what follows is an excerpt from the essay, followed by link to full piece on Public Books.

"James Baldwin’s legacy looms powerfully in this current moment. This may be all the more true for black writers. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of the contributors to Jesmyn Ward’s timely new anthology of essays about race in the United States, admits that she has often “found time to pray intensely at the altar of Baldwin.” Her religious metaphor is apt. Baldwin was both a secular master of the American essay and novel, and a spiritual seer on race matters. At the same time, his writing often hummed in the registers of the Afro-Protestant churches where he first heard the Word call him by name.

In her introduction, Ward explains that she found herself turning to Baldwin’s essays in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 and, subsequently, of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013. Winner of the National Book Award for her 2011 novel, Salvage the Bones, Ward sketches a direct line to Baldwin by adapting the title of his 1963 classic, The Fire Next Time. Her title, The Fire This Time, shifts from the future to the present tense, from prophecy to confirmation. However, in contrast to Baldwin’s singular epistle, Ward’s book is an anthology. As such, it gathers a range of perspectives that don’t always align. This is not a criticism; it is simply an acknowledgement of the constraints and possibilities of genre. Ward’s The Fire This Time provides a rich and varied portrait of the work that race does in the making of black lives and literature today. There’s less critique, more nuanced considerations and layered contexts, befitting the complexity of black life in 2016.

Anthologies rely upon dialogue more than argument... "

To continue reading the full essay, go to Public Books

New Website & New Book

9.1.2016: Happy Birthday josefsorett.com 2.0 and Spirit in the Dark!!!!!!

I want to thank Joselin Mane, my longtime "social media guru," for challenging me to create a website back in 2007 and insisting that I sign up for Twitter not long after that. While I am still finding my twitter-legs, and I aspire to update my blog with greater regularity, thanks to Joselin's techie skill-set and editorial eye it is my pleasure to introduce a new and improved version of josefsorett.com at the same time that my first book -- Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics -- comes out.

Thank you to everyone who took a few minutes to few the site and offer feedback over the past two weeks. In the blog's featured banner slides and below, you'll find old blog highlights dating back to my first launch back on 07.07.07. With the re-launch now, I invite to you subscribe and check out the site for new content in the months ahead!!!

With regards to THE BOOK --- first of all, BUY IT!!!! --- I want to thank my editor, Theo Calderara (and his team at Oxford University Press) for his great patience and persistent efforts to help bring Spirit in the Dark into the world.

Today (9.1.2016) is the official release date, and hardback and e-reader versions are available from Barnes and Nobles , Amazon and elsewhere.

You can also use promo code AAFLYG6 to purchase Spirit in the Dark (for a 30% discount) directly from the publisher at https://global.oup.com/academic.

And a special thanks to Alyssa Bender Russell for a wonderful publicity flyer!!! (see below) 

From the Vault: After Words with Josh Dubler (August 2013)

Click on the following image to view a 2013 conversation between me and Joshua Dubler regarding his book Down in the Chapel on Book TV's After Words program.

From the Vault: Harlem Book Fair (July 2013)

Click on the following image to view the New Jerusalem panel that I moderated at the 2013 Harlem Book Fair, featuring Anthea Butler, James Forbes, Eddie Glaude and Obery Hendricks. The panel aired live back then and can still be viewed on Book TV.

Coming Soon: Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics

Over the weekend I was feeling buoyed by all of the words of encouragement in response to the announcement of my forthcoming book, Spirit in the Dark, which is now available for pre-order online. I'm even more excited now that the Cover image and Table of Contents are posted on the website of Oxford University Press, along with the blurbs, which are also up on Amazon. The book's official release date is September 1, 2016, with a ship date of August 1st.

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I'm pleased to share the blurbs now, with much appreciation and gratitude to four scholars whose work has influenced my own and for whom I have deep admiration and respect:

"Spirit in the Dark is a finely honed compendium of black American writers and the breadth of their religious influences. That black intellectuals and artists were also sometimes dogmatic religious adherents, eclectic spiritualists, and irrepressible agnostics is not an unknown observation, but what these identifications meant for modern black expressive culture has gone mostly unsaid. Until now. A richly historical study, Spirit in the Dark is a valuable resource indeed." --Maurice Wallace, English and Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia (and author of Constructing the Black Masculine)

"An exciting and innovative intervention that deftly melds African American religious and cultural studies." -- Barbara D. Savage, author of Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion

"In this magisterial book, Josef Sorett takes us into those black literary spaces that have heretofore been described as secular and reveals how those who reside therein imagine the beautiful in light of the religious. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, Sorett pushes the boundaries of our understanding of the workings of the 'spirit' and, in doing so, unsettles our understanding of black religion and literature. This SPIRIT moves in this book. It is a must read!" --Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Princeton University (author of, most recently, Democracy in Black)

"Even at their most assertively secular, black expressive arts over the last century have riffed on Afro-Protestant church structures that they in turn attenuate, revise, and sustain. In this venturesome book Josef Sorett traces the 'celebratory ambivalence' that animates and infuses African-American cultural production from the Great Migration to the present. Spirit in the Dark is the best single-volume work I know of on the arts and fictions of Afro-Protestant modernity." --Tracy Fessenden, author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature