Spirituality, Identity and Resistance in African American Literature

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Literature will focus on African American religions in/and African American literature. This issue will look broadly at African American literary forms, from memoir to novel, poetry to plays, novels to essays, aiming to understand how African American religions are understood and practiced.

African American religions are religions of contact, of violence and displacement, of memory, and of choice. African peoples in diaspora encountered European and American Christianity, European and Indigenous American folkways, and Islam. In addition, African Americans retain memories of Africa, passed down from generation to generation. These memories are part of their practices and understanding, also incorporating new religious movements and African-derived practices such as Kwanzaa. In addition, African Americans have entered the “world” religions, such as Buddhism.

This volume seeks to explore how African American religions are expressed in a broad range of literary forms, like biographym memoir, novel, poetry, drama, essays, as well as slave and neo-slave narratives. While this issue is interested in canonical African American literature, like the work of Toni Morrison, it also seeks to see how religion is understood in popular literature, like science fiction and fantasy, mystery, romance, children’s literature, and other forms as well. Hence, we seek to broaden the understanding of how religion appears in and functions in African American cultural production. In addition, we are interested in religions including and other than Christianity, as well as syncretic traditions. James W. Coleman’s Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction (2006), the work of Yolanda Pierce, including Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative (2005) and “African American Literature as Spiritual Witness: The Poetic Example of Margaret Alexander Walker” (Christianity and Literature 2009); Kimberly Rae Connor’s “Redeeming the Human Reality,” in Teaching Religion and Literature (2018); Craig R. Prentiss’ Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (2015), and my own work on Buddhism in Alice Walker’s thought offer examples for thought but do not limit potential essay topics.

Prof. Dr. Carolyn M. Jones Medine
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Literature is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• African American religion and/in African American literature
• memory and history
• womanist
• beauty
• suffering
• transformation
• freedom
• African Americans in “world” religions
• religious imagination