Faith and Religion Among African Americans

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to invite you to contribute to this Religions Special Issue: “Faith and Religion among African Americans”. 

In his early work, Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class Consciousness, and Revolution, the late historian, Manning Marable, used the term “Blackwater” to describe “an activist tradition of Black faith.” This Black faith tradition, on Marable’s account, was born in resistance to chattel slavery, yet endured through the post-civil-rights-era. Marable described Black faith as a vital means through which African Americans “returned to the source of our humanity,” but also as a means for “building a strategy for liberation in the material world.” For Marable, “Blackwater,” stands in sharp contradiction to “the accommodationist other-worldliness” of dominant expressions of Black religious belief, practices, and institutions. 

More than forty years later, “Blackwater,” as an enduring tradition of Black faith that is neither reducible to, nor a refusal of, Black religion, remains a useful and interesting term with which to consider Black religious traditions. In our contemporary historical context, when many activists engaged in the ongoing movement for Black lives might identify more readily with the former rather than the latter, how might Marable’s articulation of an enduring “activist tradition of black faith,” help us to better understand the various ways African Americans have attempted to return to, or completely reimagine, “the sources of our humanity” in a social order that persistently attempts to render Black lives sub- or even non-human? What strategies for material (and spiritual) liberation have been imagined and/or enacted by those who have inherited, extended, or reconfigured the Blackwater tradition? In a more critical vein, we might ask how the reification of binaries between “this-worldly” and “other-worldly” approaches to Black religion, seemingly inherent in Marable’s Blackwater, have been complicated by activists, artists, and religious practitioners who have used “Black faith” to imagine other worlds of Black flourishing and futurity—especially by those whose “Black faith” is enacted in and through religious, spiritual, or cultural traditions and practices other than dominant expressions of Christianity and Islam. Alternatively, how has the persistence of anti-Black violence and death challenged the endurance of Black faith (or faith in Black endurance) which has led some activists and intellectuals to question not only possibilities for liberation in the material world, but also the very notion of “returning” to any “sources” of a Black humanity that have been perpetually negated in an anti-Black world. Put another way, what is the place of doubt, despair, or even pessimism within the tradition of Blackwater? Are contemporary theories of Afro-pessimism and Black nihilism antithetical to the Blackwater tradition, or are they somehow bound up together with this activist tradition of Black faith?

Abstracts of 250-500 words should be submitted to the Special Issue editor, Dr. Michael Brandon McCormack at [email protected] by May 1, 2023. Completed and accepted papers of 3,500 to 7,500 words should be submitted using the journal’s submission system by August 1, 2023. 

All submissions must contain original unpublished work not being considered for publication elsewhere. All essays are peer-reviewed. 

Dr. Michael Brandon Mccormack
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.

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 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.

• Blackwater
• Black faith
• religion
• spirituality
• activism
• pessimism
• nihilism
• futurity
• otherwise worlds