Spirit soundings: Religion, race and the arts in twentieth century America

Spirit Soundings: Religion, Race and the Arts in Twentieth Century America explores the ways in which various notions of religion and/or spirituality have figured into efforts to theorize a racial aesthetic over the course of the twentieth century. Through an engagement with the three most iconic moments of black cultural production---the New Negro movement (circa 1920-30s), the Black Arts movement (circa 1960-70s), and the Word movement (circa 1980-90s)---this dissertation reveals that religion has consistently been a critical ingredient in black aesthetic debates. These movements represent epochal moments in black cultural life, witnessing the shifts from a concern with Negro Art, to the Black Aesthetic, and then on to New Black aesthetics. Each debate is here understood similarly as concerned not only with interpreting African American art, but with harnessing and directing the aesthetic and political energies of the artists and critics who comprised each of these movements with a normative vision of black politics and culture. Decidedly inter-disciplinary, Spirit Soundings is a historical project that employs the arts and popular culture to engage questions in the field of religious studies. While scholarship has generally cast the sensibilities of each of these movements as secular, secularizing, if not profane, this study argues that religion, albeit defined and described differently, remained a fertile and fluid ground on which to base arguments both in favor of and against a racial aesthetic. Ultimately, this dissertation advances the claim that black aesthetic debates bear witness to religious tensions in African/American culture in particular historical moments. That is, artists and critics who theorized a racial aesthetic have discussed religion in particular ways, celebrated specific religious practices, and critiqued certain religious beliefs in ways that reflect the particular historical contexts in which they wrote, and in doing so they reveal the impact of circulating normative definitions of religion on black cultural production. In each case, "religion" and "spirituality" function as key categories for identifying what is (or is not) perceived to constitute or contribute to a racial aesthetic. Just as the racial discourse radically shifted in each of the periods that animate this study, so too did the ways in which black artists and critics imagine religion evolve in a manner that reflected broader developments in American religious history.