| This dissertation project is an ethnographic description of a middle class Afrocentric religious community, First Afrikan Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia. First Afrikan is a community in the process of creating an identity and nurturing a culture that privileges African ways of knowing and being. Of import to my research is how this Africanness is constructed in the individual and collective imaginations of the congregants and what it means to the community's understanding of racial, class, gender and national identities. This church community has established firm tenets about how a person of African descent should think through and act within the social contexts in which he find himself. At the same time, the church is a space which tolerates, in some cases, and fosters, in others, a diversity of ideas and approaches to being an Afrocentric person. Consequently, this project is largely an exploration of the interplay between the firmly held convictions of the community and the continuum along which those convictions are interpreted and enacted.; Broadly, the objectives of the project are: (a) to provide an overview of the community in terms of its rituals, rhetoric and meaning to its members, (b) to delineate the ways through which Afrocentrism is defined and how it is enacted through bodily and linguistic performances, (c) to examine the roles of class and education within the congregation's understanding of itself, (d) to consider the dynamics between Afrocentric ideology and Womanist theology, (e) to explore the relationships between theology and Blackness and (f) to probe the interconnections between racial identity and national identity especially as pertains to double consciousness. These objectives are accomplished through an analysis of the ethnographic evidence culled from participant observations and in-depth interviews as well as documentary research. |
