University of Kansas

Faculty Member, History

Other Affiliations: University of Kansas, American Studies/African and African American Studies

Assistant Professor

About

My work focuses on alternative African American religions, and uses the concepts of bricolage and polyculturalism to argue for the rhizomatic construction of Black culture, as opposed to the Africanist roots paradigm. In my view, emphasizing the more recent, "horizontal" timeframe allows for more agency, ingenuity, and connectivity amongst the creators of new religious movements.

My first book, "Chosen People: African Americans and the Rise of Black Judaism," will be published by Oxford University Press in 2012. That book traces the rise of autochthonous forms of Black Judaism from 1890s Holiness churches to 1920s and thirties Black nationalist movements, which creatively combined traditions as diverse as freemasonry, esoteric books, conjuring, Holiness Christianity, and Judaism.

My second book project, which I am working on in my present NEH fellowship at Chicago's Newberry Library, is called "Black Orientalism: Spiritualists, Muslims, Minstrels, Masons & the Making of Black Religions." I argue that images of Islam circulated with much greater volume and velocity in the profane spaces of public culture than they did in religious communities. These popular representations of Islam were Orientalist, yet African Americans were able to claim and use them for oppositional purposes. I focus in particular on the cultural forms that shaped the life of Noble Drew Ali - the circus, the Shriners, Black discourses about Islam in Africa, Rosicrucianism, and Black Spiritual churches.

I am also working on a social history of Harlem during the New Negro Renaissance, and have done research on Langston Hughes and other Renaissance artists.

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