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West Africa's Women of God: Alinesitoué and the Diola Prophetic Tradition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, (November 2016). Finalist for Albert J. Raboteau Prize in Africana Religions.
Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Winner of the American Academy of Religion Award, "Best First Book in the History of Religions," 2000.
Books
Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (New York: New York University Press, July 2020) (also on Amazon)
--WINNER, 2022 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, Council of Graduate Schools
--FINALIST, 2021 Religion and the Arts Book Award, American Academy of Religion
--Reviewed in Reading Religion: https://readingreligion.org/books/lift-every-voice-and-swing
--Reviewed in Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone: http://www.cercles.com/review/r92/Booker.html
--Reviewed in American Catholic Studies: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/854095
--Reviewed in American Religion: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/857086
--Reviewed in Journal of African American History: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/720229
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
"Mothers of the Movement: Evangelicalism and Religious Experience in Black Women's Activism," in 'Evangelicalism: New Directions in Scholarship,' ed. Randall Balmer and Edward J. Blum, Special issue of Religions 12 (2), 141 (2021): available https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/2/141/htm.
"'Deplorable Exegesis': Dick Gregory's Irreverent Scriptural Authority in the 1960s and 1970s," Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 30.2 (2020): 1-50, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/religion-and-american-culture/ar...
"'Pulpit and Pew': African American Humor on Irreverent Religious Participation in Negro Digest, 1943-1950," Journal of Africana Religions 8.1 (2020): 1-36, available https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.8.1.0001. (PDF available here)
"'God's Spirit Lives in Me': Metaphysical Theology in Charleszetta 'Mother' Waddles' Urban Mission to the Poor," Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 22.1 (August 2018): 5-33, available http://nr.ucpress.edu/content/22/1/5. (PDF available here)
"Performing, Representing, and Archiving Belief: Religious Expressions among Jazz Musicians," Religions 7 (8), 108 (2016): available http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/7/8/108/html.
"'An Authentic Record of My Race': Exploring the Popular Narratives of African American Religion in the Music of Duke Ellington," Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 25.1 (2015): 1-36, available https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rac.2015.25.1.1.
"Civil Rights Religion? Rethinking 1950s and 1960s Political Activism for African American Religious History," Journal of Africana Religions 2.2 (2014): 211-243, available https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.2.2.0211. (PDF available here)
Book Chapters
"'Pray for good sounds': Black Catholic Practice, Friendship, and Irreverence in the Intimate Correspondences of Mary Lou Williams," forthcoming for the "American Catholic Laywomen in the Twentieth Century" book project, ed. Nicholas Rademacher and Sandra Yocum.
"The Hate That Hate Produced: Representing Black Religion in the Twentieth Century," in A Companion to American Religious History, ed. Benjamin E. Park (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021), 301-316. (contact for info)
Book Reviews
Review of Alisha Lola Jones, Flaming? The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), for American Religion 2.2 (Spring 2021): 145-147. (PDF available here)
Review of Emily Suzanne Clark and Brad Stoddard, Race and New Religious Movements in the USA: A Documentary Reader (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 24.3 (Feb 2021): 121-122. (PDF available here)
Review of documentary film, Father's Kingdom (2017), for Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 23.3 (Feb 2020): 114-116. (PDF available here)
Review of Tracy Fessenden, Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018), for Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief (18 July 2019), available https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2019.1633084 (PDF available here).
Review of Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (UNC, 2017), for Reading Religion: A Publication of the American Academy of Religion (2018), available http://readingreligion.org/books/promise-patriarchy.
Review of Lerone A. Martin, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (NYU, 2014) for Journal of Religion and Culture 25 (2015): 111-115, available http://www.jrc-concordia.ca/preaching-on-wax-review/.
Encyclopedia Entries
"Abraham Joshua Heschel," "Mordecai Wyatt Johnson," "George Dennis Sale Kelsey," and "Benjamin Elijah Mays," in The Martin Luther King, Jr., Encyclopedia, ed. Clayborne Carson, et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007).
Public Scholarly Engagement
"Black Christian Faith: Perennial Decline, Respectability, and 'the back of the church'," Black Perspectives, African American Intellectual History Society, February 10, 2022.
"How to Think beyond 'the Black Church' and the Trope of Generational Rebellion," The Black Church in American Public Life, the Berkley Forum, Georgetown University, co-sponsored by the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice, Columbia University; April 8, 2021
"Prosperity Meets the Poor: The Mission of Mother Waddles in Urban America," Sacred Writes – Faithfully Magazine, October 8, 2020
"Keeping Duke Ellington Alive in Matter and in Spirit," Sacred Matters: Religious Currents in Culture, July 22, 2020
"The Church of Jazz - An Interview with Author Vaughn Booker," 360° Sound, Jul 16, 2020
"Ask the Expert: The Meaning of Jazz," in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (July-Aug 2020)
"Performance," for the "A Universe of Terms" series, ed. Mona Oraby and Daniel Vaca, The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion and the Public Sphere, December 20, 2019
Interview with Tiffanie Wen on the future of religion, "Eight Dartmouth Professors Peer into the Future (It's not all scary.)," in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (May-Jun 2018)
"The False God of Nationalism," a piece for The New School's Public Seminar, January 9, 2018
A 2017 interview with Professor Judith Weisenfeld of Princeton University, discussing her book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Pr.) in Religion & Politics.
Resource List for studying Race and Religion in American History, 2014
(Ed.) Where is All My Relation: The Poetics of Dave the Potter (2018).
"Words, Wares, Names: Dave the Potter as American Archive." Anglia. Journal of English Philology / Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 138.3 (2020): 1-20.
"Misreading with the President: Re-reading the Covers of John Lewis's March." International Journal of Comic Art 20.1 (2018): 17-25.
"Depicting African American Life in Graphics and Visual Cultures." In A History of African American Autobiography, ed., Joycelyn Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
"Picturing Black Authorship with and against Stowe's Lens." In African American Literature in Transition, Volume 4: 1850-1865, ed. Teresa Zackodnik. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
"Anarchic Strains in the Comics of Ronald Wimberly and Keith Knight." SubStance: Special Issue on Comics and Anarchy 46.2 (2017): 110-128.
"Signifying Marks and The 'Not Counted' Inscriptions of Dave the Potter." Arizona Quarterly 72.4 (Winter 2016): 1-25.
"Digression, Slavery, and Failing to Return in The Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke." Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 39.4 (Fall 2016): 511-534.
"The Cartoonal Slave." In The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Culture, eds. Soyica Colbert, Robert Patterson, and Aida Hussen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. 168-94.
"Slave Memory Without Words in Kyle Baker's Nat Turner." Callaloo 36.2 (2013): 279-297.
"The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter." African American Review 44.4 (2011): 607-18.
"Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel." College Literature 38.3 (2011): 129-149.
"Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography," College Literature 38:3 (2011) 21-44.
"'Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture': Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature," American Literature 82:1 (2010) 57-90.
"Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels," MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 32:3 (2007) 175-200.
"Slave Cyborgs and the Black Infovirus: Ishmael Reed's Cybernetic Aesthetics," Modern Fiction Studies 49:2 (2003) 261-283.
"Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto(bio)ethnography." African American Review 35.3 (2001): 391-408.
Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women's Discourses of the Female Body. (University of Nebraska Press, 2019.)
The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender, Migration, and the Claims of Postcolonial Nationhood in Francophone African Literatures. (Lexington Books, 2010)
Homophobic Africa?, editor; special issue of African Studies Review, special issue 56.2 (2013)
"He who Sows Colonization Will Reap Immigration: Some Insights from the New Migritude." The Minnesota Review 94 (Spring 2020)
"Alain Mabanckou and the Category of World Literature." Research in African Literatures 51.3 (forthcoming, Fall 2020)
"Conceptualizing Medical Humanities Programs in Low-Resource Settings in Africa." with Quentin Eichabaum and al. Academic Medicine, Vol. 94, No. 8 / August 2019.
"The Invention of the Homosexual: How Homophobia became a Political Strategy in Senegal." Gender and Sexuality in Senegal. Eds. M'Baye Babacar and Besi Muhonja. Lexington Books, 2019. 27-52.
"Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer." Culture, Theory and Critique 57.3 (2016): 391-407
"Un/Clothing African Womanhood: Colonial Statements and Postcolonial Discourses of the African Female Body." The Journal of Contemporary African Studies 33.1 (2015): 12-26.
"Afropean Masculinities as Bricolage." Francophone Afropean Literatures. Eds Nicki Hitchcott and Dominic Thomas. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2014. 155-170.
"Homophobic Africa?" African Studies Review 56.2 (2013): 21-32.
"A Pedagogy of the Black Female Body: Angèle Essamba's Black Female Nudes." Third Text 24.6 (2010): 653-664.
"Housing and Homing the Black Female Body in France: Calixthe Beyala and the Legacy of Sarah Baartman and Josephine Baker." Black Womanhood: Icons, Images and Ideologies of the African Body. University of Washington Press, 2008. 259-278.
The Cultures and Letters of the Black Diaspora, editor with Ivy G. Wilson; special issue of Callaoo 30.2 (2007)
"Black is the Color of the Cosmos or Callaloo and The Cultures of the Diaspora Now," with Ivy G. Wilson; Callaloo 30.2 (2007): 415-419
"Male Wives, Female Husbands: Immigration, Gender and Home." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 32.3-4 (2005): 325-342.
"Court Poet and Wild Child: Two Readings of Calixthe Beyala's Les Honneurs perdus" Nottingham French Studies 43.3 (2004): 15-27.
"Neither Here Nor There: Calixthe Beyala's Collapsing Homes." Research in African Literatures 33.2 (2002): 34-45.
"Autobiography or Autojustification: Re-reading Bugul's Le baobab fou." The Literary Griot 11.2 (1999): 56-69.
“Faustin Linyekula and the Violence of Plague.” Theatre Journal (December 2020): 405-423.
"The Fabulous Pan-Africanism of Binyavanga Wainaina." GLQ 26.3 (June 2020): 529-560.
"Anti-Homosexual Acts on Trial: The Poetics of Justice in Uganda." TDR 63.2 (Summer 2019): 6-33.
Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018.
Forged in Fire by Okello Kelo Sam, Laura Edmondson, and Robert Ajwang. Voorhees Theatre in Brooklyn, NY. 2015.
“Uganda Is Too Sexy: Reflections on Kony 2012.” TDR 56.3 (Fall 2012). 10-17.
Forged in Fire (play). By Okello Kelo Sam, Laura Edmondson, and Robert Ajwang. Excerpted in Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters. Ed. Michael Balfour. Bristol, UK and Chicago: Intellect Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2012. 61-66.
Eat Like a Bird (play). In Cultural Conversations: Works in Progress, Writers in the Making, ed. Susan B. Russell (Lemont, PA: Eifrig Publishing, 2011), 91-132.
"Confessions of a Failed Theatre Activist: Intercultural Encounters in Uganda and Rwanda." In Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange: Vectors of the Radical, edited by Mike Sell. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 41-59.
“Genocide Unbound: Erik Ehn, Rwanda, and an Aesthetics of Discomfort,” Theatre Journal, 61:1 (March 2009): 65-83.
Review essay: "Performing Africa." African Affairs 109 (2009): 151-160.
“The Poetics of Displacement and the Politics of Genocide in Three Plays about Rwanda,” in Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, edited by Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 54-78.
Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage, Indiana University Press, 2007.
“Of Sugarcoating and Hope,” TDR, 51:2 (May 2007): 7-10.
“Marketing Trauma and the Theatre of War in Northern Uganda,” Theatre Journal, 57:3 (2005): 451-474.
“Love in the Time of Dissertations: An Ethnographic Tale,” with R O Ajwang, Qualitative Inquiry, 9:3 (June 2003): 466-480.
"Race," in Keywords for African American Studies, New York University Press
"Au Nègre Joyeux: Everyday Anti-blackness Guised as Public Art," Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art
"Racial Profiling and the 'French Exception,'" French Cultural Studies
"The Politics of Race-Blindness: (Anti)blackness and Category Blindness in Contemporary France," Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
King, Deborah K. 2010. "Mom-in-Chief: Community Othermothering and Michelle Obama, The First Lady of the People's House," in Race in the Age of Obama, edited by Donald Cunnigen and Marino A. Bruce. UK: Emerald Group Publishing. Research in Race and Ethnic Relations Series, Volume 16: 77-123.
“Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, v14 n1 (Autumn 1988) 88-111.
Durr, Marlese and King, Deborah K. “Braiding, Slicing, and Dicing: The African American Woman’s Home as a Site of Work.” (under review)
“Missing the Beat, Unraveling the Threads: Class and Gender in Afro-American Social Issues,” The Black Scholar, 22:3 (Summer 1992) 36-44.
Commercial Campaigns:
Until We All Win Campaign, Nike, Camera Operator
Selected Films:
2017 Practice, China, Director, Co-Cinematographer, Editor
2018 The Offering, Director, Co-Cinematographer, Editor
2018 An Exercise in Transfiguration, Archival, Director, Editor
2015 Macarrão, narrative, Writer, Director
2013 Bound, documentary, Co-Cinematographer
2010 La Receta: (The Recipe) narrative, Director, Writer, Editor
2010 El Nazareno (Black Christ of Portobello), documentary, Director, Cinematographer
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
2017 Practice, Director and Co-cinematographer
2018 Bridge/Refrain, Cinematographer
2017 Palenque, Columbia, Co-Cinematographer & Production Team
2013 All Men are Flowers, Director of Photography
2012 Special Moments by Oksana, Director of Photography
2012 Maria Moderne, Director of Photography
2011, Los Gigantes, Co-Cinematographer
2010 Little Creatures, Director of Photography
“Triangular Voyages: Locating the Transnational Caribbean Woman in Paule Marshall’s ‘To Da-duh, in Memoriam.’” Special Issue Editor Jennifer Williams. Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, (Fall 2017).
“Satire in the Black Americas: Transnational Problematizations in Chappelle’s Show and Ity and Fancy Cat.” Contemporary African American Satire. Eds. James J. Donahue and Derek Maus. (Summer 2015, University Press of Mississippi).
“In Her Own Image: Literary and Visual Representations of Selfhood in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 12.1 (Spring 2014)
Humor in the Caribbean Literary Canon, New Caribbean Studies Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
“Through the Caribbean Sea and Other Waters: Loretta Collins Klobah’s The Twelve Foot Neon Woman Enters a Woman Poet’s World.” Small Axe Salon, 4. (September 2012).
“Violent Liaisons: Historical Crossings and the Negotiation of Sex and Sexuality in The Book of Night Women and The True History of Paradise.” Small Axe, 38. (July 2012).
“Traveling Humour Reimagined: The Comedic Unhinging of the Western Gaze in Caribbean Postcards.” Caribbean Quarterly, 58.2-3. (June-September 2012).
“Synaesthesia and the Refracted Ethnographic Gaze in Nellie Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints.” Publication of the Afro-Latin American Research Association, 15 (October 2011), 108-120.
“Slackness and a Mento Aesthetic: Louise Bennett’s Trickster Poetics and Jamaican Women’s Exploration of Sexuality.” Editor Ifeoma Nwankwo. Journal of West Indian Literature, 18.1. (November 2009).
Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers, Rutgers University Press, 2014
2021: Reimagining Social Medicine from the South, Abigail H. Neely. Duke University Press.
2021: "The Differential Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Geography in the United States." Abigail H. Neely and Patricia J. Lopez.The Professional Geographer (2021). DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2021.2000448.
2021: "Hlonipha and Health: Ancestors, Taboos, and Social Medicine in South Africa." Abigail H. Neely. Africa 91, no. 3 (2021): 473-492. DOI: 10.1017/S0001972021000279.
2021: "Fundamentally Uncaring: Neoliberalism and the Differential Multi-Scalar Impacts of COVID-19 in the U.S," Patricia J. Lopez and Abigail H. Neely. Social Science and Medicine, 272: 1-8. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113707.
2020: "Entangled Agencies: Rethinking Causality and Health in Political-Ecology," Abigail H. Neely, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. DOI: 2514848620943889
2020: "Care in the Time of COVID-19," Abigail H. Neely and Patricia J. Lopez. Interventions Piece for Antipode.
2019: "Two Worlds, One Bottle: An Object-Centered Ethnography for Global Health," Abigail H. Neely, Medicine Anthropology Theory, doi.org/10.17157/mat.6.4.642
2019: "Grieving Daughter, Grieving Witness," Abigail H. Neely. In Kathryn A. Gillespie and Patricia J. Lopez, Grieving Witnesses/Witnessing Grief: The Politics of Grief in the Field. Under contract with the University of California Press.
2019: "A Qualitative Approach to Examining Health Care Access in Rural South Africa," Abigail H. Neely and Arunsrinivasan Ponshunmugum. Social Science and Medicine, 230: 214-221, doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.04.025.
2018: Chris S. Duvall, Bilal Butt, Abigail H. Neely, "The trouble with savanna and other environmental categories, especially in Africa." In Rebecca Lave, Christine Biermann, and Stuart N. Lane, The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography. Palgrave Macmillan.
2017: "Global Health from the Outside: The Promise of Place-Based Research" Abigail H. Neely And Alex M. Nading. Health & Place, DOI:10.1016/j.jhg.2016.12.007.
2015: "Internal Ecologies and the Limits of Local Biologies: A Political Ecology of Tuberculosis in the Time of AIDS," Abigail H. Neely. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 4: 791-805.
2015: "Relationship and Research Methods: Entanglements, Intra-Action, and Diffraction," Abigail H. Neely and Thokozile Nguse. In Gavin Bridge, Tom Perreault, and James McCarthy, eds., Handbook of Political Ecology. Routledge: 140-9.
2014: "Triangulating Health: Toward a Political Ecology of Health," Paul Jackson and Abigail H. Neely. Progress in Human Geography, published online 31 March 2014.
2010: "'Blame it on the Weeds': Politics, Poverty, and Ecology in the New South Africa," Abigail H. Neely. Journal of Southern African Studies 36, no. 4: 869-887.
The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960-1990. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
The Business of Black Power: Corporate Responsibility, Community Development, and Capitalism in Post-War America, edited by Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, University of Rochester Press, 2012
"An Explosion in the 'Laboratory of Democracy,' " Black Power at Work, edited by David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey, Cornell University Press, 2010.
"What's the Matter with Newark?" Shelterforce, Journal of the National Housing Institute, Fall 2008.
“Dangerous Librarians: The Survival of Branch Libraries in New York’s Fiscal Crisis” in The Journal of Urban History https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144220965572
“Family and History Mix during a Fulbright Year: A personal and intellectual Journey in Ghana,” Perspectives Daily, (September 2021) in Perspectives on History, Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association
“Connecting decolonization in Africa and the US Civil Rights Movement,” World History Project, Bill Gates Foundation, (Summer 2020)
“Reframing Yaa Asantewaa through the Shifting Paradigms of African Historiography,” in The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, ed. Janell C. Hobson, (Routledge, 2021), 236-244.
"Women’s International Alliances in an Emergent Ghana." Journal of West African History, 4:1 (2018), 27-56.
“The Ghana Trades Union Congress and the Politics of International Labor Alliances, 1957–1971.” International Review of Social History, 62:2 (2017), 191-213.
“Decolonization, Cold War Dynamics and Nation Building in Ghana-Asia Relations: 1957- 1966.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 49:1 (2016), 235-253.
The Politics of Chieftaincy: Authority and Property in Colonial Ghana, 1920-1950 (University of Rochester Press, Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora Series, 2014).
“The Politics of Land and Urban Space in Colonial Accra,” History in Africa, 39 (2012): 293-329.