From the earliest literary productions of the eighteenth century to the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the twenty-first century, religion--namely Protestant Christianity--has been encoded in black life in North America. Black is a Church invites attention to the surprising alliances, peculiar performances, and at times contradictory ideas and complex institutions that shape the contours black life in the United States.
While many of the most significant black intellectual movements of the second half of the twentieth century have been perceived as secular, Josef Sorett demonstrates in this book that religion was actually a fertile, fluid and formidable force within these movements. Spirit in the Dark examines how African American literary visions were animated and organized by religion and spirituality, from the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s