Life Under the Baobab Tree

Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously written by early and later diaspora people of African descent. Their speech arises from the depth of their experiences under the Baobab tree and offers to the world voices of resilience, newness/resurrection, hope, and life. Resolutely journeying on the trails of their ancestors, they speak about setbacks and forward-looking movements of liberation, social transformation, and community formation. The volume is a carefully woven conversation of intel­lectual substance and structure across time, space, and spirituality that is quintessentially “Africana” in its centering of methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialogical approaches to developing liberating epistemologies in the face of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance.

A critical part of this conversation is a reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the concept of religion in its colonial and imperial forms. Life Under the Baobab Tree examines how Africana peoples understand their corporate experiences of the divine not as “religion” apart from its inti­mate connections to social realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics, environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To that end Afro-Pessimistic formulations of life placed in dialogic relation Afro-Optimism. Both realities constitute life under the Baobab tree and represent the sturdiness and variation that anchors the deep ruptures that have affected Afri­cana life and the creative responses. The metaphor and substance of the tree resists reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions about the nature of diasporic lived experiences, both within the continent of Africa and in the African Diaspora.

Kenneth Ngwa is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew Theological School. Ngwa’s current research interests are in the fields of African/a biblical hermeneutics. He is also the founder and director of the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew Theological School, an interdisciplinary forum that examines the relation between religion and health, healthy disparities, and collaborative work for health equity. Ngwa is the author of The Hermeneutics of the ‘Happy’ Ending in Job 42:7–17 (2005); co-editor of Navigating African Biblical Hermeneutics: Trends and Themes from Our Pots and Calabashes (2018); and Let My People Live: An Africana Reading of Exodus (2022).Niang Aliou Cissé :

Aliou Cissé Niang is an associate professor of biblical interpretation—New Testament—at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Niang is the author of Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal (2009); co-author of Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World (2012); A Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude (Cascade Books, 2019); “Catholic Epistles,” in Anselm Companion to the New Testament (Anselm Academic, 2014); “Space and Human Agency in the Making of the Story of Gershom through a Senegalese Christian Lens,” Forum-Journal of Biblical Literature (2015); “Islandedness, Translation, and Creolization,” in Islands, Islanders, and Bible: RumInations (2015); “Christianity in Senegal,” and “Diola Religion,” both in Encyclopedia of Christianity in the Global South, ed. Mark A. Lamport and Philip Jenkins (2018).Pressley Arthur :

Arthur Pressley is an associate professor of psychology and religion at Drew University, where he has also served as academic dean. Pressley is also a clinical psychologist, a past president of the New Jersey Association of Black Psychologists and has worked on numerous international issues, most notably the Childhood Chernobyl Childhood Illness Project. He currently teaches a course titled “Fanon and Psychoanalysis of Black Novels.” Some of his published articles include “Using Novels of Resistance to Teach Intercultural Analysis and Empathy”; “Teaching Black: God Talk and Black Thinkers,” in Being Black, Teaching Black: Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies, ed. Nancy Lynne Westfield (2007), and “The Story of Nimrod: A Struggle with Otherness and the Search for Identity,” in African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod, ed. Anthony Pinn and Allen Dwight Callahan (2008).Adegbite Shola :

Shola Adegbite is a PhD candidate at Union Theological Seminary, NY. She engages the Bible using storytelling as well as her Yoruba-African background and socio-historical and ideology criticisms. She also has interests in gender, embodied, and earth-centered approaches with a goal of liberation, justice, healing, and diversity. She is a teaching fellow for introductory level classes on the Bible, New Testament, and church history.Yountae An :

An Yountae is an associate professor of religious studies at California State University, Northridge. Dr. An specializes in religions of the Americas with a particular focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. His research focuses on the construction of religion, race, and political identity in colonial and postcolonial Americas. He is author of The Decolonial Abyss (Fordham University Press, 2016), and The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making (forthcoming 2023, Duke University Press). He is co-editor with Eleanor Craig of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021).Coleman Desmond D. :

Desmond D. Coleman is a humanities teaching fellow in philosophy at Alvernia University. His current interests lie at the intersections of critical philosophy of race, Black critical philosophy of film, and the uses of alchemy within Western histories of science, art, theology, and philosophy. He’s currently in the process of rewriting his dissertation, for which he received a Ford Foundation Fellowship award, into a book (provisionally titled: “Ruminations on Alchemy and Blackness”).Faraji Salim :

Salim Faraji is a professor and former chair of Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is also the founding executive director of the Master of Arts in International Studies (MAIS) Africa Program at Concordia University Irvine in Ghana, West Africa. He is a member of the International Society for Nubian Studies and a founding member of the William Leo Hansberry Society. He specializes in early Christian history, Africana and Africanist historiography, Coptic studies, and the Kerma, Napatan, Meroitic and Medieval periods of Nubian history. Professor Faraji is a contributor to Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna Child, the Encyclopedia of African Religion, the Oxford Dictionary of African Biography, and more recently, Origins and Afterlives of Kush: Proceedings of the University of California at Santa Barbara Conference in Nubian Studies, July 25– 27 2019. He is the author of The Roots of Nubian Christianity Uncovered: The Triumph of the Last Pharaoh. Professor Faraji is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a practicing African Traditional Priest who has been initiated in both the Akan traditions of Ghana, West Africa, and ancient Egyptian and Nubian religious practice. He is an adjunct faculty member of the University of La Verne’s Ecumenical Center for Black Church Studies, Payne Theological Seminary, and is currently president of the Amen-Ra Community Assembly of California-Amen Ra Theological Seminary.Harding Rachel E. :

Rachel Elizabeth Harding is a poet, historian, and scholar of religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Harding teaches in the Ethnic Studies department of the University of Colorado Denver and writes about religion, creativity, and social justice in the experience of communities of African descent in the U.S. and Brazil. Dr. Harding is author of two books: A Refuge in Thunder, a history of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé; and more recently, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism and Mothering, co-written with her mother, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, on the role of compassion and mysticism in African American social justice organizing. Dr. Harding is also an ebômi (ritual elder) in the Terreiro do Cobre Candomblé community in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. She co directs the Veterans of Hope Project—an interdisciplinary initiative on religion, grassroots democracy, and healing, that was founded by her parents, Vincent and Rosemarie Freeney Harding. (www.veteransof hope.org).Khumalo Minenhle Nomalungelo :

Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo is a South African biblical scholar who focuses on reading sacred texts with understandings of popular cultural production of narrative. Her work makes use of ancestral, sociocultural, and academic practices toward constructing pedagogies for collective psychosocial resistance.Miller Althea Spencer :

Althea Spencer Miller is an assistant professor of New Testament, Drew Theological School. Spencer Miller’s recent research and work in progress under the heading “Reading with Island Eyes, Speaking in Island Tongues: A Postcolonial, Autoethnographic Approach to Orality” focuses on the development of an oral hermeneutic for decolonizing biblical interpretation. This research includes a teaching interest in Africana studies and religion and the development of oral and Africana pedagogies. Spencer Miller is co-editor of Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives with Kathleen O’Brien Wicker and Musa Dube (2005) and has contributed essays as chapters in many publications since then. One essay that introduces her thinking on orality as a cultural phenomenon is “Creolizing Hermeneutics: A Caribbean Invitation,” in Islands, Islanders, and the Bible: Ruminations (2015).Mordecai Pamela :

Pamela Mordecai writes poetry, plays, and long and short fiction. Born and raised in Jamaica, she and her family immigrated to Canada in 1994. A former teacher and teacher-trainer with a PhD in English, Mordecai has authored and co-authored numerous textbooks and edited and co-edited groundbreaking anthologies, especially of Caribbean women’s writing. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Romanian, and Serbian. With her late husband, Martin, she wrote a reference work, Culture and Customs of Jamaica. She has published a novel, a short story collection, five children’s books, and nine poetry collections, the latest of which are de book of Joseph, which completes her New Testament trilogy in Jamaican patwa, and A Fierce Green Place: New and Collected Poems. Her poetry is archived at https://mordecai.citl.mun.ca/.Page Hugh R. :

(The Rev. Canon) Hugh R. Page is a professor of theology and Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he also serves as vice president for Institutional Transformation and advisor to the president. He is author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including most recently: Israel’s Poetry of Resistance: Africana Perspectives on Early Hebrew Verse (2013—as author), The Fortress Commentary on the Old Testament (2014—as co-editor), and Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There Is a Mystery” (201—as co-editor).Rawson A. Paige :

A. Paige Rawson is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner, who spent almost a decade in the ministry before obtaining a PhD in order to study and teach the Bible and theology through feminist, queer, and poststructuralist lenses. Paige’s work eschews traditional Western European individualism and its methodologies, and is animated by their commitment to social justice, antiracist epistemological activism, and embodied cognition. Having recently made an exodus out of academia into coaching and consulting, Paige is now happier and more fulfilled than ever.Wariboko Nimi :

Nimi Wariboko is the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University. He is one of the most original and provocative economic ethicists, theological theorists, and philosophers in the world today. His original, transdisciplinary oeuvre combines social sciences, philosophy, radical theology, literary, and cultural studies to create new ideas and theories, disrupt conventional wisdom, and promote human flourishing. He is the author of twenty-four monographs, co-editor of six volumes, and multiple journal articles, book reviews, and book chapters. The six pillars of his scholarship are economic ethics, Christian social ethics, African social traditions/political theology, Pentecostal studies, philosophical theology, and literary studies. In 2020 a group of scholars from multiple continents honored Wariboko with a book on his thoughts, The Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko: Social Ethics, Economy, and Religion. In the same year, another group organized an international conference on his ideas and their impact on the global academy. Over forty papers were presented at this conference. Some of the papers presented at the 2020 conference will be published as Public Righteousness: The Performative Ethics of Human Flourishing (forthcoming). He is also the co-editor of Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Study.Williams Sharon Kimberly :

Sharon Kimberly Williams is a clinical lecturer in religion and cultures in the Department of Religion at Iona University. She is a part-time faculty member for the Faith, Health, and Social Equity cohort in the Doctor of Ministry program at Drew University Theological School. Her clinical research training was completed at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School through a partnership with the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew. Sharon’s research explores music, spirituality, healing, and social activism through the sociocultural lenses of Africana, Black church, Global South, and peace and justice studies. A former justice artist for the Social Justice Leadership Project at Drew, Sharon has performed sacred music and poetry all around the world. She is currently finishing up her first book manuscript, a collection of creative nonfiction essays titled Breath | Voice | Fire.Keller Catherine :

Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University. She works amid the tangles of ecosocial, pluralist, feminist philosophy of religion and theology. Her books include Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene. Her latest monograph is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances.Catherine Keller (Afterword By)
Catherine Keller is a professor of constructive theology at the Theological School of Drew University. In her teaching, lecturing, and writing, she develops the relational potential of a theology of becoming. Her books reconfigure ancient symbols of divinity for the sake of a planetary conviviality—a life together across vast webs of difference. Thriving in the interplay of ecological and gender politics, of process cosmology, poststructuralist philosophy and religious pluralism, her work is both deconstructive and constructive in strategy. She is author of several books, including Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances (2021); Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglements (2014); Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (2003), and many other essays and articles.

Kenneth N. Ngwa (Edited By)
Kenneth Ngwa is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew Theological School. Ngwa’s current research interests are in the fields of African/a biblical hermeneutics. He is also the founder and director of the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew Theological School, an interdisciplinary forum that examines the relation between religion and health, healthy disparities, and collaborative work for health equity. Ngwa is the author of The Hermeneutics of the ‘Happy’ Ending in Job 42:7–17 (2005); co-editor of Navigating African Biblical Hermeneutics: Trends and Themes from Our Pots and Calabashes (2018); and Let My People Live: An Africana Reading of Exodus (2022).

Aliou Cissé Niang (Edited By)
Aliou Cissé Niang is an associate professor of biblical interpretation—New Testament—at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Niang is the author of Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal (2009); co-author of Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World (2012); A Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude (Cascade Books, 2019); “Catholic Epistles,” in Anselm Companion to the New Testament (Anselm Academic, 2014); “Space and Human Agency in the Making of the Story of Gershom through a Senegalese Christian Lens,” Forum-Journal of Biblical Literature (2015); “Islandedness, Translation, and Creolization,” in Islands, Islanders, and Bible: RumInations (2015); “Christianity in Senegal,” and “Diola Religion,” both in Encyclopedia of Christianity in the Global South, ed. Mark A. Lamport and Philip Jenkins (2018).

Arthur Pressley (Edited By)
Arthur Pressley is an associate professor of psychology and religion at Drew University, where he has also served as academic dean. Pressley is also a clinical psychologist, a past president of the New Jersey Association of Black Psychologists and has worked on numerous international issues, most notably the Childhood Chernobyl Childhood Illness Project. He currently teaches a course titled “Fanon and Psychoanalysis of Black Novels.” Some of his published articles include “Using Novels of Resistance to Teach Intercultural Analysis and Empathy”; “Teaching Black: God Talk and Black Thinkers,” in Being Black, Teaching Black: Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies, ed. Nancy Lynne Westfield (2007), and “The Story of Nimrod: A Struggle with Otherness and the Search for Identity,” in African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod, ed. Anthony Pinn and Allen Dwight Callahan (2008).

Life Under the Baobab Tree makes an important and scholarly contribution to the growing field of Africana studies. . . [A] well-organized and edited collection that will spark interest for those seeking greater understanding of a traditional African religious worldview.

Breathtaking in its creative framing of Africanness and Blackness as vital, resilient remembrances of—and critical responses to—the abundance of life! This volume features a dazzling array of theoretical frameworks, voices, identities, practices, interpretive strategies, and expressions that augment the distinctive positioning of religious thinking and valuing within Africana Studies. While offering unflinching analyses of antiblackness and its defining disposition in the past and present, Life Under the Baobab Tree also intimates at possibilities emerging from the generative dimensions of life itself. The lucid accounts and claims of diasporic reality represented in these pages are both instructive and thought-provoking.---Carol Wayne White, author of Black Lives and Sacred Humanity Toward an African American Religious Naturalism

Life Under the Baobab Tree goes a very long way in healing the wounds of people of African descent who in diverse ways collectively have been bruised and battered by homogenization, amputation, and erasure. The rich, complex, and variegated Africana experience is captured beautifully in this transdisciplinary anthology in which the powerful African image of the Baobab tree is the working metaphor that compellingly images the work. This text is a must-read for anyone who wishes to experience the fullness of the global African experience.---Emmanuel Y. Lartey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Pastoral Theology & Spiritual Care, Candler School of Theology & Graduate Division of Religion, Emory University