Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies

Placing the neglected issue of class back into the study and understanding of religion, Sean McCloud reconsiders the meaning of class in today's world. More than a status grounded in material conditions, says McCloud, class is also an identity rhetorically and symbolically made and unmade through representations. It entails relationships, identifications, boundaries, meanings, power, and our most ingrained habits of mind and body. He demonstrates that employing class as an analytical tool that cuts across variables such as creed, race, ethnicity, and gender can illuminate American religious life in unprecedented ways.Through social theory, historical analysis, and ethnography, McCloud makes an interdisciplinary argument for reinserting class into the study of religion. First, he offers a new three-part conception of class for use in studying religion. He then presents a focused cultural history of religious studies by examining how social class surfaced in twentieth-century theories of religious affiliation. He concludes with historical and ethnographic case studies of religion and class. Divine Hierarchies makes a convincing case for the past and present importance of class in American religious thought, practice, and scholarship.

Politics & Social Sciences

McCloud, Sean

Social Sciences

The University of North Carolina Press

Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States

The rate of interfaith marriage in the United States has risen so radically since the sixties that it is difficult to recall how taboo the practice once was. How is this development understood and regarded by Americans generally, and what does it tell us about the nation's religious life? Drawing on ethnographic and historical sources, Samira K. Mehta provides a fascinating analysis of wives, husbands, children, and their extended families in interfaith homes; religious leaders; and the social and cultural milieu surrounding mixed marriages among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Mehta's eye-opening look at the portrayal of interfaith families across American culture since the mid-twentieth century ranges from popular TV shows, holiday cards, and humorous guides to "Chrismukkah" to children's books, young adult fiction, and religious and secular advice manuals. Mehta argues that the emergence of multiculturalism helped generate new terms by which interfaith families felt empowered to shape their lived religious practices in ways and degrees previously unknown. They began to intertwine their religious identities without compromising their social standing. This rich portrait of families living diverse religions together at home advances the understanding of how religion functions in American society today.

Mehta, Samira K.

Sociology

Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-century Muslim World (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks)

The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya's origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period. Introducing the group's founder, Ahmad al-Tijani (1737-1815), Wright focuses on the wider network in which al-Tijani traveled, revealing it to be a veritable global Islamic revival whose scholars commanded large followings, shared key ideas, and produced literature read widely throughout the Muslim world. They were linked through chains of knowledge transmission from which emerged vibrant discourses of renewal in the face of perceived social and political corruption. Wright argues that this constellation of remarkable Muslim intellectuals, despite the uncertainly of the age, promoted personal verification in religious learning. With distinctive concern for the notions of human actualization and a universal human condition, the Tijaniyya emphasized the importance of the realization of Muslim identity. Since its beginnings in North Africa in the eighteenth century, the Tijaniyya has quietly expanded its influence beyond Africa, with significant populations in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North America. We are proud to offer this book in our usual print and ebook formats, plus as an open-access edition available through the Sustainable History Monograph Project.

Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks)

History

Wright, Zachary Valentine

Africa

Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra

Product Description 
Beyond simplistic binaries of "the dark continent" or "Africa Rising," Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. This ethnographic study examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.\nReview 
The increased mobility and interconnectedness of Africans and Diasporans begs greater analysis, and Anima Adjepong's in-depth scholarship captures the nuance and the complexity in the internal and external relationships Afropolitans have with host and home cultures and communities.--Msia Kibona Clark, Howard University\nWritten in beautiful narrative prose, this book brilliantly uses rich and captivating metaphors (e.g., Wakanda and wahala) to discuss the paradoxes of nation-making, space-making, and identity discourses in transnational postcolonial sites. Within an expansive queer methodology, including stories, art, and participant observation, the book uses excellent sociological analysis to historicize and problematize the mundane everydayness of Afropolitan worlds in ways that highlight ongoing erasures (intentional or otherwise) of the wahala non-Afropolitan others in this Wakandan era of Africa Rising.--Sylvia Bawa, York University\nWith a keen eye for detail and cogent multilayered analysis, Dr. Adjepong expertly weaves together a focus on class, religion, gender, sexuality, race, and nation at the transnational crossways linking Accra and Houston. 
Afropolitan Projects critically interrogates both the promises and pitfalls produced on the ground through the contours of lived experiences and vibrant forms of material culture alongside the structural realities and political possibilities they engender. This book has much to offer in rethinking analytics of diaspora, postcoloniality, and belonging in Africa and the world.--Kemi Balogun, University of Oregon\nReview 
With a keen eye for detail and cogent multilayered analysis, Dr. Adjepong expertly weaves together a focus on class, religion, gender, sexuality, race, and nation at the transnational crossways linking Accra and Houston. 
Afropolitan Projects critically interrogates both the promises and pitfalls produced on the ground through the contours of lived experiences and vibrant forms of material culture alongside the structural realities and political possibilities they engender. This book has much to offer in rethinking analytics of diaspora, postcoloniality, and belonging in Africa and the world.--Kemi Balogun, University of Oregon\nAbout the Author 
Anima Adjepong is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Adjepong, Anima

The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia

Award-winning historian Tamika Y. Nunley has unearthed the stories of enslaved Black women charged by their owners with poisoning, theft, murder, infanticide, and arson. While free Black and white people accused of capital crimes received a hearing, trial, and, if convicted, an opportunity to appeal, none of these options were available to enslaved people. Conviction was final, and only the state or owners could spare their accused chattel of punishment by death. For enslaved women in Virginia, clemency was not uncommon, but Nunley shows why this act ultimately benefitted owners and punished the accused with sale outside of the state as the best possible outcome.\nDemonstrating how crimes, convictions, and clemency functioned within a slave society that upheld the property interests of white Virginians, Nunley reveals the frequency with which owners preferred to keep the accused in bondage, which allowed them, behind the veil of paternalism, to continue to benefit from Black women's labor. This so-called clemency also sought to rob Black women of the power they exercised when they committed capital crimes. The testimonies that Nunley has collected and analyzed offer compelling glimpses of the self-identities forged by Black women as they attempted to resist enslavement and the limits of justice available to them in the antebellum courtroom.

Nunley, Tamika Y.

Americas

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