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WORK TITLE: New World A-Coming
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/13/1965
WEBSITE: https://judithweisenfeld.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://religion.princeton.edu/people/faculty/core-faculty/judith-weisenfeld/ * https://judithweisenfeld.com/about/ * https://judithweisenfeld.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/weisenfeld_cv_3_2017.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nr 92003411
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nr92003411
HEADING: Weisenfeld, Judith
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370 __ |c United States |2 naf
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374 __ |a College teachers |a African American women authors |2 lcsh
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377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Her The more abundant life, 1992: |b t.p. (Judith Weisenfeld)
670 __ |a Hollywood be thy name, c2007: |b ECIP t.p. (Judith Weisenfeld) data view (b. Oct. 13, 1965)
670 __ |a New world a-coming, 2016: |b t.p. (Judith Weisenfeld) dust jacket back flap (she is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University)
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PERSONAL
Born October 13, 1965.
EDUCATION:Barnard College, A.B., 1986; Princeton University, M.A., 1990; Princeton University, Ph.D., 1992.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY, assistant professor, 1991-2000; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, associate professor, 2000-2006, William R. Kenan Professor of Religion, 2006-2007; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, professor and associate faculty of the Center for African American Studies, 2007-2014; Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and associate faculty of Department of African American Studies and Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2014–.
MEMBER:African American Intellectual History Society, American Academy of Religion, American Historical Association, American Society of Church History, American Studies Association, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and Organization of American Historians.
AWARDS:Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize, Best Book in Africana Religions, 2017.
WRITINGS
Founder and editor, The North Star: A Journal of African-American Religious History, 1997-2005, coeditor, with Priscilla Wald and Christine DiStefano, of special issue “Institutions, Regulation, and Social Control” of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, summer 1999; coeditor of Religion & American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 2016-. Has contributed chapters to numerous encyclopedias and academic publications and articles to journals. Has given conference papers and invited lectures.
SIDELIGHTS
Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She serves on the executive committee of Center for the Study of Religion and the Program in American Studies. As she says on her website, her “research focuses on early twentieth-century African American religious history” with a special interest in the “relation of religion to constructions of race; the impact on black religious life of migration, immigration, and urbanization; African American women’s religious history; and religion in film and popular culture.”
Weisenfeld has written three books and coedited two others. She has contributed chapters to various encyclopedias and academic publications and articles to journals. She is coeditor of Religion & American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. Her first book, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945, took a look at black women engaged in the first half of the twentieth century in social activism through the black chapter of the Young Women’s Christian Association in New York City.
Hollywood Be Thy Name
In her second book, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949, Weisenfeld delves into how films have constructed images of African American religion. In its exploration of cinematic representations of black religion, the book occupies a place in both religious studies and film history. Kathy L. Glass, writing in African American Review, called the volume a “generative, well researched study of filmic representations of African Americans, black religious customs, and ideas about race in America.” She went on to note that it “raises important questions about the medium of film, its engagement with, and shaping of, notions of race and culture in the United States” and pronounced it an “illuminating study.” Sylvester A. Johnson, reviewing the book in American Historical Review, applauded the “intriguing narrative” that he believed “will enrich undergraduate courses across fields of study in the humanities.” He also called attention to the “volume’s sophisticated style of mapping race and religion in popular culture” that “will challenge and rarefy graduate seminars while advancing future scholarship on the subject.”
Jill Watts, a contributor to Journal of American History, commented: “Previous studies have focused on sweeping assessments of African Americans in film or specific experiences of black performers or filmmakers. Weisenfeld’s concentration on religion as the single most important factor in the depiction of blacks in film brings depth to our understanding of the construction of racial stereotypes and the motivations of black independent filmmakers who forged significant works despite laboring under tremendous restrictions.” In Reviews in American History, Gerald R. Butters noted that “the author’s magic in this volume is her ability to juggle African American history, film history, and black religiosity in a manner that is highly readable.” He concluded: “It is indeed a major accomplishment.”
New World A-coming
Weisenfeld’s third book, New World A-coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, examines the rejection on the part of blacks of American racial stereotypes. Embracing a different racial identity, they turned to such groups as the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, the Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine, and various Ethiopian Hebrew congregations “that flourished as black Southerners and African immigrants settled in northern cities,” according to a correspondent in Publishers Weekly. These groups that formulated their sense of themselves through distinctive dress, diet, and background “origin” stories. The critic found this a “wide-ranging study” that is “eloquent yet succinct, perfect for academics and general readers alike.”
Weidenfeld commented in general on her method of shaping her studies in an interview with Randall Stephens for Religion in American History: “I’m most compelled by scholarship on American religion that offers theoretical insight in ways that emerge from deep engagement with the sources and their contexts as opposed to mobilizing sources primarily for the purposes of generating theoretical conclusions.” Jeffrey Wheatley, writing online in Reading Religion, found New World A-coming “carefully crafted.” The author, he noted, conducted “extensive archival research,” combing through “letters, exegeses, biographies, attendance logs, newspaper articles, and advertisements” as well as “drivers’ licenses, census records, permits, petitions for citizenship, and, of course, the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” for groundwork. “What binds these movements together in a substantive sense,” he observed, “is the alternative ‘religio-racial’ identities that each advocates.” Some believed, for example, that they were the biblical Hebrews, while others held the view that they were raceless under God. Weisenfeld, asserted Wheatley, “is not interested in adjudicating the authenticity of such claims by assessing them in relation to movement leaders’ biographies, empirical historicist accuracy, or established religious creeds. Instead, New World A-coming is about individual and collective self-understandings and the performative aspects that make these understandings material, even vital.” He pronounced the book “a must-read for researchers and teachers in American religion, race, gender, and the state.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
African American Review, Spring, 2009, Kathy L. Glass, review of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949, p. 205.
Journal of American History, March, 2008, Jill Watts, review of Hollywood Be Thy Name, p. 1298.
Publishers Weekly, December 12, 2016, review of New World A-coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, p. 143.
Reviews in American History, March, 2008, Gerald R. Butters, review of Hollywood Be Thy Name, p. 90.
ONLINE
American Historical Review, https://academic.oup.com/ (December 1, 2008), Sylvester A. Johnson, review of Hollywood Be Thy Name.
Judith Weisenfeld Website, https://judithweisenfeld.com (October 13, 2017).
Mavcor Website, http://mavcor.yale.edu/ (October 14, 2017), author profile.
Princeton University, Department of Religion Website, http://religion.princeton.edu/ (October 14, 2017), author faculty profile.
Reading Religion, http://readingreligion.org/books/new-world-coming (July 13, 2017), Jeffrey Wheatley, review of New World A-coming.
Religion in American History, http://usreligion.blogspot.com/ (March 12, 2014), Randall Stephens, author interview.*
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I teach in the Department of Religion at Princeton University where I am the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and Associated Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I also serve on the Executive Committees of the Center for the Study of Religion and the Program in American Studies.
My research focuses on early twentieth-century African American religious history, and I have been especially interested in the relation of religion to constructions of race; the impact on black religious life of migration, immigration, and urbanization; African American women’s religious history; and religion in film and popular culture. I am currently an editor of the journal Religion & American Culture.
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Home»People»Faculty»Core Faculty»Judith Weisenfeld
Judith Weisenfeld
Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion, 2016-17 Acting Chair, Department of Religion
Position: Core Faculty
234 - 1879 Hall
(609) 258-8409
jweisenf@Princeton.edu
Field: Religion in the Americas
COURSES
WEBPAGE
Judith Weisenfeld joined the Princeton faculty in 2007. Her field is American religious history, with emphasis on 20th century African American religious history; religion, race, and gender; and religion in American film and popular culture. She is the author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU, 2017), which was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies,Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (California, 2007), for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend, and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard, 1997). Her current research examines the intersections of psychiatry, race, and African American religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In addition to her appointment in Religion, she is affiliated with the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She serves on the Executive Committees of the Program in American Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion.
Courses – Fall 2017
REL 271 /AMS 341 (HA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit
“Cult” Controversies in America
Judith Weisenfeld
10:00 am – 10:50 am T Th
REL 377 /AAS 376 /AMS 378 (SA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit
Race and Religion in America
Judith Weisenfeld
1:30 pm – 4:20 pm W
Courses – Spring 2017
REL 365 (HA) Graded A-F, P/D/F, Audit
Catholics in America
1:30 pm – 4:20 pm W
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HomeJudith Weisenfeld
Judith Weisenfeld
Judith Weisenfeld
Judith Weisenfeld (Leadership Team, Project Cycle II) is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where is Associate Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century African American and American religious history, and she has been especially interested in the relation of religion to constructions of race, the impact on black religious life of migration, immigration, and urbanization, African American women's religious history, and religion in film and popular culture. Her publications include African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard 1997) and Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1950 (California 2007).
She has recently completed Apostles of Race: Religion and Black Racial Identity in the Urban North, supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, which will be published by New York University Press in 2017. The book is a study of the individual and social experiences of early 20thcentury blacks in the urban North – migrants from the South and immigrants from the Caribbean – who embraced the new understandings of black racial identity promoted by the founders and leaders of a group of newly-founded religious movements. Focusing on a number of Ethiopian Hebrew congregations, the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, the book explores the theologies, embodied performance, ritual practices, community formations, and material expressions produced and supported in these movements. Other current projects include research on psychiatric discourses about and treatment of religious African Americans in the early 20thcentury and on race and religion in non-fiction film.
Judith Weisenfeld is a member of:
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Project Cycle II - Material Economies of Religion in the Americas: Arts, Objects, Spaces, Mediations
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Posted by Randall March 12, 2014
FOUR QUESTIONS WITH JUDITH WEISENFELD
Randall Stephens
The latest to take part in our Four Questions with series is Judith Weisenfeld, professor of religion at Princeton University. Judith’s work focuses on urban religion, religion in film and popular culture, religion and constructions of race, and women's religious history. Founder and editor the North Star Journal (1997-2005), she is the author of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (University of California Press, 2007) and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York's Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard University Press, 1998). At the moment she is completing a project titled Apostles of Race: Religion and Black Racial Identity in the Urban North, 1920-1950. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for this project.
Randall Stephens: When and why did you decide to study American religion?
Judith Weisenfeld: I became interested in the study of American religion while an undergraduate at Barnard College in the mid-1980s. I was involved with the student movement calling on universities to withdraw investments from apartheid South Africa when Robert Baum, a specialist in West African religious history now at Dartmouth, arrived as a visiting faculty member. The coincidence of participation in the anti-apartheid movement and the availability of a new set of courses at my institution on the religious history of people of African descent turned my attention as a Religion major from early Christianity to religion, race, and global politics. As the result of an undergraduate course with Bob on religion and racial stratification in the U.S. and South Africa (in which I read Albert J. Raboteau’s Slave Religion and Arthur Huff Fauset’s Black Gods of the Metropolis), a course with Randy Balmer on American religious history, and senior thesis research on Black Theology in South Africa, I found myself increasingly drawn to African-American religious history. In graduate school I had the good fortune to study with Al Raboteau and John F. Wilson, both of whom helped me to locate African-American religious history in a variety of broader contexts and histories including African diaspora studies and American religious history.
Stephens: What do you think is different about the field now compared to when you completed your graduate work?
Weisenfeld: I’m struck by a greater openness to the use of varied sources for the study of religion in America and to multidisciplinary scholarship in general. Part of this has to do with the rise of the “lived religion” approach and increased interest in popular religion. Especially important for my own work has been the publication of significant scholarship on the visual, material, and sensory cultures of American religion. I also see more interest in investigating religion in locations outside of the conventional contexts of formal religious institutions and, taken together, all of these shifts have opened the field to more work on culture and American religious life.
Topics from African-American religious history have become a more regular feature in the general narratives of American religious history than when I completed graduate school, but I suspect that in the classroom the challenge of “coverage” consigns African American religious history to the “Jack-in-the-Box” moments of slavery and the modern Civil Rights Movement. I’m excited about scholarship that moves beyond simply adding particular marginalized groups to the mix but considers questions about the shape of the broader narrative. Increasing attention to religion and region has generated important studies of religion in the American West and of the Americas as well as works that address transnational engagements in missions and empire, for example. Such scholarship highlights varied conceptions of the political and imaginative space of America. I’m also struck by the turn to the study of religion and race in American history in ways that resist the conventional conflation of “race” with African American. The appearance of works that attend to race as historically and socially constituted rather than as biological fact and that trace intersections of race and religion have changed the conversation in important ways.
Stephens: How do you think theory should inform the study of American religion?
Weisenfeld: I find theory useful for helping me to step back from the singular details that fascinate me in my sources and find broader patterns and meanings. I never begin a project with the goal of applying particular theories to sources, but think instead about how different theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches might illuminate the materials I find myself working with. That said, I have been influenced by critical race studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, for example, to raise questions about universal theoretical claims and about the locations from which such theories have been generated. Critical perspectives from these fields now shape the way I frame projects from the outset as well as the questions I bring to the sources I find. I’m most compelled by scholarship on American religion that offers theoretical insight in ways that emerge from deep engagement with the sources and their contexts as opposed to mobilizing sources primarily for the purposes of generating theoretical conclusions.
Stephens: What project(s) are you working on now?
Weisenfeld: I’m working on a comparative study of a number of early twentieth-century African-American religious movements—primarily the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, and congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews—that proposed new ways of understanding history and racial identity for people then conventionally categorized as Negro. I’m interested in what it meant for participants in the movements to accept the racial identity claims and narratives of sacred history the leaders put forward and want to understand how these new religio-racial identities shaped members’ conceptions of their bodies, families, communities, and political sensibilities. Rather than operating at the margins of public and community culture, their work to contest conventional racial categorization, both discursively and in embodied practice, was part of a broader set of discussions in black America at the time about the nature of racial identity. Debates about group identity and “race names” took place among people of African descent born in the U.S. and black immigrants from the Caribbean and often had theological components to them. The project explores the public cultures of race in the period shows that racial meaning for blacks, whether native born or immigrant, was not fixed and that many understood racial identity to have profound religious stakes.
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"Preaching and Farming at Mission Dolores" by Anton Refregier. A WPA Mural at Rincon Annex Post Office in San Francisco, California. The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, https://lccn.loc.gov/2013630288.
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New World A-Coming: Black Religion and
Racial Identity During the Great Migration
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p143.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration
Judith Weisenfeld. New York Univ., $35 (368p)
ISBN 978-1-4798-8880-1
In a comprehensive study of the formation of early 20th-century black religious movements, Weisenfeld
(Hollywood Be Thy Name), a professor in Princeton's department of religion, examines individual and
social experiences that helped define racial and religious identities. She focuses on the Moorish Science
Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and Ethiopian Hebrew
congregations that flourished as black Southerners and African immigrants settled in northern cities. The
popularity of the movements came from the appeal of their leaders as well as their ability to redefine
religious and racial identity These movements offered new ways to interpret history and define racial
identity for people traditionally labeled "Negro." Variations in religious belief, color of skin, dress, dietary
restrictions, and views on marriage and sex broadened discussion in communities and gave identity to those
who were outside of traditional black Protestant life. The historical information (supplemented with photos)
is absorbing, thanks to modern relevance; the term African-American, for example, is the latest in a long
line of racial identifiers. Weisenfeld's wide-ranging study is eloquent yet succinct, perfect for academics and
general readers alike. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration." Publishers
Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 143. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225117&it=r&asid=17b49a523df536d6c4fc0e5babb30993.
Accessed 2 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475225117
New World A-Coming
Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration
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Judith Weisenfeld
New York, NY: New York University Press , February 2017. 368 pages.
$35.00. Hardcover. ISBN 9781479888801. For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website.
Review
With New World A-Coming, Judith Weisenfeld offers scholars from a range of subfields a well-researched and carefully crafted book. In it, Weisenfeld examines black religious movements such as the Ethiopian Hebrews, Moorish Science Temple [MST], the Peace Mission movement, and the Nation of Islam [NOI]. She focuses on their emergence in the 1920s and 1930s during the Great Migration. What binds these movements together in a substantive sense is the alternative “religio-racial” identities that each advocates. Each group “believed that understanding black peoples’ true racial history and identity revealed their correct and divinely ordained religious orientation” (5). Ethiopian Hebrews viewed black people as the biblical Hebrews. For the MST and NOI, this entailed the Asiatic and Islamic origins of “so-called Negros.” For Father Divine’s Peace Mission—the group most at odds with the others—this meant a commitment to racelessness under God. Weisenfeld is not interested in adjudicating the authenticity of such claims by assessing them in relation to movement leaders’ biographies, empirical historicist accuracy, or established religious creeds. Instead, New World A-Coming is about individual and collective self-understandings and the performative aspects that make these understandings material, even vital—especially within the US/American and Western context of anti-black racism.
This book is structured thematically, with three parts and seven chapters. Part 1—“Narratives”—explores how black religious groups situated black people within space and time, providing a sacralized sense of destined peoplehood in the process. Part 2—“Selfhood”—looks at the practices of naming and of the body that evidenced and gave an affective dimension to alternative religio-racial identities. Especially interesting is Weisenfeld’s attention to practices of diet and health. Prohibitions and recommendations about certain foods were often based on scripture. They were also based on ideas about proper diets for particular bodies—Asiatic bodies, in the case of Wallace Fard Muhammad and the NOI. Such proper proscriptions, Fard and later Elijah Muhammad argued, had been obscured by racial slavery and white-created foodways designed to oppress black communities. The vital stakes that black individuals saw in alternative religio-racial identities are especially clear here. Part 3—“Community”—goes the farthest in historically contextualizing these movements’ emergence during the Great Migration. Weisenfeld highlights the role of religio-racial identities in shaping the management of gender roles for women and men in regard to sex, the family, and children. She also examines the contestations and boundary-drawing occurring between different black religious movements, including black Protestants.
New World A-Coming sticks close to historical sources. To make this book possible, Weisenfeld had to do extensive archival research to get at the lives of the everyday members of these groups. A type of “lived religion” model is present here. The sacred narratives, selves, and communities of black religio-racial movements are evident in their letters, exegeses, biographies, attendance logs, newspaper articles, and advertisements. In the production of this book, self-understandings of the sacred are also being refracted through mundane documents of state bureaucracy: draft registration cards, applications for drivers’ licenses, census records, permits, petitions for citizenship, and, of course, the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who were surveilling these movements. Drawing on this array of sources, Weisenfeld highlights contestations over religio-racial identifications occurring at the level of encounter between subject and state.
State agents, at times, questioned the legitimacy of Moorish-sounding names, and questioned the legitimacy of racial classifications that were not “black” or “negro.” Policing agencies scrutinized communities interpellated through the categories of “cult,” “voodoo,” or “superstition.” As Weisenfeld relates in her conclusion, in 1992 a Moorish Science Temple sheik in Chicago requested that the death certificate for Noble Drew Ali—the founder of the Moorish Science Temple who died in 1929—be edited to change Drew Ali’s “color or race” from “American Black” to “Moorish American.” So many of the themes of New World A-Coming intersect here: the ongoing relevance and commitment to alternative religio-racial identifications in black communities, the material and performative aspects of religion, and issues about racialized and colonized subjects’ (il)legibility according to state bureaucracies.
What is interesting about the presence of governmental institutions throughout New World A-Coming is less methodological—can we use state archives to tell a story about anything other than the state’s own imaginary?—and more narratological—how have state institutions played a role in shaping religio-racial self-understandings? The story of religio-racial movements is part of a story about the powers of state agents to police, in limited yet efficacious ways, religious and racial categories—determining who is black, white, Muslim, in a cult, Christian, etc. This occurs through mundane bureaucratic practices as much as it does through spectacular uses of force. The story of religio-racial movements is also a story of the differential powers of people to abide by, contest, or reject state classificatory schemes. Assertions of alternative religio-racial truths collided with secular (a governmentalized white Protestant secular?) state-sanctioned truths.
Weisenfeld’s book is a must-read for researchers and teachers in American religion, race, gender, and the state. Thematically and narratively, Weisenfeld brings into view key elements of American religious history. In terms of thinking about blackness, racialization, and religion, this book is bound to inspire productive conversation in relation to recent and upcoming work by scholars such as Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Edward J. Blum, Will Caldwell, Emily Suzanne Clark, Matthew J. Cressler, Jacob Dorman, Jamil Drake, Paul Harvey, Curtis Evans, Sylvester Johnson, Nicole Kirk, Vincent Lloyd, Lerone Martin, Monica Miller, Josef Sorett, and many others. I hope to see future research that builds on this literature and the themes of New World A-Coming. More work is needed on diasporic religio-racial formations, the powers of state institutions to police practices in vital ways, and how the analytical language of “religio-racial” might be applicable to groups who are not black. For example, white religio-racial movements whose whiteness has, in some accounts, gone unmarked. Weisenfeld herself suggests this line of inquiry. Scholars are fortunate to have a book as rich, careful, and thoughtful as New World A-Coming to help raise these questions and point them in new directions.
About the Reviewer(s):
Jeffrey Wheatley is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Northwestern University.
Date of Review:
July 13, 2017
About the Author(s)/Editor(s)/Translator(s):
Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945.
Categories: 20th century race JAAR reviews United States and Canada Islam African American war and peace
Keywords: American South, military draft
JUDITH WEISENFELD. Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2007. Pp. xiii, 341. $24.95.
Judith Weisenfeld . Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2007. Pp. xiii, 341. $24.95.
Sylvester A. Johnson
The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 5, 1 December 2008, Pages 1577–1578, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.5.1577
Published: 01 December 2008
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Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly examined the intersection of religion and film. Most have concerned themselves with how religious experience is represented in the cinema. Others have examined grand themes in ostensibly secular movies (like The Matrix [1999] and Star Wars [1977]) as religious motifs. A few, like John Lyden's Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (2003), have even examined movie-going (film consumption) itself as religious experience.
In this theoretically rich volume, Judith Weisenfeld achieves a provocative study of religion and film by pursuing a somewhat different concern with the location of religion in American popular culture. While most studies of African American and U.S. religious history assume the site of religion to be either churches or religious communities narrowly defined, Weisenfeld subtly yet powerfully advances an altogether different approach by examining the technological domain of the film industry and performance as sites where religion is made. The author is ultimately concerned with how movies, as a “technology of race,” derive their ability to produce religion from the “power and the privileged gaze of the camera to invest skin color with moral meaning” (p. 4). In this way, American film has functioned as a technological means of making religion.
This book demonstrates how three decades of cinema manufactured religious experience in order to represent religion as a racial characteristic of blacks (e.g., African Americans as a morally pedantic or naïve race) and to portray America proper as a normatively white Christian nation. Readers will be struck, however, by the complexity that defines the volume's every move. Weisenfeld shows how even the most controversial movies, steeped in anti-black stereotypes, were lauded by various black and white reviewers for giving visibility to African Americans and for portraying black religion as sufficiently universal to embody a broadly relevant portrayal of human aspiration, passion, and struggle. Rather than merely critiquing the over-determined representations of racial subjectivity, Weisenfeld keenly theorizes the production and reception of race movies in order to explain why black and white audiences voraciously consumed religion through the silver screen and how they came to be so deeply moved and persuaded by these cinematic encounters. The volume also captures the nuances that differentiated Hollywood from independent filmmakers; the latter were somewhat more willing to represent black identity in relatively progressive terms.
The book's first two chapters examine Hallelujah (1929) and Green Pastures (1936) to explain how film producers, inspired by the success of Broadway's black-audience or black-cast plays like Nan Bagby Stephens's Roseanne (1923) and Ridgley Torrence's Simon the Cyrenian (1917), shifted their focus to films that dramatized black religion. In chapters three and four, the author further maps the cultural history of these movies when she analyzes the efforts of filmmakers like the African American Spencer Williams to reconcile the modernity of urban life with the quaint, regressive ethos (read as southern, Protestant, and rural) of “traditional” black religion. At stake was the moral meaning that inhered around “entertainment culture,” a worldliness that staunchly challenged institutional black religion as the solely legitimate domain of black entertainment. Especially vexing was the fact that these films flagrantly portrayed the “fast life” of drinking, dancing, gambling, and sexual freewheeling, simultaneously representing the danger of modern living and glorifying the pizzazz and excitement of the city. The final two chapters consider representations of black religion during World War II (Weisenfeld argues that the most “universal” portrayal of black religion, surprisingly, was produced by the U.S. military to propagandize black participation in the war effort) and the moralistic representation of racial boundaries and racial passing. With finesse and nuance, the author unravels the complex, ironic uses of liberal racial ideology at work in films like Alfred L. Werker's Lost Boundaries (1949), which refused to cast blacks as interracial black characters due to the overlapping influences of censorship, angst over policing boundaries of race, and the moral stakes of representing truth and honor.
The volume is also attentive to historically contextual themes like southern migration to the urban north, the rise of film censorship, and consternation over federal segregation of the military, all the while keeping a steady eye on the primary subject at hand. The extensive selection of photographs depicting pivotal scenes and broadsides that promoted the movies is outstanding, enabling the reader to experience the visual cues and graphical depictions of race and religion integral to this history of visual media. The book's underlying aim of resituating the locus of religious experience, moreover, holds great import for future studies of American religious history. The intriguing narrative will enrich undergraduate courses across fields of study in the humanities, and the volume's sophisticated style of mapping race and religion in popular culture will challenge and rarify graduate seminars while advancing future scholarship on the subject.