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This paper analyzes Nigerian Pentecostal receptions of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ‘77) and engages existing narratives of “rupture” used to characterize Nigerian Pentecostalism. In doing so, this paper seeks to offer an alternative account of Pentecostal relationships to the imagined “past” associated with Orisa traditions—focusing on “contempt” rather than “rupture”—that can account for both violent rejection of Orisa among Pentecostals as well as the presence of Orisa in Pentecostal religiosity. What may seem a rupture or break with the past, can alternatively be seen as Pentecostals inhabiting a contemptuous posture towards specific objects (groups, traditions, people, etc.). While Pentecostals consistently narrate the rise of Christianity as a break from a “dark” non-Christian past, Pentecostals in Nigeria and the diaspora draw from Orisa cosmologies and traditions while sustaining a theologically generative posture of contempt towards those same traditions.
The study explores Tanzanian women's engagement with Islam through an ethnography of Radio Nuur, a non-denominational Islamic station in Tanga, Tanzania. Based on participant observation and interviews, the research investigates the discourse types and ideologies broadcasted, emphasizing women's participation and perspectives. Contrary to other stations, Radio Nuur actively involves women, both as staff and callers, potentially increasing their "voice" in the workplace and community. I examine how radio discourse shapes Tanzanian Muslims' sense of belonging to local and global religious communities and influences their interpretations of gender roles amidst diverse religious discourses. By studying media's role in constructing community identities and negotiating various ideological influences, the research sheds light on gendered communication dynamics within Tanzania and beyond, impacting understandings of Islam's local and global dimensions.
This paper engages Islamic frameworks of historical memory along the Swahili coast. It argues that Swahili ideas of inheritance (*urithi*) formulate a dynamic and generative way in which Muslim scholars and biographers articulate and live with Islamic pasts and religious memory along the coast. Building on anthropological approaches to history and memory as well as work concerning Islamic historiography, I explore *urithi*’s significance as a Swahili-Islamic ordering of the past based in a spiritual tradition that posits knowledge as a meaningful historical inheritance and Islamic scholars as “inheritors of the Prophets” and thus bearers of religious memory. These arguments are based on analysis of two biographical texts covering the lives of pioneering reformist Swahili-Muslim scholars, Sheikh Al-Amin b. Ali Mazrui (d. 1947) and Sheikh Abdulla Saleh Al-Farsy (d. 1982). My analysis is further informed by insights gathered from various interviews with the authors of these biographies.
In my book Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America's First Black Christians (2022), which will be discussed at a roundtable in the 2024 AAR conference, I present a new theory on the development of Black Christianity in the Americas. The goal of this paper is to complement this panel discussion with a presenation that debates the Portuguese influence on the early development of African Catholicism. It does so with a focus on the little-known African Atlantic island of Annobón.