Life Under the Baobab Tree : : Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age / / ed. by Kenneth N. Ngwa, Aliou Cissé Niang, Arthur Pressley.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2023 English
• MitwirkendeR: Adegbite, Shola,; Coleman, Desmond D.,; Faraji, Salim,; Harding, Rachel E.,; Keller, Catherine,; Khumalo, Minenhle Nomalungelo,; Miller, Althea Spencer,; Mordecai, Pamela,; Page, Hugh R.,; Rawson, A. Paige,; Wariboko, Nimi,; Williams, Sharon Kimberly,; Yountae, An,
• HerausgeberIn: Ngwa, Kenneth N.,; Niang, Aliou Cissé,; Pressley, Arthur,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (416 p.)

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 non-linear 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 impacted 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.