Event

What is happening when groups of people treat their sacred beliefs, spaces, rituals, histories, and institutions as a foundation for humor, comedy, or satire, at the same time that these people express their commitments to the sacred? What kinds of religious orientations are present in African American history that create, embrace, and extend humor about the sacred? What explains both the sustained presence of African American religious life and the proliferation of humor about African American religion from Emancipation to the present? This talk explores my current book project, “From the Back of the Church: A Humorous History of Irreverent Religion in African American Life,” wherein I chart a cultural tradition of Black folks “playing” with the religions they claim, over nearly 150 years, as free(d) Black people moved within and beyond the American South throughout the United States.
 

Vaughn A. Booker is the George E. Doty, Jr. and Lee Spelman Doty Presidential Associate Professor of Africana Studies. He comes to Penn from Dartmouth College, where he was Associate Professor of African & African American Studies and Religion. Booker is a historian of religion whose scholarship and teaching center twentieth-century African American religions. He focuses on people who engage in practices of (re)making simultaneously religious and racial identities, communities, and forms of authority. His teaching interests, which incorporate intersectional approaches, include Black religion and culture during Jim Crow, religion and the Civil Rights movement, contemporary Black religious/spiritual memoirs, religion and mourning/memorialization, and modern Black religious/spiritual communities.