Dianne Stewart is the author of Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022), Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African American Marriage (Seal Press, 2020). She is also a co-editor (with Jacob Olupona and Terrence Johnson) of the Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People series at Duke University Press.
Religious Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora People Series/Duke University Press, 2022
Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social... more Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume II, Orisa, Stewart scrutinizes the West African heritage and religious imagination of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and explores their meaning-making traditions in the wake of slavery and colonialism. She investigates the pivotal periods of nineteenth-century liberated African resettlement, the twentieth-century Black Power movement, and subsequent campaigns for the civil right to religious freedom in Trinidad. Disrupting syncretism frameworks, Stewart probes the salience of Africa as a religious symbol...
According to the 2010 and 2020 US censuses, more than seventy percent of Black women in America a... more According to the 2010 and 2020 US censuses, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners. Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.
Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience makes interfa... more Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience makes interfacing interventions in three primary fields: liberation theology, African diaspora studies and womanist thought. It expanded the sources, methods and hermeneutical tools available to Caribbean and African American/Black liberation theologians. At its inception in the late 1960s, the liberation school of Black theology located its foundational sources in the long tradition of Black prophetic Christianity and Black church activism, beginning with the slave period. Efforts to uncover a parallel trajectory in Jamaica did not lead Dianne Stewart to a Black Christian slave past. There was no Black church to find in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonial Jamaica. However, Stewart did find a liberation tradition deeply rooted in a polyreligious African heritage with salient contributions from Kongo/Central African cultures. After examining the motif of liberation in the African Jamaican religious imagination, from the appearance of Obeah and Myal in the 18th century to the formation of Kumina and Rastafari in the mid-19th and early 20th century, Stewart argues that African heritage religions have provided the epistemic structures—institutional, metaphorical and conceptual—for organized political and cultural resistance to Christian imperialism and racial slavery. She interrogates six major religious contexts in which those epistemic structures exhibited enough flexibility to reject, absorb and/or negotiate with dominant expressions of Christianity in the formation of an African-Jamaican spiritual heritage. In so doing, she contests the assumption that the Afro-Protestant diaspora suffers disproportionately (relative to the Afro-Catholic diaspora) from an impoverished and diluted African religious heritage. She theorizes African Jamaican religions not primarily as Black expressions of Christianity lightly peppered with Africanisms (à la Herskovits). Rather, Stewart construes them as ‘ethnic’ and pan-Africanized traditions that adopted “christianisms” both as an intuitive strategy for confronting worlds of new ideas and experiences and as a survival strategy for coping with multiple levels of exile and the foreboding prospect of annihilation. Through comparative analysis of the Kongo-based Kumina ritual of Myal (ancestral manifestation/mediumship) and U.S. African American womanist doctrines of soteriology/ redemption, she also identifies in Kumina and other African Jamaican religious traditions an Africana mode of “cross-bearing”—an African cross of recurring incarnation—that promotes the holistic liberation of Black women and Black communities and provides an alternative to the emphasis on suffering and surrogacy womanist scholars have rejected in prevailing Christian soteriologies and theories of atonement.
This keynote address for the 2012 Womanist Consultation with the Circle of Concerned African Wome... more This keynote address for the 2012 Womanist Consultation with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in Ghana offers an African diasporan perspective on an understudied approach to theorizing Africana women's activisms. In Africana cultures, the mother symbol has hermeneutical and epistemological relevance to the ethical project of community building and social transformation. The address explores the mother concept and its noble significations as an originary symbol that traverses many of the Indigenous African, Christian and Islamic religious heritages claiming the allegiance of Africana communities. Specifically, it offers a figurative exploration of the mother symbol that draws from the scholarship of African and African diaspora feminist/womanist scholars. Considered together, the works of thinkers such as Ifi Amadiume, Oyèrónkẹ́OyěwùmíOyèrónkẹ́Oyěwùmí and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes resurrect from a transatlantic legacy of Africana women's kinship connections and responsibilities, buried virtues of relational life that all humans can strive to embody and enact. Mothering is interrogated, then, as a term whose semantic purview expands well beyond the literal to register the metaphorical and even the socio-ontological.
Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora, 2013
Reprinted from Chapter 4 of Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of ... more Reprinted from Chapter 4 of Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience
Religious Cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora People Series/Duke University Press, 2022
Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social... more Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume II, Orisa, Stewart scrutinizes the West African heritage and religious imagination of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and explores their meaning-making traditions in the wake of slavery and colonialism. She investigates the pivotal periods of nineteenth-century liberated African resettlement, the twentieth-century Black Power movement, and subsequent campaigns for the civil right to religious freedom in Trinidad. Disrupting syncretism frameworks, Stewart probes the salience of Africa as a religious symbol...
According to the 2010 and 2020 US censuses, more than seventy percent of Black women in America a... more According to the 2010 and 2020 US censuses, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners. Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.
Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience makes interfa... more Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience makes interfacing interventions in three primary fields: liberation theology, African diaspora studies and womanist thought. It expanded the sources, methods and hermeneutical tools available to Caribbean and African American/Black liberation theologians. At its inception in the late 1960s, the liberation school of Black theology located its foundational sources in the long tradition of Black prophetic Christianity and Black church activism, beginning with the slave period. Efforts to uncover a parallel trajectory in Jamaica did not lead Dianne Stewart to a Black Christian slave past. There was no Black church to find in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonial Jamaica. However, Stewart did find a liberation tradition deeply rooted in a polyreligious African heritage with salient contributions from Kongo/Central African cultures. After examining the motif of liberation in the African Jamaican religious imagination, from the appearance of Obeah and Myal in the 18th century to the formation of Kumina and Rastafari in the mid-19th and early 20th century, Stewart argues that African heritage religions have provided the epistemic structures—institutional, metaphorical and conceptual—for organized political and cultural resistance to Christian imperialism and racial slavery. She interrogates six major religious contexts in which those epistemic structures exhibited enough flexibility to reject, absorb and/or negotiate with dominant expressions of Christianity in the formation of an African-Jamaican spiritual heritage. In so doing, she contests the assumption that the Afro-Protestant diaspora suffers disproportionately (relative to the Afro-Catholic diaspora) from an impoverished and diluted African religious heritage. She theorizes African Jamaican religions not primarily as Black expressions of Christianity lightly peppered with Africanisms (à la Herskovits). Rather, Stewart construes them as ‘ethnic’ and pan-Africanized traditions that adopted “christianisms” both as an intuitive strategy for confronting worlds of new ideas and experiences and as a survival strategy for coping with multiple levels of exile and the foreboding prospect of annihilation. Through comparative analysis of the Kongo-based Kumina ritual of Myal (ancestral manifestation/mediumship) and U.S. African American womanist doctrines of soteriology/ redemption, she also identifies in Kumina and other African Jamaican religious traditions an Africana mode of “cross-bearing”—an African cross of recurring incarnation—that promotes the holistic liberation of Black women and Black communities and provides an alternative to the emphasis on suffering and surrogacy womanist scholars have rejected in prevailing Christian soteriologies and theories of atonement.
This keynote address for the 2012 Womanist Consultation with the Circle of Concerned African Wome... more This keynote address for the 2012 Womanist Consultation with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in Ghana offers an African diasporan perspective on an understudied approach to theorizing Africana women's activisms. In Africana cultures, the mother symbol has hermeneutical and epistemological relevance to the ethical project of community building and social transformation. The address explores the mother concept and its noble significations as an originary symbol that traverses many of the Indigenous African, Christian and Islamic religious heritages claiming the allegiance of Africana communities. Specifically, it offers a figurative exploration of the mother symbol that draws from the scholarship of African and African diaspora feminist/womanist scholars. Considered together, the works of thinkers such as Ifi Amadiume, Oyèrónkẹ́OyěwùmíOyèrónkẹ́Oyěwùmí and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes resurrect from a transatlantic legacy of Africana women's kinship connections and responsibilities, buried virtues of relational life that all humans can strive to embody and enact. Mothering is interrogated, then, as a term whose semantic purview expands well beyond the literal to register the metaphorical and even the socio-ontological.
Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora, 2013
Reprinted from Chapter 4 of Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of ... more Reprinted from Chapter 4 of Dianne M. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience
Le vodou n'est pas responsable du tremblement de terre à Haïti africultures.com/le-vodou-nest-pas... more Le vodou n'est pas responsable du tremblement de terre à Haïti africultures.com/le-vodou-nest-pas-responsable-du-tremblement-de-terre-a-haiti-9166/ Dianne Diakité, professeur au département de religion d'Emory University à Atlanta, revient sur les propos du pasteur américain Pat Robertson en mettant en exergue la singularité du vodou et les raisons pour lesquelles Robertson lui attribue en filigrane la responsabilité du tremblement de terre en Haiti. Alors qu'un nombre croissant de chercheurs et de lecteurs commencent à revaloriser les cultures religieuses africaines et à reconnaître leur importante contribution aux sociétés de la diaspora, Pat Robertson a ajouté un chapitre sinistre à la fascination de l'Amérique pour le « problème d'Haïti. » Dans cette dernière fiction, déguisée en révélation, Robertson déclare, » il s'est passé quelque chose à Haïti il y a longtemps «. Ce » quelque chose » n'est rien d'autre que l'héritage du vodou. Le tremblement de terre d'Haïti, un événement terrible dans l'histoire de cette île, est exploité par Robertson et la légion de soi-disant chrétiens qui soutient son ministère. Il leur fournit une tribune, une de plus, pour caractériser Haïti comme une nation honnie, destinée à succomber au malheur, un désastre à la suite de l'autre ; une nation sous la malédiction divine ou démoniaque. L'héritage religieux africain Il est indispensable de remettre les pendules à l'heure. Les formations étatiques et les sociétés lignagères en Afrique possédaient chacune leurs croyances, pratiques et institutions religieuses bien avant l'arrivée du judaïsme, de l'islam et du christianisme. Le vodou en faisait partie, un terme à usages infinis et multiples, connoté par une pluralité transcendantale qui inclut aussi bien » dieu « , » esprit » et » mystère «. Il s'agit donc d'une religion qui ne doit en aucun cas être assimilée à un culte démoniaque. Aujourd'hui, il suffit de consulter les ouvrages en la matière pour se rendre compte que le vodou est considéré par les chercheurs sérieux comme une tradition historique et contemporaine appartenant à l'Afrique de l'ouest et à Haïti. L'héritage du vodou lie ensemble Haïti, le Bénin, le Togo et le Ghana à travers plusieurs éléments culturels parmi lesquels il faut inclure des cosmologies, philosophies, langues, thérapies médicales, habitudes culinaires, rites de passage, valeurs éthiques, normes esthétiques, conventions artistiques et technologies qui procurent à plusieurs communautés une identité commune et une grammaire théologique indispensable à leurs sociétés. Cet héritage leur a permis de transmettre leur humanité de génération en génération. Le commerce négrier, une entreprise divine ou diabolique ? Il est vrai que dans l'ensemble les Américains ne comprennent pas grand-chose aux
Roundtable Discussion of Laura Grillo's An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Po... more Roundtable Discussion of Laura Grillo's An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa
Roundtable discussion of Andrea White's Native/First Nation Theology by Dianne Stewart and other ... more Roundtable discussion of Andrea White's Native/First Nation Theology by Dianne Stewart and other respondents
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