Register now for the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s second annual conference in the Black Sacred Arts to take place in New Haven, CT from May 15-17. The keynote speakers for the conference will be J. Lorand Matory, Steven Friedson, Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant, and Michael Veal.
This conference seeks to bring together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and (medico)-religious perspectives to foster dialogue on the aesthetic dimensions of rituals of transformation. From the healing dance of the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, to the Vodu and Orisha orders of the Black Atlantic; from the drums of affliction found throughout Bantu-speaking Africa, to being slain in the spirit in an African American church, ritual transformations of consciousness animate the Black sacred arts. Far from being ancillary to ritual practice, as the arts have so often been depicted, they are central to technologies of ritual transformation.
View the conference website for full details and registration link.