2025: Centering the Black Sacred Arts: Research, Education, and Public Life

1:00 – 1:30  | Arrival and Check-in

1:30 - 1:35 | Welcome Martin Jean, Director of the ISM

1:35 – 3:05  | Rehearsing Blackness in African American Cultural Contexts (Dining Room)

• Jorge Banuelos, “Behind the Mask: A Hagiography of MF DOOM”
• zuri arman, “‘Demons screamin’ in my ear’: D’Angelo’s Voodoo and the Critique of Being”
• James Ramsey, “‘Master Plans’: On Blackness, the Sacred, and Pharoah Sanders

3:05 – 3:20  | Coffee Break

3:20 – 4:20  | Material Culture and the Black Sacred Arts (Amphitheatre)

• Patrick Polk, “Black Gods in the Museum: Reflections on African and African Diasporic Sacred Arts on Display”
• Chinyere Ndubuisi, “From African Shrines to the World Stage: The Ikenga and the Globalization of Black Sacred Arts”

4:30 – 5:30 Stand-alone Session (Dining Room)

• Portsha Jefferson, “Connecting through the Waters: Haiti, Africa, and Artistic Expression”

5:30 – 6:30  | Opening Reception (Foyer/Patio)

Dinner on your own. 

8:30 – 9:00  | Continental Breakfast (Upper Lobby)

9:00 – 10:15 | Dialogic Keynote (Dining Room)

• Jacob K. Olupona
• Kyrah Malika Daniels
• Colin Edouard

10:15 – 10:30 | Morning Break

10:30 – 12:00 | Ritual Soundings and the Black Sacred Arts (Amphitheatre)

• Tony Perman, “Spirits as Social Theorists in Zimbabwe and the Future of Social Theory in Ethnomusicology”
• Timothy Mangin, “Echoes of Devotion: Sonic Sufism, Mbalax, and Black Identity”
• Robin Moore, “Violín. Mediating Musical Style and Devotional Practice in 21st-Century Cuba”

Afternoon

12:00 – 1:00 | Lunch (Dining Room)

1:00 – 2:30 | Catching Lwa: African Soul Western Mind (Roundtable) (Amphitheatre) 

• Vanessa Charlot
• Collin Edouard
• Natasha Tauber
• Jean Clerveaux
• Charlene Désir (Moderator)

2:30 – 2:45  | Coffee Break (Upper Lobby)

2:45 – 4:15 | Gospel Pedagogy and Aesthetics (Dining Room)

• Raymond Wise, “Reimagining Gospel Music Pedagogy: Integrating Black Sacred Arts into Curriculum Design”
• Kgomotso Moshugi, “Decolonization and Global Hymn Mobility: Asserting Black Sacred Arts through Altered Musical Aesthetics”
• Jamal-Dominique Hopkins, “Black Sacred Music: A Pedagogical Approach to Animating a Biblical Literary Imagination”

4:15 – 4:30 | Coffee Break (Upper Lobby)

4:30 – 5:30 | Voice and Ritual in the Afro-Hispanophone Sphere (Amphitheatre)

• Sarah Finley, “Afro-Diasporic Ritual Voices in the Colonial Mexican Archive: Decolonial Soundings”
• Mesi Walton, “Afro-Venezuelan Culture: Sacred Traditions, Migration, and Identity”

Dinner on your own. 

7:00 | Fet Milokan with Sosyete Nago – Location TBD

Morning

8:30 – 9:00 | Continental Breakfast (Upper Lobby)

9:00 – 11:00 | Pedagogy, Therapy, and the Black Sacred Arts (Dining Room)

• iyelli ichile, “Art, Artifacts, and Ancestors: Conjuration and Curation in Africana Studies Pedagogy”
• Ree Botts, “The #BlackFeministHealingArts Communiversity - A Radical Sacred Arts Pedagogy + Praxis for Healthcare Institutions + The Hood”
• Sela Adjei, “Spirituality Meets Psychotherapy: Exploring the Sociology of Death, Gender, Aesthetics, and Therapeutic Practices Among Aŋlᴐ-Eʋe Spirituality Meets Psychotherapy”
• Ebony Aya, “Deep Calls Out to Deep: Black Women as Ritual and Cultural Keepers in Higher Education”

11:00 – 11:15 | Morning Break

11:15 – 12:45 | Sacred Sweet Wata: Pedagogy, Performance, and the Curating Archives of Ancestral Memory (Dining Room)

• Michelle Grant-Murray, “Southern Grits Casserole: The Sacred Practice of the Moving Body”
• Yanique Hume, “Dance as Spirit Work: Embodying Ancestral Memory as Healing Art”
• Alexandra P. Gelbard, “Sweet Wata as a Co-Curatorial Practice: Sacred Arts, Archival Approaches, and Exhibiting Performance”

Afternoon

12:45 – 1:45 | Lunch (Dining Room)

1:45 – 3:15  | Visual Praise Poems and Oral History through Film (Amphitheatre)

• Jeanette Charles-Marquez, “Ìyánífá as Archive: Women’s Spirituality, Power, and Positionality through Film and
  Oral History”
• Beni Marquez, “From Lagos to Bobures: Mamá África’s Representation of Spiritual Traditions in Nigeria and Venezuela”
• Elena Guzman, “Oríkì Oshun: a visual praise poem to the mother of the sweet waters”

3:15 – 4:00  | Coffee Break (Upper Lobby)

4:00 –4:30 | Concluding Discussions (Amphitheatre)

Dinner on your own. 

Departures

Dr. Adjei is a scholar/artist with degrees in communication design, and African art and culture from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. He received his Ph.D. in African studies from the University of Ghana, Legon. He is an internationally active scholar in the field of postcolonial provenance research, restitution, and transcultural collaboration and multimodal research. He has worked with researchers, artists and curators on various art/research projects at the Nkyinkyim Museum (Nuhalenya), Museum of Science and Technology (Accra), Ubersee Museum (Bremen), Volkerkunde Museum (Zurich), Museum der Kulturen (Basel), MARKK (Hamburg), and the Bernisches Historisches Museum (Bern). He is the founder of Grin Studios Limited, an art consultancy that connects creatives, cultural producers, and researchers, specializing in exhibitions, design pedagogy and art-based research. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Media, Arts and Communication in Accra.

Spirituality Meets Psychotherapy: Exploring the Sociology of Death, Gender, Aesthetics, and Therapeutic Practices Among Aŋlᴐ-Eʋe

In Aŋlᴐ-Eʋe Vodu religion, spirit mediumship is necessary to negotiate with the spirits of traumatic deaths who return to afflict their living relatives. The amegashie, a spirit medium, who serves as an intermediary between the living and the dead, employs various artforms as therapeutic tools for her dzogbeshiwo (pl.). The interplay between art, spirituality, and psychotherapy produces effective healing results. During the healing process of spirit mediumship, a series of performances, aesthetic practices, and laws (mostly ordained by the Voduwo and Trᴐ᷉wo) are strictly adhered to by both the amegashie and dzogbeshie (sing.) For instance, why would an amegashie instruct a spiritually afflicted victim to smear white kaolin designs on their entire body throughout the healing process? Why would the amegashie invoke the spirit of a departed individual into a figurine—which must in turn be venerated and treated like a living entity by the dzogbeshie? Why would dzogbeshiwo swathe themselves in blue and white fabric for several weeks throughout the healing process? What is the significance of colour psychology in Vodu spirituality and healing practices? These are some of the questions I will be addressing in this paper. Among the Aŋlᴐ-Eʋe, gender specificity is attached to spirit mediumship, usually with women being the key members, far outnumbering men. The seamless integration of art, aesthetics, psychotherapy, and spirituality is an understudied area in Vodu visual culture that will be discussed, based on data collected through participant observations, semi-structured interviews, photography, and auto-ethnographic studies. The chapter further explores the prospects of developing a harmonious synergy between clinical psychiatry and indigenous healing practices to foster a positive transformation in psychiatry and psychopharmacology.

zuri arman is a writer, cultural organizer, and Ph.D. candidate in the department of Africana Studies at Brown University. Their dissertation project interrogates the function and form of methodological thinking in the post-Enlightenment production of knowledge. zuri’s poetry and prose is forthcoming or featured in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Ufahamu: Journal of African Studies, a special issue of Interviewing the Caribbean ed. by Carol Boyce Davies and Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies (PM Press). Additionally, zuri is the co-founder and editor of (de)cypher: dark notes on the culture, a journal and porous thought space bridging politics, art, and black studies (cypheringwhile.black; @darkdecypher). In their free time, he enjoys correctly guessing astrology signs, rapturous laughter with friends, and asking questions to which there is no sens(i/a)ble answer or solution.

“Demons screamin’ in my ear”: D’Angelo’s Voodoo and the Critique of Being 

At the conclusion of Devil’s Pie, a documentary following his experience touring in Europe, D’Angelo asks in relation to the production of black music, “Which one is the right method? Because I don’t wanna feed myself religion, I wanna feed myself God.” This essay takes up D’Angelo’s question in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s 1994 essay, “Rethinking Aesthetics: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” in which she presents a scholarly protocol for the study of black aesthetic production. A decipherment practice interrogates the function of any given representation towards the refortification or rupture of the metaphysical-material architectures confining black life within the historico-cultural epoch Wynter calls the “genre of man.” Relatedly, D’Angelo’s sophomore album Voodoo delivers a genre-defying sonic experience partially written from the perspective of a black prisoner forced to labor in a post-Reconstruction chain-gang. “Demons screamin’ in my ear” meditates on the thinking of these two philosophers and aestheticians to sketch the embryo of an onto-epistemological orientation and spiritual disposition named “mistrust.” I argue mistrust emerges from the shadowy underbelly of post- Enlightenment skepticism and is characterized by an unflinching suspicion towards the transcendental aspiration for Being that overdetermines the western philosophical and methodological tradition since its inception. Deploying Wynter’s critical decipherment practice, I collude with the mistrustful poetics of Voodoo as D’Angelo sonically revolts against the metaphysical confinement of the gendered modes of Being circumscribing his spiritual practice. I explore the implications of mistrust as a response to the imposition of metaphysical-material captivity for black gender and sexuality in the contemporary cosmological period D’Angelo and his collaborator, Saul Williams, refer to as the “Aquarian Age.” My account of mistrust offers an important methodological intervention into black music criticism that troubles the excision of the critical spirituality immanent to black music.

Ebony Aya works at Macalester College as a program manager for the Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching. She is a recent doctoral graduate from the University of Minnesota in curriculum and instruction, with minors in culture and teaching and African American and African studies. In her work, she focuses on the experience of Black women in higher education and centering African ways of knowing in our pedagogies. Additionally, she is the founder of the Aya Collective, a space that centers the expertise and experience of Black women in writing and is the author of published books, Reconsidering Eve: Towards a Deepened Consciousness and Incomplete Stories: On Loss, Love, and Hope, and recently launched the Aya Collective’s second anthology, Finding the Voice Within’.

Deep Calls Out to Deep: Black Women as Ritual and Cultural Keepers in Higher Education

Black women in higher education—whether faculty, staff, or students—are struggling. My recent dissertation research on the experiences of Black women Ph.D. students confirms this reality (Aya, 2023). Through writing about our shared experiences, nine participants revealed pervasive challenges, including emotional abuse, routine isolation, overwork, and under-compensation. These stressors severely impacted their mental health, leading to what Love (2019) describes as “spirit murder”—the cumulative psychological and physical toll of racism resulting in stress, depression, suicidal ideation, and illness (Aya, 2022; Essed, 1991; Hills, 2019; Szymanski & Lewis, 2016).

Unfortunately, these findings echo broader research on the systemic marginalization of Black women faculty, administrators, and students in higher education (Alfred, 2001; Alston, 2019; Hills, 2019; McCoy, 2021). Intentional attacks on their scholarship, leadership, and initiatives contribute to burnout and escalating mental health crises. However, participants also emphasized the importance of supportive care communities, both on and off campus, and the need for spaces that nurture their spiritual and cultural identities. Focusing specifically on spirit and culture, this paper explores how Black women resist oppression in academia by embracing Black sacred art (Atta, 2018; Collins & Hunter, 2022; Davis, 2008; Ewing, 2018; Harris, 2018). Practices such as dance, song, ancestral veneration, and writing allow these women to (re)member themselves whole (Dillard, 2022). Challenging higher education’s tendency to silence and suppress the spirit, these ritual and cultural keepers integrate these practices into their classrooms, research, programming, and development work. In doing so, they cultivate belonging, wellness, and transformation for themselves and their communities within and beyond the academy.

Dr. Mesi Bakari Walton is an assistant professor of Spanish and Afro-Diasporic cultures at Howard University. Her research intersects with Africana, Latin American, and cultural studies and explores how cultures are employed as symbols of identity and tools of survival through the texts of music, song, dance, language, and other practices. She completed her Ph.D. in the department of African Studies at Howard University with a focus on Afro-Venezuelan cultural survivals. Dr. Bakari conducted research as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Colombia titled, “Ancestral Identity—Afro-Colombian Cultural Traditions of the Atlantic Coast”. She has a book chapter titled, Dance, rhythm, and ritual: Afro-Venezuelans in resistance and a peer-reviewed article titled, Afro-Venezuelan Cultural Survival: Invoking Ancestral Memory. Dr. Bakari has been invited to teach and perform at the Venezuelan and Colombian embassies in the U.S. as well as numerous institutions, organizations, and festivals in the U.S. and abroad.

Afro-Venezuelan Culture: Sacred Traditions, Migration, and Identity

Afro-Venezuelan drumming, popularly known as “tambor,” is gaining global recognition as Venezuelan migrants bring their cultural expressions to cities such as New York, Madrid, and Cartagena. Rooted in Afro-Catholic celebrations like the San Juan Festival, this music blends rhythms, dances, and songs that serve as sacred practice and performative tradition. However, as these expressions are re-contextualized across the globe, their ceremonial and ritual foundations risk being diluted or lost. This Black sacred art, now performed outside the pueblos of Venezuela and on streets around the globe, remains vital for identity preservation and community-building, offering migrants a semblance of home and a means to resist being labeled as foreigners or unwanted. By organizing drum gatherings, processions, and performances, Venezuelans assert control over their identity narratives and foster belonging in unfamiliar environments. Grounded in ethnographic research, this study centers the voices of practitioners to understand why they continue their traditions and how these practices provide a framework for identity maintenance in unfamiliar environments. The research also highlights how this tradition is undergoing a cultural shift, transitioning from a marginalized practice associated with Black communities to one embraced across diverse social and racial groups as middle- and upper-class white Venezuelans are now more inclined to engage with the music and dance. This tradition blends ritual, performance, and identity, showing how Afro-diasporic traditions help shape belonging, adapt cultural expressions in new places, and highlight the lasting importance of Black sacred arts in preserving and evolving cultural identity during migration.

Jorge Banuelos is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of religious studies and African American studies at Yale. He is a historian and theorist of Africana religion with interests in Black radicalism, Black intellectual history, and method in the study of religion. His dissertation is an intellectual history of nineteenth-century Pan-Africanism among Anglophone Africans. In his free time, he is a drummer always on the hunt for the next jam.

Behind the Mask: A Hagiography of MF DOOM (talk)

This paper is about the artistic use of objects in the existential renewal of the subject. How can someone use objects to refashion themselves as a different kind of being than they were? I seek an answer to this question on ontological plasticity by turning to the villainous career of the Hip- Hop artist Danile Dumile (1971–2020), otherwise known as MF DOOM. Dumile was a rapper, beat-maker, and producer with over thirty years of experience in the industry. In the late 1990s, Dumile transformed himself into the villain MF DOOM by publicly donning a mask in response to several personal crises, including murder of his brother in 1993. DOOM was a routine target of structural violence. As an undocumented African-Caribbean migrant in New York City, he was effectively deported to the United Kingdoms in 2010. He later died in the UK from medical malpractice a decade later on October 31st (Halloween). The mythology of how MF DOOM became a villain was the recurring theme of his discography: his musical catalog was filled with references to villains and monsters like Dr. Doom and King Gheedorah. The mask allowed DOOM to redefine the structure of his being, the society responsible for making him a villain, and death’s limits. In Religion and its Monsters (2002), Timothy Beal writes that “we can learn something about a religious tradition by getting to know its monsters, and that we can learn something about monsters by looking into their religious backgrounds.” With this in mind, I provide a religious biography of MF DOOM—a Five Percenter and later member of the Nuwaubian Nation—that resolves as a foray into the modernity of the madvillain. A phenomenology of his mask also examines the modern appeal of masking practices for Afro-diasporic subjects who lack an explicit continental antecedent for their practices.

Rehearsing Blackness in African American Cultural Contexts (Panel)

This panel examines several cases of contemporary Black cultural expression that are unmistakably effuse with spiritual significance for artists and audiences alike. The individual papers explore several popular sonic traditions of African America, including jazz, hip-hop, and R&B music. Though the cases presented are undeniably laden with abstract meaning, they are easily overlooked by scholars of religion since the sounds we study do not immediately appear to serve any sacramental purposes in any explicitly liturgical settings. The presented cases are ripe for exploring several cosmological and epistemological issues in the study of the Black sacred arts, as well as the confluence between the Black sacred arts and popular Black culture. These papers explore questions of theology, sociological theory, literary criticism, metaphysics, and epistemology in the Black arts writ large.

These papers disrupt the arbitrary line of distinction between “practitioners” and “theorists.” By treating artistic products as thought experiments–and recognizing artists as deeply thoughtful people–we aim to uncover the theoretical interventions that dormantly reside in popular music. In line with the historian and theorist of religion Charles H. Long, this panel treats Black music in African America as “the source for new modes of thought” (“Introduction,” Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion [1986]). Like Long, this panel also carefully considers the politics of cultural criticism that guide one’s hermeneutical procedures. These papers consider alternative frameworks for making sense of art that resist the desire to metabolize it through existing Western frameworks for knowledge production and signification.

reelaviolette botts-ward is a president’s postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, where she brings Black Sacred arts to healthcare and medical science spaces. She is the founding director of The #BlackFeministHealingArts Communiversity, and a 2024 Poet-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora. ree has published widely on sacred healing arts with the Columbia University Health Humanities Journal, the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, among others. Her next book, entitled Home/Girl Healin’: the Sacred Geographies of Everyday #BlackFeministHealingArts in Oakland, is under peer review with Duke University Press. In it, she reveals how everyday feminists find “medicine and church” within quotidian art-making and ceremonial praxis. ree holds a Ph.D. in African Diaspora studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College. For more on her work, visit blackwomxnhealing.com/reelaviolette.

The #BlackFeministHealingArts Communiversity - A Radical Sacred Arts Pedagogy + Praxis for Healthcare Institutions + The Hood

The #BlackFeministHealingArts (#BFHA) Communiversity1 is a curricular model that brings Black Sacred Arts and ancestral medicine to healthcare institutions and the hood. Housed within the UCSF School of Medicine, #BFHA innovates pedagogy for teaching community medicine through Black expressive culture and sacred healing arts. We merge the Anthropology of Religion with Medical Anthropology, Medical Humanities, Black Studies, and Performance to produce courses, exhibits, and publications on art and healing. With an emphasis on somatic, psychological, and spiritual healing, we celebrate African diasporic cosmologies of care alongside quotidian sacred arts of everyday Black women to expand Western definitions of medicine.

In a context where medical institutions have largely failed to comprehend the wellness needs of Black women, #BFHA invites Black sacred artists to teach health professionals what integrative healing looks like for us. Our courses invite medical doctors, medical students, and community health workers to learn alongside patients and practitioners about Black Sacred Arts as integrative medicine. Our courses’ accompanying exhibits bring academic knowledge to public life by inviting Black sacred artists from the community to lecture, present, and perform for broader audiences. Our publications archive this work.

My presentation is a lecture-demonstration that narrates collective experiences with the 2023 #BFHA Communiversity, which featured an exhibit at the Museum of the African Diaspora with sound baths by Song Remedy and Harpist from the Hood. I will share footage from these offerings, alongside testimonials from students and participants, through storytelling, video art, and sonic activations. I will illustrate how #BFHA bridges gaps between Black Sacred Arts and Health Sciences to illuminate everyday art practices that offer healing for the hood, beyond the clinical space. Additionally, I will show how #BFHA uses Black Sacred Arts to expand normative discourse on medicine through embodied, experimental, and experiential learning within and beyond the classroom.

Jeanette Charles-Marquez is a storyteller and oral historian with more than a decade of experience in radio, television, and journalism. She is a doctoral candidate and Fulbright fellow in history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jeanette is the lead producer of the documentary Salsa, un tumbao’ caribeño, for which she was awarded the Women in Film Creative Documentary Producer Fellowship in 2023-2024. A daughter of the Haitian Diaspora and German working-class immigration, Jeanette’s storytelling draws upon her personal background and commitment to justice. She has participated in the Sundance Collab’s documentary film intensive and film producer programs and studied film marketing. In 2021, she produced a 30-minute docu-style report focused on healing justice through arts and community organizing. She is currently in development on a project about Nigerian women and their role in Yoruba traditionalism. Her work centers liberation, healing, and culturally rooted storytelling across multiple platforms.

Ìyánífá as Archive: Women’s Spirituality, Power, and Positionality through Film and Oral History (talk)

According to the Yorùbá cosmology of Ifá, the term “Ìyánífá” refers to a woman who passionately serves her community and diligently trains in the ancestral tradition. Her unique leadership demonstrates how African and Indigenous cosmologies are not divorced from contemporary structures and systems; but, rather, in constant dialogue. This complementarity, between spirit and liberation, speaks to a long legacy of sacred spaces and politicized spirituality that’s taken root from maroon societies on either side of the Afro-Atlantic where women remain at the forefront and whose stories remain to be sufficiently documented. This paper examines the essential yet underrepresented role of women in Ifá, drawing on the forthcoming documentary Ìyánífá: Women, Power, and the Ifá Tradition a project that reveals how Yorùbá and Diasporic women embody, negotiate, and reimagine power and the archive. By centering Ìyánífá, this paper emphasizes how women’s roles in Ifá are integral to the spiritual and material survival of Yorùbá traditions on the continent and in the Diaspora. While men are often perceived as the primary custodians of Ifá wisdom, this presentation underscores how women have historically and contemporarily upheld, transmitted, and expanded Ifá’s teachings. Women in Ifá have served as diviners, ritual leaders, and community organizers, holding parallel, if not equivalent, roles to male counterparts. This analysis highlights how women’s leadership is embedded in the preservation of the sacred – Ìyánífá become and serve as living archive. As such, this paper reflects on the methodological approach to documenting sacred traditions, grounded in accountability, ancestral guidance, and the ethical visual representation. Oral history and film demonstrate the potential to challenge Western colonial erasure and spectacle; thereby offering alternative models for sacred storytelling. Ultimately, this presentation advocates for a methodology that honors the sacred and foregrounds Ìyánífás’ agency as storytellers as well as producers and guardians of knowledge.

Documenting Sacred Traditions: Film and Oral History in Nigeria and the Diaspora (panel)

This panel explores the praxis of documenting sacred traditions, specifically Ifá traditionalism, through documentary film and oral history. Drawing on projects rooted in Nigeria, Venezuela, and the Caribbean, the panel foregrounds how visual storytelling and oral testimony serve as indispensable tools for preserving, transmitting, and reimagining sacred knowledge systems. Our panel asks: How do we document traditions to empower and convey their sacredness without reducing them to spectacle or extractive consumption? What does it mean to center African women’s narratives and spiritual authority? How might documentary film and oral testimony serve to bridge Africa and the Diaspora? And, how do oral history and film coalesce to create liberatory counter-archives challenging colonial epistemologies? Through the case studies of Mamá África (Venezuela-Nigeria) by filmmaker Beni Marquez and Ìyánífá (in pre-production, primarily Nigeria) by historian Jeanette Charles-Marquez, we delve into the ethical, aesthetic, political, and spiritual questions of documenting African sacred traditions. Mamá África traces Yorùbá traditionalism in Venezuela and Nigeria highlighting how core spiritual tenets and philosophical paradigms travel across geographies and generations. Meanwhile, Ìyánífá portrays women’s roles within Ifá, spotlighting their often-underrepresented role in the continuity of Yorùbá tradition. Panelists will screen select scenes as well as discuss their methodological choices, challenges, and commitments required to engage with documenting sacred narratives; including questions of consent, relational accountability, and the balance between visual storytelling’s aesthetic demands and the sacred’s requirements. Reflecting upon their experiences as filmmakers and Ifá initiates in the Diaspora, panelists will also engage in dialogue about spirit-led production processes. Please note, this panel will be bilingual in English and Spanish. Furthermore, while we do not have a third panelist; we’re open to including one upon recommendation. However, we would also appreciate the time designated for additional panelists to feature select scenes from our respective projects during the panel. 

Vanessa Charlot is an award-winning photographic artist, filmmaker, and assistant professor of media and communication at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media. Her work transcends traditional boundaries, blending documentary photography, filmmaking, and interdisciplinary research to explore the complex intersectionality of race, politics, culture, and gender. Charlot’s artistic practice intertwined with the exploration of Black life, compelling viewers to confront and reimagine the often-distorted narratives that shape perceptions of Black bodies. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” Charlot uses her art to weave together history, memory, and imagination, disrupting conventional notions of objectivity and neutrality in visual storytelling. Her projects are both intimate and politically resonant, serving as acts of reclamation and reframing that aim to restore and recontextualize the histories and legacies of her subjects. Through her lens, Charlot engages in a form of storytelling that challenges boundaries, giving voice to the untold and overlooked.

Catching Lwa: African Soul Western Mind

Symbolically powerful materials, deeply rooted in the lifeblood of African Diasporic religions, have become decontextualized from their origins, stripped of their layered meanings and reduced to mere aesthetic without spirit. Recent phenomena, such as students catching Lwa in schools, underscore an urgent need for Vodou education to reclaim these contexts. This tradition, imbued with the metaphors of ritual, the rhythms of carnival, and the poetic cadence of sacred proverbs, is a living archive of resistance and renewal.

Kyrah Malika Daniels, in her essay “Alpha & Omega: Mystic Twins & the Lord & The Lady of Death,” curated for the exhibit Ayiti Toma II: Faith Family Resistance, illuminates the duality of Vodou’s pervasive presence and persistent denial. She writes, “Historically and today, many Haitians deny any affiliation with Vodou because of their adherence to Catholicism or Protestantism and the stigma associated with the ancestral tradition. However, even these Haitians have grown up-versed in a nation ‘socialized’ by Vodou.” In this way, Vodou becomes an omnipresent yet unspoken framework, much like Judeo-Christian influences in the United States—shaping the rhythms of life, whether openly acknowledged or subliminally felt. The spirit of Vodou leaps through generations of image-making, finding expression in sacred textiles, photography, and now the algorithms of artificial intelligence. Each medium, though modernized or reshaped, mirrors the eternal shifts within Vodou’s essence—shifts that speak to survival, adaptation, and the resilience of the African Diaspora. These visual and ritual practices are not merely artifacts but are acts of defiance, echoing a spiritual lineage that refuses to be silenced. To decontextualize these forms is to deny the profound act of resistance embedded in their creation. Together, they invite us to honor the complex interplay of faith, art, and identity that continues to sustain a people navigating both ancestral wisdom and modern realities.

Houngan Collin Edouard is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at Yale University, where he researches vocality in Haitian Vodou ceremonies. He won the 2023 Karen McCarthy Brown Award for his research on breath and the body in Vodou ceremonies from the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou and the 2024 Emerging Scholars Award for his presentation on the Adjenikon (lead ceremony singer) from the Haitian Studies Association. He also won the 2024 Excellence in Teaching Award from Bridgeport University. He holds a master of arts degree in music from Yale University, a master of music degree in choral conducting from the University of Cambridge, a master of arts degree in music and music education with K-12 certification from the Teachers College Columbia University, and a B.F.A. in vocal performance from The City College of New York. He is a priest in the Haitian Vodou tradition and a member of Sosyete Nago.

Spirits in Session: Vodou Education & Mystical Technologies

“We’re Haitians, we can’t deny that aspect [Vodou]. It’s the base of our culture, we can’t be surprised by this — only hypocrites will say we don’t have spirits due to our customs.” Frandy Louis, principal of Lycee National Philippe Guerrier, told a reporter from Haitian Times that students became mounted by Vodou spirits during school hours. Though divine visitations are not infrequent, according to Principal Louis, students often become embarrassed and ashamed when they hear about their actions from other students during spirit visitation. These feelings of shame are, in part, due to a lack of acknowledgment, awareness, and education of Vodou that surrounds Haiti. In May 2022, Principal Louis, who was the principal of Lycée National Dutty Boukman, recalls walking a student who had been mounted by a lwa to his office and talking to the spirit on his way down the hall. These divine visitations have sparked debate about implementing education about lwa yo (Vodou spirits) in the classroom and whether this knowledge would minimize the shock some students have despite its normalcy. After the Ouanaminthe Canal resumed construction, Vodou ceremonies became more frequent in the area as spiritual leaders came from across the country to defend Haitians as they built their water source. In October 2023, at the height of this tension, several students attending College L’essor du Cap-Haitien were reported to have been mounted by Vodou spirits. As conversations continue about implementing Indigenous sacred knowledge in the Haitian educational system, what steps would educators need to take in order to help educate students about the lwa? How would incorporating Vodou into school broaden or narrow the understanding of spirit visitations? What method would educators need to consider as they diversify the overwhelmingly Christian education in Haiti? Grounded in observations in Jacmel, Haiti, this paper intends to offer examples of what Haitian education may look like by incorporating Vodou in their education utilizing what Africana Religious Studies scholars Dianne M. Stewart Diakité and Tracey E. Hucks call Africana mystical technologies. If educators closely used these mystic technologies that have been used by “religious experts such as seers, prophets, diviners and healers as well as their repertoires of practices that encompass divination, spirit mediumship, charm and talisman production, and mystical pharmacopeia for remedying social affliction and restoring personal wellness,” how would it change students’ interactions with spirits at their schools? Ultimately, this paper examines how students may perceive and interact with both the spiritual and material worlds if educators embrace these methodologies in the classrooms.

Sarah Finley is associate professor of Spanish at Christopher Newport University. Training in literature, musicology and vocal performance supports her research on sound and music in the early modern Hispanic world. Her book Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz explores sound in the work of Mexican poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Finley’s second monograph Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024) is the first book-length study of Afro-descendant sound in viceregal Mexico or elsewhere in colonial Latin America. Grants from The Huntington Library, the Helmerich Center for American Research, the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and the Virginia Commission for the Arts have supported her work.

Afro-Diasporic Ritual Voices in the Colonial Mexican Archive: Decolonial Soundings

As a result of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans and their descendants shaped vibrant syncretic religious practices throughout Europe and the Americas. With estimates that some 150,000 people of African and Afro-diasporic origin lived in colonial Mexico around 1646, the region was no exception. Nevertheless, national and scholarly discourses have long marginalized Mexico’s African inheritance. Recent research responds by highlighting Afro-descendants’ contributions to colonial Mexican society. Black participation in sacred and secular festivals was particularly noteworthy, as Joan Cameron Bristol and Miguel Valerio have shown. While prior scholarship underscores dynamic examples of Afro-diasporic faith, it also beckons additional research. One area that has received little attention is ritual sound. The lacuna is surprising, given the importance of music and dance in Afro-diasporic religions as well as the prominence of linguistic difference in early Mexican descriptions of Black ceremonies. Thus, I examine representations of Afro-diasporic ritual speech and song from Inquisition files, edicts and political correspondence. A critical framework of voice enables me to consider how Eurocentric constructions of the concept—with links to agency, human subjectivity and knowledge production—condition archival imaginings of Black vocality. I argue that these philosophical underpinnings contribute to the “muffling” of African and Afro-descendant voices as incomprehensible in written records.

In response, I listen to Afro-Mexican ritual vocalizations through an Atlantic filter that amplifies resonances with sonic practices from West and Central Africa and the Caribbean. The approach enables me to develop informed speculations about diverse uses of voice in Afro-Mexican ceremony. By fleshing out descriptions of Black rituals from the colonial archive, I heighten the audibility of African and Afro-descendant spiritual practitioners and their present-day echoes. More broadly, my presentation furthers decolonizing efforts in voice studies by centering African and Afro-diasporic constructions of vocality as critical concepts, particularly as they relate to sacred rites.

Dr. Alexandra P. Gelbard is a sociologist and interdisciplinary social scientist grounded within African diaspora studies. Her research focuses on African diasporic community formation, religion, culture, and street processional traditions within Cuba and the broader Afro-Atlantic world. She is also a photographer and curator, collaborating with the community organizers on the Cabildo de Regla project, and the creator of the Cabildo de Regla digital humanities project (www.cabildoderegla.org). She co-curates, and is one of the featured photographers for, Sweet Wata: Choreographing Ancestral Memory. In addition to her scholarly and artistic work, she helps to foster cultural exchange encounters grounded in African Diasporic connectivities between her hometown of Washington, D.C. and Cuba, with an emphasis on shared musical heritages.

Sweet Wata as a Co-Curatorial Practice: Sacred Arts, Archival Approaches, and Exhibiting Performance (talk)

This presentation discusses the process of co-curating the Sweet Wata: Choreographing Ancestral Memory exhibit with Michelle Grant-Murray as an artistic, educational, archival, spiritual, and curatorial practice. Prompted by Michelle Grant-Murray’s question of how can dance works live on beyond a temporally bound, experienced performance, I began photographing her dance performances and related teaching workshops. As a scholar, researcher, and Iyalocha, my experience in photographing ritual spaces is informed by my spiritual and intellectual identities, as my work guides my Spirit and Spirit guides my work. I use an ethnographic approach towards visual documentation, engaging my spirit guides to orient my practice. Our intention within the exhibit’s presentation is to highlight the foundational components of Ancestral Dance Movement Memory (ADMM) which include the influence of African Diasporic sacred practices, an individual’s improvisation to reveal their specific embodied ancestral knowledge, and the resulting narratives that reflect specific place-based identities. When analyzing the photographs from workshops and performances located in South Florida, movements reflect broader narratives of African Diasporic contact and co-presence that produce new practices and identities distinctive to the locale. Furthermore, amidst the rampant censorship laws currently enacted within South Florida, this exhibit serves as a space of refuge and education about African Diasporic spiritualities. While our exhibit altar spaces are “representative,” our inherent spiritual energies as practitioners imbues an essence within the spaces we constructed, creating an energy that invited in those who needed to be present. As we collectively approach the future political climate, we propose that this type of curatorial approach guides us in the face of enhanced scrutiny and censorship towards a practice that reflects the intersections of African Diasporic sacrality, artistry, and liberation.

Sacred Sweet Wata: Pedagogy, Performance, and Curating Archives of Ancestral Memory (panel)

The Sweet Wata project is an ongoing series encompassing dance performances, teaching workshops, visual and multimedia archival practices, and artistic instillations culminating in the Sweet Wata: Choreographing Ancestral Memory exhibit. It centers sacred movement practices informed by African Diasporic spiritual epistemologies and ancestral reverence. This panel discusses the project as a space of engagement with embodied movement practices grounded in sacred arts expressed and the processes of teaching, performance, archival practice, and exhibit curation. Prompted by the question of how can dance works live on beyond an experienced live performance, the Sweet Wata: Choreographing Ancestral Memory exhibit debuted in January 2024. As a multi-media teaching exhibit, inclusive of artistic representations of Orisha, Southern U.S. Black, and Haitian spiritual sacred altar spaces, we also include a library, as well as material cultural items from the African Diaspora. Programming includes teaching lectures, dance workshops, a website, and dance performances as an inclusive space to reflect the practice of Black sacred arts. This panel will open with a dance performance by Michelle Grant-Murray and Yanique Hume. Michelle Grant-Murray will present Southern Grits Casserole: The Sacred Practice of the Moving Body, which examines her dance pedagogy, Ancestral Dance Movement Memory (The Murray Method) as an embodied practice deriving from sacred epistemologies of the African Diaspora, with a specific focus on the African American Ringshout tradition. Yanique Hume will present Dance as Spirit Work: Embodying Ancestral Memory as Healing Art, exploring the intersections of water spirits informing her danced ritual performances at the 2024 Dakar Biennale and Zong in 2018. Alexandra P. Gelbard will conclude the panel with Sweet Wata as a Co-Curatorial Practice: Sacred Arts, Archival Approaches, and Exhibiting Performance by discussing the curatorial process of the Sweet Wata exhibit, through educational, political, and spiritual intentionalities.

Michelle Grant-Murray, M.A., M.F.A, Senior Associate Professor of Dance at Miami-Dade College is a choreographer, educator, author, scholar, performer and artistic director of Olujimi Dance Theatre, a senior associate professor and coordinator of dance at Miami Dade College, and artistic director of Jubilation Dance Ensemble. She is the founder and host of The Black Artist Talk, founder and executive director of the Artistry in Rhythm (A.I.R.) Dance Conference, co-founder of Florida Black Dance Artists Organization and author of Beyond the Surface: An Inclusive American Dance History. She is a Knights Arts champion as well as a three-time recipient of the Miami individual artists grant sponsored by the Miami Dade Department of Cultural Affairs. Currently, Michelle is researching the performative intersections of eco-feminism, ecology, and sustainability of the Black female body. She is co-curator of the Sweet Wata: Choreographing Ancestral Memory exhibit.

Southern Grits Casserole: The Sacred Practice of the Moving Body

In this presentation I discuss the Ringshout practice in relation to Ancestral Dance Movement Memory (the Murray Method) as a pedagogical approach towards performance-based research. ADMM explores the subjectivity of the moving body as an agent of spiritual knowledge, derived from African Diasporic sacred practices. These movements-as-languages generate communicative repertoires that explore theoretical and philosophical facets of identity and memory. Through an individual’s practice and process of ADMM, narratives of ancestral and collective memories emerge from each dancer. Through a focus on the Ringshout tradition, I argue that this sacred embodied form acts as a portal and pathway to access and unlock diverse movement forms connecting an individual’s distinct ancestral narrative to a broader practice of connected and collective memory. The circular and cyclical improvisational movements of individuals, traveling counter-clockwise as a collective body reflects our experiences and identities as part of the broader African Diaspora. The concurrent use of voice, body, and percussion connects to the collective while simultaneously fostering individual modalities of expression.

Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and is now an assistant professor of African American and African diaspora atudies and anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her book manuscript, currently under contract with Colombia University Press, is titled, Chimera Geographies: Black Spiritual Borderlands of the Caribbean, and explores how Black women, queer, and non-binary artists use ritual art to create spiritual borderlands of the African diaspora. In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a filmmaker whose work explores the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health. This includes her award-winning debut film, Smile4Kime, currently available as a part of AfroPoPs season 16, and her most recent film, Oriki Oshun.

Oríkì Oshun: a visual praise poem to the mother of the sweet waters

This viewing session will feature a screening of my film Oríkì Oshun in addition to a talk-back about the potentials of film as a ritual tool. Oríkì Oshun is an experimental short film that honors the Orisha Oshun, a central figure in Yoruba cosmology and spirituality. Rooted in the Yoruba tradition of oríkì—a performative act of praise that invokes the essence, attributes, and destiny of a person, place, or deity—this film reimagines the possibilities of storytelling through a multisensory, synesthetic cinematic experience. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, Oríkì Oshun weaves together sacred stories (pataki) that reveal the multidimensionality of Oshun. While often celebrated as the Orisha of beauty, love, and wealth, this film ventures beyond these familiar portrayals, offering a deeper and more complex vision of Oshun’s identity. It explores her sacrifices, her struggles, her resilience, and her transformation into a fierce warrior. By blending traditional Yoruba performance aesthetics with experimental film techniques, Oríkì Oshun creates a polyrhythmic and immersive space where sound, image, and movement converge to honor the sacred. This project is not just a celebration of Oshun but a meditation on the power of storytelling to expand our understanding of divine multiplicity, human imperfection, and sacred possibility.

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins is associate professor of Christian scriptures and director of the Black Church Studies Program at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. He has been a pedagogy fellow with Yale University’s Center for Faith and Culture and a faculty research fellow with the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University. Hopkins’ research focuses on the intersection of the Dead Sea scrolls and Qumran studies with biblical literature and Black religious thought. His work has been supported by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, the Calvin Institute, the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and the Sacred Writes Media Partnership. His recent book is entitled Cultic Spiritualization: Religious Sacrifice in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Gorgias Press, 2022). Dr. Hopkins and his wife, Karen, reside in the Waco, TX area.

Black Sacred Music: A Pedagogical Approach to Animating a Biblical Literary Imagination

A renaissance of Black sacred music has found profound space in the world of higher education. The recent airing of Henry Louis Gates’ documentary “Gospel,” rightly situates this musical expression within the Black sacred arts tradition. But what is the connection between Gates, an Ivy League educator, and Black Gospel music? Black sacred music and the academy dare to broaden intersectional explorations of Black sacred arts in non-traditional spaces. Such rare spaces include Baylor University and its Black Gospel Archives, which holds the largest collection of Black Gospel music in its special collections’ library. Featured in Gates’ documentary, this space affords academics the opportunity to engage Gospel music, as Black sacred arts, mining it for its pedagogical implications.

Within biblical and theological studies, Black sacred music offers a hermeneutical perspective on the Bible, utilizing an intersectional approach to reflecting, musing, and interpreting text, society, and culture. As such, Black sacred music has pedagogical implications as a rich tool that exposes cultural expression, spiritual inclinations, and reflects a voice of human flourishing. The musical expressions intone survival and an otherworldly outlook on culture, society, and what it means to be human. This paper will explore ways that Gospel music, as Black sacred arts, is used as a pedagogical tool and expression for teaching biblical exegesis and hermeneutics. Engaged in the work of contextualization, Black sacred music serves as biblical commentary, interpreting literary sacred texts and popular culture. Black sacred music opens the aesthetic imagination, subtly, and in an unspoken way, further animating our literary sensibilities. Situated within the context of academic spaces, centering Black sacred arts within theological curricula is a valuable pedagogical and theoretical method for illuminating how biblical sacred texts are read, interpreted, and lived out in contemporary society.

Yanique Hume, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Department of Cultural Studies, University of the West Indies at Cave Hill is an interdisciplinary scholar, priestess, dancer, and choreographer who specializes in the religious, performed, and popular cultures of the Caribbean and the broader African Diaspora. She is head of the department of cultural studies and senior lecturer at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Dr. Hume is the co-editor of Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora (2013); Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance (2016); and Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean (2018). She has also conducted substantial research on the creative and cultural industries of the Caribbean. As a dancer and choreographer, Dr. Hume has worked with companies in her native Jamaica as well as in Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. She is the recipient of grants from the Social Science Research Council, the International Development Research Centre, Ford Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Dance as Spirit Work: Embodying Ancestral Memory as Healing Art

In this paper I reflect on my critical dance practice as a scholar, dancer and priestess engaged in interdisciplinary collaborative performances. I focus principally on two solo choreographic works presented in 2018 with poet and literary scholar, NourbeSe Philips and with multidisciplinary artist and scholar, Gina Athen Ulysse in 2024. These site-specific performances center the spirit of the ocean as a catalytic force for engaging with a ritual of remembrance asking of us to reflect on the body as archive of ancestral memory and the collective ritual action as a form of reparative healing exercise. In “Zong: A Call to Remember” and “For Those Among Us Who Inherited Sacrifice: A Response” the web of connectivities forged through our shared histories and experiences of the crossing and subsequent displacement and further migrations are articulated in and through movement. In a sense, these choreographies perform a wake-work thus connecting the invisible and visible planes of existence through relying on the corporeal to enliven the nexus of the visual, poetic, and the spiritual. As such I explore how these works embody the deep-seeded knowledge of the crossing and its aftermath while calling upon the divinities that inhabit the sacred waters that made and make the passage then and now possible.

Dr. Iyelli Marie Ichile is a professor of African American studies and history, and the director of the African American Studies Institute at Prince George’s Community College. She has a Ph.D. in African diaspora history from Howard University, and a master’s in African American studies from Columbia University. Her most important education, however, took place in her mother’s home. Dr. Ichile has taught at universities around the country, including Temple University, Virginia Commonwealth University and Florida A&M University—in addition to curatorial work at a number of museums. She is a founding member of the Chesapeake Conjure Society and supports political and cultural work in our community in as many ways as she can. She is a mother and an artist. Her work examines the ways in which culture, art, aesthetics, relationship-building and spirituality inform Black liberation.

Art, Artifacts, and Ancestors: Conjuration and Curation in Africana Studies Pedagogy

This presentation examines the pedagogical practices employed by Africana Studies faculty who integrate both artistic and metaphysical dimensions into their teaching. This discussion will highlight the methods which incorporate artifacts, ritual practices and visual art, as central to the intellectual and spiritual work of the classroom. This approach provides students not only with intellectual tools, but also with practices which connect them to a rich, transhistorical lineage. The use of physical and digital artifacts in the classroom is the basis for this process, allowing students to engage with the material culture of African diasporic communities—both historical and contemporary—which extends their classwork beyond traditional textual analysis. These objects serve as conduits for deeper understanding, linking students to the exterior and interior worlds in which their forebears lived. Central to my approach is the view that teaching Africana history is inherently ancestor work—a collaboration with the unseen that guides students through the complexities of epistemological expansion. Invocation of ancestors as legitimate, active sources of knowledge foregrounds the embodied and esoteric knowledge that is foundational to many indigenous spiritual traditions. Rituals such as libation, are therefore not merely supplementary to the academic study of Africana peoples but are central to the process of knowledge transmission itself. Moreover, I will examine how the integration of visual art and the work of contemporary artists enriches Africana Studies pedagogy by creating a dynamic space for students to engage in creativity and cultural reflection. By treating the classroom as a sacred space where cultural meaning can be identified, made and re-made, we aim to foster a learning environment where students understand their studies as a process of dialogue with both the past and the future. This presentation will also address how faculty navigate the ontological tensions between “professional” secular, academic, and/or intolerant environments, and the creation of the Black sacred arts-space as practitioners, themselves. Faculty who take these educational approaches not only enrich the classroom experience; they also allow students to see themselves as active participants in the ongoing work of remembering, reclaiming, and reshaping their own heritage.

Portsha T. Jefferson has a 25-year history of performance, choreography, research and travel, passionately rooted in African/Caribbean dance, drumming, and spiritual traditions.  As a cultural practitioner and visionary, Ms. Jefferson’s dedication and exploration of Haitian culture have brought her to Haiti, where she has traveled throughout the country to research regional dance, rhythms, and musical traditions since 2003. Specific interest and concentration of study took place in Gonaives at Lakou Badjo, where Nago (Yoruba) traditions are preserved, and at Tanp Souvenance Mistik, a Vodou community that celebrates it’s Rada (kingdom of Dahomey) heritage. Ms. Jefferson’s visionary artistic leadership and her company, Rara Tou Limen’s unforgettable presentations, classes, workshops, festivals, and retreats, have garnered her the attention as a respected colleague and an established cultural gatekeeper, forging new trailways through ancient traditions, staying true to the sojourn carving pathways for many to flourish crossing boundaries and dimensions in the dance.

Connecting through the Waters: Haiti, Africa, and Artistic Expression

Dive into the depths of cultural and spiritual connections in Hotô to Shore: Agbé to Agwe, an evocative dance film by Portsha Jefferson that explores the sacred bond between water deities as they manifest in Haiti and Benin. Through striking visuals, Vodou chants, sacred drumming, and powerful choreography, the film illuminates the shared spiritual legacies of Vodou and West African traditions, revealing how the waters that separate these lands also serve as a bridge uniting their histories, cultures, and beliefs. This special event features a screening of the film, followed by a discussion and participatory presentation. Portsha Jeferson will unpack the profound themes of the film, delving into how sacred waters connect communities across continents and inspire artistic expression. The discussion will also highlight the significance of water in spiritual practices, exploring its role as a source of life, healing, and transformation. Attendees will experience an immersive participatory presentation of sacred dance, led by choreographer Portsha Jefferson, versed in the movements and rhythms honoring Agwe, the Haitian spirit of the sea, and Agbe, the Fon deity of waters and abundance. This interactive segment invites the audience to embody the divine energies of the waters through movement, bridging past and present, Africa and the Americas, the spiritual and the artistic. Through film, discussion, and dance, “Connecting Through the Waters” promises a profound exploration of heritage, spirituality, and the enduring ties between Haiti and Africa.

Timothy R. Mangin, assistant professor of music at Boston College, earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University in 2013. His research focuses on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and cosmopolitanism in urban dance musics, with a special interest in African and Afrodiasporic music dialogues. Dr. Mangin has carried out extensive research in various musical cultures, such as underground hip hop and jazz events in New York City, in addition to urban dance music scenes in Senegal, Cape Verde, and Southeast Asia. His work has been featured in Radio Television Senegalaise as well as Afropop Worldwide, a prominent online resource for Afromusic journalism and scholarship, along with scholarly collections and journals such as The Journal of Popular Music Studies. Dr. Mangin’s current manuscript, Mbalax Cosmopolitanism: Blackness, Wolofness, and Sufism in Senegalese Urban Dance Music (University of Rochester Press), explores Senegalese cosmopolitanism through mbalax, the country’s preeminent urban dance music.

Echoes of Devotion: Sonic Sufism, Mbalax, and Black Identity

Sufi music and practice are central to daily life in Senegal, where 94% practice Islam and 90% are Sufi. Senegalese Sufi identity extends globally in various ways, such as students studying abroad or emigrants maintaining ties to kith and kin through social networks and remittances to families, communities, and religious orders. Senegalese artists also amplify Sufism in culture through incorporating Sufi practices, miracles, and leaders in performances, referencing Islamic principles, and naming sacred sites. Mbalax, Senegal’s most popular urban dance music, plays a major role in this production and reproduction of Sufism in mainstream culture, creating what I call “sonic Sufism.” This paper explores the concept of “sonic Sufism” in mbalax. I argue that mbalax plays a crucial role in creating and sustaining a Senegalese Sufi cosmopolitan identity by incorporating Sufi themes, practices, and praise into an urban dance music rooted in Afrodiasporic styles such as jazz, R&B, and salsa. Through ethnographic observations and historical analysis of Blackness and Sufism in mbalax performances, the paper demonstrates how popular music serves as a medium for expressing devotional love and bridging the boundaries between sacred and secular realms. I examine how musicians and audiences engage with Sufi elements in mbalax performances and everyday life, highlighting mbalax’s ability to foster a sense of cultural citizenship, Blackness, and religious identity. The paper also demonstrates how the history of Sufism in Senegal and its inextricable and deep influence on popular culture have expanded through the work and lives of the Senegalese diaspora in Harlem, New York City.

Beni Marquez is an Afro-Venezuelan filmmaker hailing from San Agustin, Caracas. His work spans documentary features, music video direction, as well as television and radio production. In 2022 Marquez was selected for the prestigious Cucalorus and Working Films Work-in-Progress Immersive Lab for Black directors in North Carolina. His current documentary feature film, Salsa, was recognized as one of From The Heart Productions’ “Hot Films in the Making,” further cementing his reputation as a visionary storyteller. Marquez’s previous feature-length documentary, Mamá África (2018), explores the spiritual and cultural connections between Nigeria and Venezuela. The film toured extensively from 2019 to 2021, screening at renowned festivals and institutions such as the Rhode Island Black Film Festival (2021), the Pan-African Film Festival (2020), the Black Communities Conference (2019), and the Afro-Latino Film Festival (2019). Marquez is also host of Mas Salsa Que Podcast, storytelling, and drummer sessions—multimedia programs focused on promoting Latin American hip hop and Afro-Caribbean percussion, respectively. His role as an audiovisual and social media architect highlights his technical acumen and ability to bridge the traditional with the contemporary. Currently based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Marquez’s filmmaking approach is deeply rooted in his Afro-Caribbean heritage and diasporic identity.

From Lagos to Bobures: Mamá África’s Representation of Spiritual Traditions in Nigeria and Venezuela

This paper examines Mamá África (2018), a feature-length documentary that highlights Yorùbá religious and cultural expressions in Bobures (Maracaibo Lake), Venezuela, and in Oyo, Ado Ekiti, Lagos, and Ogun State, Nigeria. Directed by Afro-Venezuelan filmmaker Beni Marquez, the film traces the ancestral connections between Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean through the lens of Yorùbá philosophical tenets and African traditional religious practices. Mamá África offers a broader examination of communalism, Pan-Africanism, and anti-colonial struggle through the daily lives and rituals of Yorùbá and Afro-Venezuelan communities. The film follows the teachings of Chief Solagbade Popoola, an Ifá priest and scholar, alongside Venezuelan Yorùbá practitioners like Lendy Solarte, a percussionist and agricultural engineer from the Solarte y Chourio family, renowned custodians of the San Benito tradition. While San Benito is often framed as a syncretic figure, Mamá África reveals its deeper connection to the Yorùbá divinity Ajé, a water deity linked to wealth and abundance. By documenting these connections, the film challenges anti-Blackness and colonial erasure of African traditions in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Additionally, this paper considers Mamá África as a cinematic intervention that amplifies Afro-Venezuelan perspectives in the Diaspora. This is especially important as most historical and cultural narratives of the Diaspora center the United States, Brazil, Colombia, and Caribbean Island territories. Instead, Mamá África showcases the voices, experiences, and spiritual practices of Afro-Venezuelan communities. Through the film’s portrayal of figures like the Solarte family, Marquez highlights Afro-Venezuelan contributions to Pan-Africanism, Black consciousness, and African spiritual retention. As a result, Mamá África provides a necessary positioning of Afro-Venezuelans as critical actors in the larger history of African diasporic identity and liberation.

Robin Moore, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin, has received awards including fellowships from the ACLS, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. His research interests include music and race, music curriculum reform, and music of Cuba and Latin America. His book publications include Nationalizing Blackness: afrocubanismo and artistic revolution in Havana, 1920-1940 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), Music and Revolution Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (The University of California Press, 2006), Music in the Hispanic Caribbean (Oxford, 2010), Musics of Latin America (Norton, 2012), Danzón: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance (Oxford, co-authored with Alejandro Madrid, 2013), College Music Curricula for a New Century (Oxford, 2017), Fernando Ortiz on Music (Temple University Press, 2018), and Violín. Mediating Musical Style and Devotional Practice in 21st-Century Cuba (Cambridge Press, forthcoming). Since 2005, he has edited the Latin American Music Review.

Violín. Mediating Musical Style and Devotional Practice in 21st-Century Cuba

Afrodescendant religious music in the Caribbean typically foregrounds drumming and centuries-old praise songs sung in fragmented African languages. However, a new form of worship in Cuba has gained popularity recently known as a violín or toque de violín that foregrounds the violin along with the guitar, electric piano, bongo drum, and/or other instruments. Violines offer music to deities associated with Santería (a Yoruba-influenced practice), Palo (Kongo-influenced), and others linked to Catholicism and/or Spiritist traditions involving mediumistic communication with the dead. They are significant because they represent one of the newest forms of Black devotion in the diaspora to gain widespread popularity and because they break with established practice in various ways. Aside from foregrounding Western instruments, they adopt vocal repertoire sung in Spanish as well as in African languages. Many incorporate European classical works and popular songs. Perhaps most significantly, violines frequently shift the goal of worship from direct interaction with divine beings through possession to a primarily social event organized around musical offerings in which possession is infrequent. Following Fred Moten, I view violín performance as fugitive, moving beyond externally imposed boundaries or categories and weaving together cultural objects or elements that formerly had little relation to one another. I am interested in the aesthetic qualities of violines as a modality of worship that emerged in contexts of dominance, the reasons for their appeal to devotees, and their implications for our understanding of Black religion more broadly. Violín performance is open to multiple readings: it can be viewed as a concession to Eurocentric and secular tastes, or as a blackening/creolizing of European- derived practices, or both tendencies simultaneously. Violines express religious faith in pluralistic ways, incorporating repertoire from multiple Black religions into the same performance alongside influences from folk Catholicism, classical music, and commercial/folkloric repertoire. I suggest they appeal to devotees in part because their approach to devotion strikes many as modern, inclusive, and accessible, and because they complicate and extend notions of the divine.

Kgomotso Moshugi is a cultural scientist and practitioner with a Ph.D. in music from the University of the Witwatersrand. His research often integrates conventional social science modes of inquiry with artistic ones. As a musical arranger specializing in choral cultures, his research interests have included observing the mobility of Euro-American artifacts in the form of hymns and their integration into the African context. He provides lectures and leadership in the arts to students and community members. Straddling between the creative and the administrative, he has developed sensibilities to the connectedness of music-making and its related contexts.

Decolonization and Global Hymn Mobility: Asserting Black Sacred Arts through Altered Musical Aesthetics

Euro-American hymns share a long and complex relationship with colonialism. As they circulate globally, the diversity of local communities and their subcultures provides valuable sites for ongoing research in understanding the hymn’s adoption and adaptations. These sites remain largely unexplored in global decolonial studies and are generally under-theorized. The creative value in local hymn arrangements is often not explicitly addressed as an intellectual and decolonial artistic endeavor. I build on the notion that through localization and African creative interventions, Western hymns become essential to Black sacred arts as they take on a new life far from their birthplace, leading to various forms of renewal and Africanization. I trace this development—imbued with racial and cultural significance—through Black music and its practices within a predominantly white church by examining audio recordings, musical scores, and hymnal archives. This paper examines the localization of the nineteenth-century hymn What a Friend We Have in Jesus and its role within the often-overlooked faith community of Seventh-day Adventists in South Africa. I compare its musical characteristics at its origin with how it transforms through various interventions into local styles. Its trajectory, mapped through the localization chart I have created, offers an analytical model for evaluating the hymn at its origin and its current locality in ways that could enrich the broader field of hymn mobility studies. Here, I advocate for local intelligence and creative agency, resulting in diverse musical arrangements whose originality is, to some extent, compositional and deserving of recognition. I demonstrate how decolonial qualities can be assessed in the mobility of a hymn through a comparative analysis of original and local musical aesthetics.

Chinyere Ndubuisi is a distinguished Nigerian sculptor and academic whose career intertwines art, education, and cultural advocacy. She earned her H.N.D. in sculpture from Yaba College of Technology and her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in visual arts (sculpture) from the University of Lagos. As dean of the School of Arts, Design, and Printing at Yaba College of Technology, she has fostered innovation and excellence in arts education. Chinyere’s scholarship explores Nigerian culture, yielding thirty-two journal articles published nationally and internationally. Her research includes a groundbreaking study on the Zaria Art Society, funded by a 2013 grant. She has authored primary and secondary school cultural and creative arts textbooks, enriching Nigeria’s education landscape. She is a member of the Society of Nigerian Artists and a visiting lecturer at the National Institute for Cultural Orientation, Lagos, Nigeria.

From African Shrines to the World Stage: The Ikenga and the Globalization of Black Sacred Arts

The Ikenga, a significant cultural and religious artefact of the Igbo people of Nigeria, epitomizes the Black sacred arts as both a repository of spiritual values and a symbol of individual and communal identity. This paper explores the globalization of the Black sacred arts using the Ikenga as a case study, highlighting its evolving relevance in contemporary discourses on African religious artefacts in global contexts. Drawing from historical, theological, and anthropological perspectives, it examines how the Ikenga has transcended its traditional boundaries, gaining recognition as a medium for understanding African cosmologies, resilience, and agency.

The research situates the Ikenga within the broader framework of Black expressive culture, addressing its theological underpinnings and symbolic representation of personal achievement, morality, and divine interconnection. By tracing the migration of the Ikenga from local shrines to global museum spaces, this study interrogates the epistemological and methodological shifts necessitated by centering such objects in academic and public discourses. It further considers the implications of the exclusion of Black sacred arts from institutional and educational frameworks, arguing that this marginalization constitutes a profound loss of cultural knowledge and heritage. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the paper illustrates how centering the Ikenga and similar artefacts can inform new theoretical paradigms, including postcolonial critique, decolonial methodologies, and an expanded pedagogy of the sacred arts. The study also addresses the sensory dimensions of the Ikenga, emphasizing its role in creating multisensory religious experiences that challenge rigid categorizations of art, spirituality, and cultural identity. Ultimately, the research advocates integrating Black sacred arts like the Ikenga into curricula to foster a deeper appreciation of their global significance and their potential to inspire innovative methodologies in Black religion and culture study.

Tony Perman (ethnomusicology) is a specialist in the music of Zimbabwe and the semiotics of music and emotion. He has received degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Ph.D.), the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (M.Mus.), and Kenyon College (B.A.). His books Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life (2020) and Music Making Community, edited with Stefan Fiol (2024) were published by the University of Illinois Press. He has written previously about religious experience, mbira music, aesthetics, and popular music in Zimbabwe in multiple journals and other edited volumes. He has played and taught the mbira dzavadzimu and mbira dzaVaNdau for many years, having been taught primarily by Chartwell Dutiro, Tute Chigamba, Musekiwa Chingodza, Davison Masiza, Zombiyi Muzite, and Solomon Madhinga. He is also a student of the Chinese guqin.

Spirits as Social Theorists in Zimbabwe and the Future of Social Theory in Ethnomusicology 

I examine the sacred ceremonial practices at the heart of many of Zimbabwe’s Ndau communities to address a series of inter-related questions that speak to the issues of this conference. In these ceremonies, “outsider” spirits possess local mediums during ceremonies defined primarily by music and dance. These spirits embody multiple times and places pertinent to local Ndau history and include Zvipunha (nanny spirits from the dawn of Ndau identity), Madzviti (warrior spirits driven north from South Africa in the 19th century after Shaka Zulu’s rise to power), Mhongo (healing spirits that combine mermaids and Mozambican relatives), and Zvaayungu (warrior spirits with ambiguous origins emerging from Zimbabwe’s war of independence in the 1970s who blur categories of white and black). Each spirit community has its own songs, drums, dance, and preferences. Within this context, I ask how our understanding of Ndau ceremonial life changes if spirits themselves are prioritized as the most authoritative social theorists and thinkers. Like many sacred African practices, Ndau religion has typically been studied from disciplinary perspectives embedded within Eurocentric histories of colonialism, including ethnomusicology, in which spirits provide “data” for outside analysis. Second, how compatible are these Afrocentric theoretical foundations (such as ubuntu) with more widely established philosophical traditions like phenomenology. Borrowing from Philip Ewell’s critique of Music Theory’s “White Racial Frame,” can indigenous theories redeem philosophy and social theory from their own white racial frame? Finally, how are the lessons learned from spirits as dynamic social theorists useful more broadly. Must theory be provincial? I we Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s urge to de-provincialize indigenous theories and consider cross-cultural philosophical conversations. In rural Ndau communities, where locals rely upon a diverse community of “outsider” spirits. The spirits help people unsettle the boundaries between identities, languages, heritage, and even race categories. What lessons can they provide beyond Zimbabwe’s borders?

Patrick A. Polk is the Lilly Endowment Curator of Art and Religion at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. His primary research interests include visual piety and popular religion in North America and Latin America, and African Diasporic sacred arts. Exhibitions he has curated or co-curated at the Fowler include: “Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art in the City of Angels” (2004-2005); “In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art” (2012-2013); “Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners at the Margins of the Americas” (2014); “Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis” (2017-2018); “Fiiman Tembe: Maroon Arts in Suriname” (2018); and “The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond” (2023-2024). He has also served as an editor of the journal African Arts.

Black Gods in the Museum: Reflections on African and African Diasporic Sacred Arts on Display

A brief but compelling scene from Beyoncé’s visual album Black is King (2020) shows the artist reading art historian Robert Farris Thompson’s landmark volume Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA (1971). Published to accompany the first major exhibition of African art at the then named UCLA Museum of Cultural History, the catalog has achieved iconic status for its groundbreaking approach to the presentation and valorization of African sacred arts. In this presentation, I will discuss several notable exhibitions mounted over the span of 50 years by the Fowler Museum at UCLA including Black Gods and Kings (1971), Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995), Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis (2017-2018), and The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond (2023-2024). Each of these projects centered sacred arts of Africa and the African diaspora within the institution’s public and academic mission.

Comparing and contrasting key elements of each exhibition’s conceptualization, implementation, and associated programming, I will highlight longstanding and emergent strategies for presenting continental African and diasporic religions and sacred traditions to diverse audiences. Particular emphasis will be placed on evolving modes of collaborative engagement with represented communities including practitioner-led exhibition development. Two recent installation projects funded by the Lilly Endowment’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative, for example, were realized in partnership with African American Ifa priests (Babalawos) Oluwo’Nla Irawoifa, Oluwo’Nla Fakolade, and Awo Falokun Fasegun and their Southern California religious communities and Vodou leader (Houngan) Jean-Daniel Lafontant of Temple Na-Ri-VéH 777 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I look forward to the opportunity to share experiences and methodological perspectives with other conference participants and to work collectively in furthering academic and public engagement with Black expressive culture and religion.

James Ramsey is a first year Ph.D. student in religious studies (“religion and modernity” subfield) and African American studies. Spanning political theology, legal theory, Black studies, Native studies, and music, his research interests currently center around the question of the relationship between governance (i.e., empire) and belief in the United States, as well as alternatives to this regime demonstrated and/or supported in Black musical traditions. Outside of his work at Yale, James is also a musician, and prior to his work at Yale, James worked as a housing attorney and advocate in New Haven and Hartford.

“Master Plans”: On Blackness, the Sacred, and Pharoah Sanders

This paper will explore the relationship between Blackness, coherence, and the sacred. Using J. Kameron Carter’s chapter in Otherwise Worlds, “Other Worlds, Nowhere (or, the Sacred Otherwise)” as a point of departure, I want to think through Blackness as a formation that troubles the hegemonic categories of the sacred and profane, disrupting the mutual exclusions of the so-called holy and unholy, clean and unclean. The stakes of this noncompliance and disruption are, of course, violence, but within the spatial and temporal regimes of containment contoured by notions of sacrality, what Christina Sharpe might refer to as the “residence and hold time of the wake” of slavery, (In the Wake, 22) Blackness still signals and embodies refusal of the distinction and the feeling of escape from its violent, constraining terms. In addition, I am interested in how these troubled and troubling signals, movements, and feelings are illustrated in Black musical composition and performance, and to what end. The work will proceed in two main parts. First, this paper will engage Carter’s work on the sacred and the profane, reading the chapter alongside some of the theoretical interventions of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Christina Sharpe, and Fred Moten. In particular, I am interested in pushing his insight further; what if Blackness did not only, in Carter’s words, open up “an alternative imaginary of the sacred from which also opens up other worlds, nowhere”, (164) but instead/also confounds the very notion of the sacred? How do the prevailing structures of violence and governance respond to the pressure applied to sacred-profane binary by Blackness, or, put differently, what is the relationship between anti-Blackness and that binary? How might this troubling trouble the meaning of something like faith or belief itself? Second, this paper will engage the album version of Pharoah Sanders’s landmark composition “The Creator Has A Master Plan,” “reading” its form and performance as an exercise of and meditation on the working-out of refusal and escape of/within the sacred-profane distinction and the anti-Black violences thereof.

Raymond Wise, Ph.D. is professor and executive director of the African American Arts Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington, a division under the Office of the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion devoted to African American music and dance performance. Professor Wise, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, began his musical career at three, singing gospel music with his family singing group “The Wise Singers.” His journey in music education includes a B.F.A. in music (piano and voice) from Denison University (Granville, Ohio), additional studies in opera, art, and German at the Institute for European Studies in Vienna, Austria, African American history, music, and dance at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California, an M.A. and Ph.D. in music education from Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio). He has developed and implemented courses in gospel history and performance at numerous universities and recently held gospel performance workshops in Ghana, West Africa.

“Reimagining Gospel Music Pedagogy: Integrating Black Sacred Arts into
Curriculum Design”

This session explores innovative approaches to incorporating gospel music into academic curricula, focusing on how the study of gospel music can reframe pedagogical practices within music and religious studies. Participants will discuss methods for integrating gospel music into classroom instruction, developing coursework that engages with Black Sacred arts, and creating inclusive learning environments that respect and celebrate the cultural and spiritual dimensions of gospel music. Case studies from institutions that have successfully implemented such curricula will be presented, highlighting challenges and best practices. The session aims to generate actionable strategies for educators seeking to deepen their students’ understanding of gospel music and its significance in the Black Sacred arts. In addition, I discuss the history of gospel music in the academy and share my experiences developing and implementing gospel music into traditional Western-European based curricula.