Underworld Work
Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans
Published on 6. May 2025
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-0-226-83884-7 (ISBN)
Description
A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms-ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more-to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms-ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more-to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.
Reviews / Votes
"Greene-Hayes skillfully teases out archival evidence and uses it to paint a picture of a vibrant, dynamic, intentionally counterhegemonic Black space." * Choice * "Underworld Work recovers the beautiful complexity of Black religion in twentieth-century New Orleans, elevating the archives as sacred sites where the ancestors speak. Guided by Zora Neale Hurston-through faith healing, Hoodoo recipes, and ecstatic performances in Baptist, Spiritualist, and Sanctified churches-Greene-Hayes ushers us into spaces of historical disorientation where Africana spiritual traditions persist despite relentless policing and criminalization by salvage ethnographers and Christian race makers." -- Yvonne Chireau, Swarthmore College "Greene-Hayes beautifully captures the religious strivings of Zora Neale Hurston and many of the varied manifestations of Black religion that were maligned as criminal and dangerous by conservative social forces terrified by the freedom and power of occult practices untethered from Protestantism, heteropatriarchy, and other life-denying orientations. Perceptive, remarkable, and innovative, Underworld Work is a must-read for anyone interested in the life-affirming practices Black people conjure in the face of state violence and the terrifying enclosures of this world." -- Terence Keel, University of California, Los AngelesMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
28 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
481 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-83884-7 (9780226838847)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Ahmad Greene-Hayes is assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School at Harvard University.
Content
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
VISITATION 1 Zora on "Voodoo"
1 "Midnight Orgies": Voudou and the Problem of Possessed Black Flesh from Haiti to Louisiana
VISITATION 2 Zora on Lynching
2 "Smoke Out the Negro Devils": Black Cosmopolitan Eclecticism in the New Century and the Terror of Lynching
VISITATION 3 Zora Eats the Salt
3 "Making a Place for Negro Untouchables": Black Sexual Victorianism and Its Counterconducts
VISITATION 4 Zora Talks "Hoodoo in America" and Elsewhere
4 "Dangerous and Suspicious": Hoodoo, Faith Healing, and Sex Work in the Black Slum
VISITATION 5 Zora's Unpublished Satire on Marcus Garvey: "The Emperor Effaces Himself"
5 "The Right Idea of God": Sinners and Saints in the New Orleans Division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
VISITATION 6 Zora Worships with the Sanctified
6 "We Ain't Spiritualists, We's the Sanctified Church": Black Pentecostals and the Politics of Distinction
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
VISITATION 1 Zora on "Voodoo"
1 "Midnight Orgies": Voudou and the Problem of Possessed Black Flesh from Haiti to Louisiana
VISITATION 2 Zora on Lynching
2 "Smoke Out the Negro Devils": Black Cosmopolitan Eclecticism in the New Century and the Terror of Lynching
VISITATION 3 Zora Eats the Salt
3 "Making a Place for Negro Untouchables": Black Sexual Victorianism and Its Counterconducts
VISITATION 4 Zora Talks "Hoodoo in America" and Elsewhere
4 "Dangerous and Suspicious": Hoodoo, Faith Healing, and Sex Work in the Black Slum
VISITATION 5 Zora's Unpublished Satire on Marcus Garvey: "The Emperor Effaces Himself"
5 "The Right Idea of God": Sinners and Saints in the New Orleans Division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
VISITATION 6 Zora Worships with the Sanctified
6 "We Ain't Spiritualists, We's the Sanctified Church": Black Pentecostals and the Politics of Distinction
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index