Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age

Life Under the Baobab Tree: Africana Studies and Religion in a Transitional Age is a compendium of innovating essays meticulously written by early and later diaspora people of African descent. Their speech arises from the depth of their experiences under the Baobab tree and offers to the world voices of resilience, newness/resurrection, hope, and life. Resolutely journeying on the trails of their ancestors, they speak about setbacks and forward-looking movements of liberation, social transformation, and community formation. The volume is a carefully woven conversation of intel-lectual substance and structure across time, space, and spirituality that is quintessentially ＂Africana＂ in its centering of methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and hermeneutical complexity that assumes nonlinear and dialogical approaches to developing liberating epistemologies in the face of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance.

A critical part of this conversation is a reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the concept of religion in its colonial and imperial forms. Life Under the Baobab Tree examines how Africana peoples understand their corporate experiences of the divine not as ＂religion＂ apart from its inti-mate connections to social realities of communal health, economics, culture, politics, environment, violence, war, and dynamic community belonging. To that end Afro-Pessimistic formulations of life placed in dialogic relation Afro-Optimism. Both realities constitute life under the Baobab tree and represent the sturdiness and variation that anchors the deep ruptures that have affected Afri-cana life and the creative responses. The metaphor and substance of the tree resists reductionist, essentialist, and assured conclusions about the nature of diasporic lived experiences, both within the continent of Africa and in the African Diaspora.

Catherine Keller (Afterword By)
Catherine Keller is a professor of constructive theology at the Theological School of Drew University. Her books include Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglements (2014) and Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (2018).

Kenneth N. Ngwa (Edited By)
Kenneth N. Ngwa is Professor of Hebrew Bible and the director of the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew Theological School. His research interests are in the fields of Africana biblical studies, ancient Israelite wisdom, and religion and health. He is the author of Let My People Live: An Africana Reading of Exodus (Westminster John Knox, 2022).

Aliou Cissé Niang (Edited By)
Aliou Cissé Niang is Associate professor of Biblical Interpretation--New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Niang’s books include Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal (2009); co-author of Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World (2012); A Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude (Cascade Books, 2019).

Arthur Pressley (Edited By)
Arthur Pressley is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology and Religion at Drew Theological Seminary. His clinical practice is in the areas of childhood trauma, medical psychology, psychological testing, and psychotherapy with adults and children.