LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women

Talking to the Dead is an ethnography of seven Gullah/Geechee women from the South Carolina lowcountry. These women communicate with their ancestors through dreams, prayer, and visions and traditional crafts and customs, such as storytelling, basket making, and ecstatic singing in their churches. Like other Gullah/Geechee women of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, these women, through their active communication with the deceased, make choices and receive guidance about how to live out their faith and engage with the living. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant emphasizes that this communication affirms the womens spiritual faith—which seamlessly integrates Christian and folk traditions—and reinforces their position as powerful culture keepers within Gullah/Geechee society. By looking in depth at this long-standing spiritual practice, Manigault-Bryant highlights the subversive ingenuity that lowcountry inhabitants use to thrive spiritually and to maintain a sense of continuity with the past.

Fat Spirit: Obesity, Religion, and Sapphmammibel in Contemporary Black Film

The author identifies the features of black, fat drag, comedy-drama films, and describes a disturbing trend within American cinema between 2000 and 2009 in which male comedians (Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy, and Tyler Perry) don intricately designed fat suits to portray “overweight” black women. Despite their billion-dollar financial success, these films are largely unexamined because of their popularity among black audiences. The article also introduces “sapphmammibel,” the composite character of sapphire, mammy, and jezebel featured in these films, and contends that as the hybridized image of the fat black woman, the sapphmammibel, and her connection to spiritual transformation is a key transacting figure.

Religion and Fat = Protestant Christianity and Weight Loss? On the Intersections of Fat Studies and Religious Studies

This article introduces the special issue on religion and fat by providing an overview of the connections between fat studies and religious studies. We identify four areas of potential overlap: religion and the fat body; religion and embodiment more generally; religion, food, and eating; and religion, weight loss, and food restriction. We then introduce the articles in this volume, which focus largely, if not exclusively, on Protestant Christianity and weight loss. We conclude with a call for fat studies scholarship to take religion more seriously, and for scholarship on religion and fat to engage a broader range of questions and religious traditions.

Where black bodies lie: historiography, race, and the place of Eros

ABSTRACT This essay explores how considering the treatment and location of black bodies in the American figurative and literal imagination forces us to reconsider the place of eros as a mechanism for archival ethics. Through an examination the commentary provided by Lynne Huffer’s essay “Strange Eros” (2016) and consideration of Michel Foucault’s treatment of the historical a priori, I reveal how eros, while powerful in its potential as a political possibility, is also a strange consideration for black people. With the #BlackLivesMatter movement as a contemporary site of black futurity, I contend that the intersection of eros, political possibility, and black existence point to opportunities for systemic change that will free black bodies – whether gendered, sexed, and/or queered – from the rigid constructions of embodiment upon which they were initially framed.