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Sorett,Josef. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford UP, 2016. 312 pages. Hardcover. $34.95.
Described as a work of religious history, Josef Sorett's Spirit in the Dark weaves religious and literary history together in order to map the intersections between African American sacred and secular forms produced during the period of1920-1970. Chronicling the development of the New Negro Movement (Harlem Renaissance) and Black Power Movement, Sorett's analysis brings together the voices and contributions of prominent and lesser known literary and religious figures who often battled over the meaning of blackness and black art as well as black religion and spirituality. While this period of "Afro-modernity is imagined as secular" (6), and although the fields of religious and literary studies are often treated as separate, Sorett urges us to consider the ways in which the sacred and the secular as well as the fields of religion and literature are "entangled" (3).
More specifically, he asserts that racial aesthetics has been shaped and informed by the Black Church, Afro-Protestantism in particular, and what Sorett refers to as "the spirit." The precise meaning of this term is difficult to pin down, as Sorett's text illustrates the fluidity and multiplicity of "the spirit." However, he does claim an inextricable link between religion and spirituality, stating that
spirituality (and a variety of related terms) is understood here as deeply dependent upon the idea and institution of church for its very articulation. . . . Church and spirit almost require each other. . . . As such, Spirit in the Dark narrates a spiritual history of race at the same time that it figures "secular" black artists and intellectuals in the story of American religion. (8)
Importantly, Sorett clarifies that while spirituality is linked to the church, "the spirit" also expands beyond the boundaries of this institution and cannot be fully contained by it. Opening his study with Aretha Franklin's song, "Spirit in the Dark," after which the book is named, Sorett positions Franklin's song as one real-world manifestation of this fluid and ever-changing spirit that "knows no boundaries" and as evidence "of the spirit spilling out into the world in unpredictable ways" (xii). Sorett's book seeks to chart this "spilling out" of the spirit...