Join us for a public lecture by Vaughn A. Booker: From the Back of the Church: Irreverent Religion in African American History

Tuesday, February 8, 5:00pm, Swift Hall Common Room (1st floor)

What is happening when Black people, who express their commitments to the sacred, also treat their sacred beliefs, spaces, rituals, histories, and institutions as a foundation for humor, comedy, or satire? What explains both the sustained presence of African American religious life and the proliferation of humor about African American religion? And how much does it matter to these Black folks that their religious humor is visible to the broader society, given its history of surveilling and subjugating them based on perceptions of African American religious, moral, and cultural inferiority? This talk showcases the concept of irreverent religion in African American history from Emancipation to the present through religious orientations that create, embrace, and extend humor about the sacred. Offering a distinctive register of religious skepticism in Black American life, irreverence in this research project helps to define how African American Christianity now exists in its Protestant/Pentecostal/Catholic/nondenominational forms with strong “toleration” of religious humor.

Vaughn A. Booker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and the Program in African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College. As a historian of African American religions, he focuses on American subjects who engage in practices of (re)making simultaneously religious and racial identities, communities, and forms of authority. His first book, Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century (New York University Press, 2020), explores the role of jazz celebrities like Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams as representatives of African American religion in the twentieth century. Vaughn’s next book project, a history of irreverent religious humor in African American Christianity, was recently award a National Endowment for the Humanities yearlong fellowship.