INTRODUCTION
1. Onaje Woodbine, “Why I’m Quitting Basketball,” Yale Alumni Magazine, November 2000.
2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 54.
3. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Myth, Symbol and Culture 101, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 83.
4. Hershini Young, Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2005), 8.
6. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 7.
7. See Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For this understanding of Bourdieu’s sociology of practice, I am greatly indebted to my mentor and friend, the religious studies scholar Christopher R. Lehrich.
8. “In these exceptional moments of crisis, of time ‘out of joint,’ ghosts signal our inheritance of the past and the necessity to act responsibly to change the future” (Young, Haunting, 41).
9. John Hoberman, Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (Boston: Mariner Books, 1997).
10. Scott N. Brooks, “Just a Dream? Structure, Power, and Agency in Basketball,” in Sport and Challenges to Racism, ed. Jonathan Long and Karl Spracklen (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 144.
11. I have borrowed this method of analysis and phrasing from Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant. Wacquant discusses Bourdieu’s objections to structural analyses of social behavior that, paradoxically, overlook the practices they seek to explain: “The chief danger of the objectivist point of view is that, lacking a principle of generation of those regularities, it tends to slip from model to reality—to reify the structures it constructs by treating them as autonomous entities endowed with the ability to ‘act’ in the manner of historical agents. Incapable of grasping practice other than negatively, as the mere execution of the model built by the analyst, objectivism ends up projecting into the minds of agents a (scholastic) vision of their practice that, paradoxically, it could only uncover because it methodically set aside the experience agents have of it” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 8).
13. On being “known,” see Scott Brooks, “City of Basketball Love: Philadelphia and the Nurturing of Black Male Hoop Dreams,” Journal of African American History 96, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 522–536. Also see Scott Brooks, Black Men Can’t Shoot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Brooks’s ethnography of street basketball in Philadelphia is a masterful depiction of how poor, young, black men work hard to become “known” and achieve status as basketball players.
14. See Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), for a discussion of the value of “social proximity” between researchers and subjects.
15. Bourdieu defines symbolic violence as “violence which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such…. Being born in a social world, we accept a whole range of postulates, axioms, which go without saying and require no inculcating. This is why the analysis of the doxic acceptance of the world, due to the immediate agreement of objective structures and cognitive structures, is the true foundation of a realistic theory of domination and politics. Of all forms of ‘hidden persuasion,’ the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of things” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 168).
16. This “something more” is a reference to William James’s definition of religious consciousness: “It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed” (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature [1902; New York: Random House, 1999], 58).
17. “Like the blues that does not make you sad even though it is about that emotion, black preaching, while having its point of departure in the depths of the moan’s historicity, moves beyond that to a joyful and courageous affirmation of being. The shout is the opaque utterance expressing what more trained black clergy were saying in standard English” (James Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009], 153).
18. Gregory Ellison II, Cut Dead but Still Alive: Caring for African American Young Men (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2013).
1. “LAST ONES LEFT” IN THE GAME: FROM BLACK RESISTANCE TO URBAN EXILE
1. Martin Finucane, “City Residents Reeling after Mattapan Slayings,” Boston Globe, September 28, 2010, http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/09/five_shot_three.html. In addition, see Walter Fluker, “Cultural Asylums and the Jungles Planted in Them: The Exilic Condition of African American Males and the Black Church,” presented at Religious Practices in Global Contexts: “Religion, Conflict, and Peacemaking,” Boston University School of Theology, Spring 2011, available at http://www.bu.edu/sth/files/2013/06/Fluker-Cultural-Asylums.pdf.
2. The Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts attempted to offer a positive spin on Boston’s racial inequities, noting “amity” between racial and ethnic groups had increased. Their report also noted an increase in the number of black politicians and black-owned businesses. However, these gains for a small minority of black professionals were far outweighed by the huge racial disparities in health, criminal justice, and poverty for the majority of Boston’s black residents. Tulaine S. Marshall and Jacqui Conrad, eds., “State of Black Boston 2011: Good News and Good Work to Be Done” (Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, 2011), available at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bx93m3UUyugcbHV5VkN2YkdwLUE/edit?pli=1.
3. My understanding of the terms “structural violence” and “racial injury” is informed by Hussein Bulhan’s definition: “Structural violence is a feature of social structures. This form of violence is inherent in the established modes of social relations, distribution of goods and services, and legal practices of dispensing justice…. Structural violence in particular imposes a pattern of relations and practices that are deeply ingrained in and dominate everyday living…. Structural violence enjoys sanctions of ruling authorities and appears diffuse and very much linked with social reality” (Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression [New York: Plenum Press, 1985], 136).
4. Marshall and Conrad, “State of Black Boston 2011.”
6. Netherworlds or underworlds are places where departed souls venture soon after death according to many of the world’s religious mythologies. Particularly in indigenous cultures, the souls of the deceased communicate with the living from these sacred places within the earth. The literary scholar Willie Perdoma reminded me that in New York City, from the perspective of high-rise government-housing-project buildings, street-basketball courts appear to be located beneath the ground.
7. Bourdieu describes habitus as a “living memory pad”: “Enacted belief, instilled by childhood learning that treats the body as a living memory pad, an automation that leads the mind unconsciously along it and as a repository of the most precious values, is the form par excellence of the blind and symbolic thought” (The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992], 62).
8. For Bourdieu’s description of a “sense of the game,” see Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 120–121.
9. Michael Eric Dyson suggests that improvisation is an important mode of expression in African American culture, particularly in black basketball. Referring to improvisation as the “will to spontaneity,” Dyson defines it is as “the way in which historical accidence is transformed into cultural advantage, and the way acts of apparently random occurrence are spontaneously and imaginatively employed by Africans and African Americans in a variety of forms of cultural expression” (“Be Like Mike? Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire,” in Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, ed. Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren [New York: Routledge, 1994], 121).
10. William C. Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 171.
11. Here I am thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorism: “what can be shown, cannot be said” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963], 51. Charles H. Long suggests that Wittgenstein’s aphorism means “what shows itself is prior to speech and language and the basis for speech and language; furthermore, because it shows itself, it cannot be said—it is silent” (Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986], 60–61).
12. For an excellent study of the “exilic condition” of urban black males, see Fluker, “Cultural Asylums and the Jungles Planted in Them.”
13. James Naismith, Basketball: Its Origin and Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 23.
14. William J. Baker, introduction to Naismith, Basketball, xi, xii.
15. Nina Mjagkij, Light in the Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1852–1946 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 1.
16. Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8.
18. This section is greatly indebted to historian Claude Johnson, Black Fives: The Alpha Physical Culture Club’s Pioneering African American Basketball Team, 1904–1923 (Greenwich, CT: Black Fives Publishing, 2012), Kindle edition, chapter 1.
23. Gena Caponi-Tabery suggests that there was a confluence of sports, music, and dance in black culture during the 1930s. In particular, she argues that the “jump” became a symbolic gesture of transcendence and joy among blacks in basketball, blues music and Lindy Hop dance across the country: “Jump tunes, the jumping jitterbug, and jump shots all burst out of the same arenas, at a time when dance bands traveled with basketball teams and clubs across the country hosted predance basketball games. These forms of expressive culture are connected through site, impulse, cultural meaning, and common gesture…. Reflecting ‘the accelerated tempo of black life during and after the urban migration as well as an upbeat sense of expanded possibility,’ nothing better captured the feeling of spiritual uplift and hopes for upward mobility than this intersection of dance, music and sport. The jump symbolized and expressed joy in the present and optimism for the future” (“Jump for Joy: Jump Blues, Dance, and Basketball in 1930s African America,” in Sports Matters: Race, Recreation, and Culture, ed. John Bloom and Michael Nevin Willard [New York: New York University Press, 2002), 39–40.
24. On the Shoulders of Giants, directed by Deborah Morales (S.I.: Union Productions, 2011), DVD.
25. For an excellent study of the role of the Harlem Globetrotters in the integration of American basketball and as a precursor to white exploitation of black athletes in hoops, see Ben Green, Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters (New York: Amistad, 2006).
26. Bobbito Garcia, foreword to Johnson, Black Fives.
27. On the Shoulders of Giants.
28. Jealous expressed these thoughts after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer:
Our generation of black Americans was supposed to be the first not to be judged by our race or the color of our skin. Instead, we had come of age to find ourselves the most incarcerated on the planet and most murdered in the country.
“Grandma,” I would ask days later, still searching for understanding: “What happened? How did things turn out like this?”
Her response was the crux of my speech to the 104th NAACP convention yesterday. She leaned in and spoke softly: “It’s sad but it’s simple: We got what we fought for, but we lost what we had.”
29. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 58.
30. William Oliver suggests that “for many marginalized Black males, ‘the streets’ is a socialization institution that is as important as the family, the church, and the educational system in terms of its influence on their psychosocial development and life course trajectories and transitions.” Drawing from Elijah Anderson’s ethnographic studies of black urban life, Oliver suggests that “high rates of unemployment, underemployment, poverty, substance abuse, incarceration, and inadequate family and fatherhood role functioning are major characteristics of Black males who center their lives in ‘the streets’ ” (“ ‘The Streets’: An Alternative Black Male Socialization Institution,” Journal of Black Studies 36, no. 6 [2006]: 919).
31. I learned this story from DJ Bobbito Garcia, whom I interviewed on January 17, 2013. Garcia was the co-host of the “The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show,” considered by many to be the best hip-hop radio show of all time. He is also an author, announcer, and film producer of playground basketball in New York City. His most recent project is a documentary entitled Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC, directed by Bobbito Garcia and Kevin Couliau (New York: Goldcrest Films, 2012), DVD. The film documents the fact that rappers, break-dancers, and ballplayers performed together on the same playgrounds.
32. Vincent Mallozzi, Asphalt Gods: An Oral History of Rucker Park (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 9.
33. Fathers of the Sport, directed by Xavier Mitchell (Fayetteville, Ark.: Hannover House, 2013), DVD.
35. See Anthony Pinn’s humanistic definition of black religion “as the recognition of a response to the elemental feeling for complex subjectivity and the accompanying transformation of consciousness that allows for the historically manifest battle against the terror of fixed identity. While this experience may not result in sustained sociopolitical and cultural transformation, it does involve a new life meaning that encourages continued struggle for a more liberated existence” (Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion [Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2003], 175).
2. BOSTON’S MEMORIAL GAMES
1. Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 614.
3. Durkheim defined religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain [1915; New York: Free Press, 1965], 62).
4. Bourdieu’s theory of social practice has been described as being capable of accounting for the elusive quality of a “bird in flight.” See Annette Lareau and Erin McNamara Horvat, “Moments of Social Inclusion and Exclusion: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Family-School Relationships,” Sociology of Education 72, no. 1 (January 1999): 38.
5. Brooks suggests that one of the ways to become a “known” city basketball player is to have other players “vouch” for you. When a “known” player vouches for an unknown player, he confers a modicum of status to that player. Scott N. Brooks, Black Men Can’t Shoot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
6. Leagues tend to cost more money and take more time to organize than tournaments; therefore, they are often organized by established institutions such as community centers, churches, or the city.
7. For an analysis of Carrie Mae Weems’s photograph of an “empty chair” in her series on the Gullah Sea Islands, see Hershini Young, Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2005), 3.
8. Marvin’s mother, Doris Barros, explained to me that Marvin understood the symbol of the “bird” in Christian terms as a representation of the Holy Spirit.
9. James P. McFadden, “PBHA Students Grieve Killing of Local Teen,” Harvard Crimson, December, 15, 1997.
10. Jim Jones, “Rain,” Pray IV Reign, Columbia / Ether Boy 88697 19376, 2009, CD.
11. Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Ain’t That Good News, RCA Victor LSP-2899, 1964, LP.
13. He Got Game, directed by Spike Lee (Burbank, Calif.: Touchstone Pictures and Forty Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 1998), DVD.
14. Maria Cramer and Brian R. Ballou, “Playing Scared: A Neighborhood Reflects as Teen Killed on Court Is Mourned,” Boston Globe, May 12, 2010.
3. JASON, HOOPS, AND GRANDMA’S HHANDS
1. Joseph C. Scriven, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” in Pilgrim Hymnal (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1968), 335.
4. C.J., HOOPS, AND THE QUEST FOR A SECOND LIFE
1. Fortunately, toward the end of my studies, there were several white professors in the religion department and a few professors of color who were affiliated with the religion department who did enthusiastically support my research. For them, I am grateful.
2. Howard Thurman discussed the devastation to the self when one remains unrecognized by others: “It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men without a sense of anchor anywhere. Always there is a need of mooring, the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted and will not give. The urge to be accountable to someone, to know that beyond the individual himself there is an answer that must be given, cannot be denied. The deed a man performs must be weighed in a balance held by another’s hand. The very spirit of a man tends to panic from the desolation of going nameless up and down the street of other minds where no salutation greets and no friendly recognition makes secure. It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men” (The Inward Journey [Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1971], 37–38).
3. This section of C.J.’s testimony is also reprinted in Onaje Woodbine, “An Invisible Institution: A Functional Approach to Religion in Sports in Wounded African American Communities,” in The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture: Toward Bridging the Generational Divide, ed. Emmett G. Price III (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 177–178.
5. ANCESTOR WORK IN STREET BASKETBALL
2. Malidoma Patrice Some, Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1997).
3. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).
4. Dwayne A. Tunstall, “Taking Africana Existential Philosophy of Education Seriously,” Philosophical Studies in Education 39 (2008): 48.
7. “Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition—it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works [New York: Norton, 1976], 243).
8. “Chris Paul Pays Tribute.”
9. Éva Tettenborn, “Melancholia as Resistance in Contemporary African American Literature,” MELUS 31, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 101–121.
10. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), 244.
11. “Chris Paul Pays Tribute.”
14. “Chris Paul Pays Tribute.”
17. Howard Thurman, “Mysticism and Social Change,” October 28, 1938, Howard Thurman Collection, Box 17, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
6. THE DUNK AND THE SIGNIFYING MONKEY
1. Michael Eric Dyson, “Be Like Mike? Michael Jordan and the Pedagogy of Desire,” Cultural Studies 7 (1993): 68.
2. Russell Paulding holds his tournament indoors to avoid injuries. However, the gym is off of Columbia Road down an alleyway and opens out on one side through several double doors so that it feels like the court is outside. In fact, the intermediate ring of onlookers stands outside, stretching, eating food, socializing, and peeking at the game.
3. James Noel, Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 153. There is no shortage of commentary in the media about the celebratory practices of African American men in amateur and professional sports, particularly in football and basketball. In the film White Men Can’t Jump, for example, Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) expresses the general belief that black athletes’ celebrations signify egoism. After losing a major basketball game, Billy reprimands Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes): “You’re like every other brother I ever saw. You’d rather look good and lose than look bad and win” (White Men Can’t Jump, directed by Ron Shelton [Beverly Hills, Calif.: Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, 1992], DVD).
4. On the idea of the “bird in flight,” see Annette Lareau and Erin McNamara Horvat, “Moments of Social Inclusion and Exclusion: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Family-School Relationships,” Sociology of Education 72, no. 1 (January 1999): 38.
5. Loïc Wacquant, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
6. My understanding of the marketability of black men as dangerous monkey beasts is greatly indebted to the work of Clinton R. Fluker, “Meet King Kong,” Mellon Fellowship Paper, Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, May 2008; and Walter E. Fluker, “Cultural Asylums and the Jungles Planted in Them: The Exilic Condition of African American Males and the Black Church,” presented at Religious Practices in Global Contexts: “Religion, Conflict, and Peacemaking,” Boston University School of Theology, Spring 2011, http://www.bu.edu/sth/files/2013/06/Fluker-Cultural-Asylums.pdf. For examples, see Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith (1915; New York: Kino on Video, 2002), DVD; King Kong, directed by Peter Jackson (Universal City, Calif.: Universal Pictures, 2005), DVD; Training Day, directed by Antoine Fuqua (Burbank, Calif.: Warner Brothers, 2001), DVD; and the April 2008 Vogue cover with LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen at “Commentary: Photos of Black Subjects Covered with Controversy,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 1, 2008, http://www.post-gazette.com/life/lifestyle/2008/04/01/Commentary-Photos-of-black-subjects-covered-with-controversy/stories/200804010228.
7. Bourdieu defines the concept of “learned ignorance” as follows: “In short, one has quite simply to bring into scientific work and in to the theory of practices that it seeks to produce, a theory—which cannot be found through theoretical experience alone—of what it is to be a ‘native,’ that is, to be in that relationship of ‘learned ignorance,’ of immediate but unselfconscious understanding which defines the practical relationship to the world” (The Logic of Practice [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990], 19). See also Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 120–121.
8. “Symbolic violence,” for Bourdieu is “violence which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such…. Being born in a social world, we accept a whole range of postulates, axioms, which go without saying and require no inculcating. This is why the analysis of the doxic acceptance of the world, due to the immediate agreement of objective structures and cognitive structures, is the true foundation of a realistic theory of domination and politics. Of all forms of ‘hidden persuasion,’ the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of things” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 168).
9. Howard Thurman, “The Inner Life IV: The Flow Between the Inner and the Outer,” 1952, Howard Thurman Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
10. Charles H. Long insists that an African American has had to “experience the truth of his negativity and at the same time transform and create an-other reality. Given the limitation imposed upon him, he created on the level of his religious consciousness” (Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion [Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group Publishers, 1999], 177).
11. I am greatly indebted to Henry Louis Gates’s theory of the discursive role of the “signifying monkey” in black folk and literary culture. Gates explains that the “signifying monkey,” an African American trickster figure, is an “ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act” (“ ‘The Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 4 [1983]: 686). Bourdieu makes a similar argument, noting that the “logic of symbolic domination” necessitates that the dominated use symbols from the dominant culture to express resistance. As Wacquant puts it, “Bourdieu rejects the alternative of submission and resistance that has traditionally framed the question of dominated cultures and which, in his eyes, prevents us from adequately understanding practices and situations that are often defined by their intrinsically double, skewed nature…. To resist I have no means other than to make mine and to claim aloud the very properties that mark me as dominated (according to the paradigm ‘black is beautiful’)” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 28).
12. Gates, “Blackness of Blackness,” 723. “The Signifying Monkey is a trickster figure, of the order of the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology, Esu-Elegbara in Nigeria, and Legba among the Fon in Dahomey, whose New World figurations…speak eloquently of the unbroken arc of metaphysical presuppositions and patterns of figuration shared through space and time among black cultures in West Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The trickster figures, aspects of Esu, are primarily mediators: as tricksters they are mediators and their mediations are tricks” (ibid., 687).
13. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan offers a lucid definition of signifying as a linguistic style in black culture: “The Black concept of signifying incorporates essentially a folk notion that dictionary entries for words are not always sufficient for interpreting meaning or messages, or that meaning goes beyond such interpretations…. A particular utterance may be an insult in one context and not another…. The hearer is thus constrained to attend to all potential meaning carrying symbolic systems—the total universe of discourse” (“Signifying, Loud-Talking, and Marking,” in Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, and Slam Dunking, ed. Gena Dagel Caponi [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999], 311).
14. The religion scholar Joseph Murphy defines the role of tricksters in African Diaspora spiritual traditions as mediators that serve as bridges between the living community and the world of spirit. He uses the example of the trickster figure Legba, otherwise known as Elegbara or Esu in several black religious traditions, including Yoruba and Voodoo. “Legba is an old man who walks with a stick…. He is…an original trickster, with his mind in two worlds. And so he becomes a gatekeeper between the worlds…. When he opens the gate, the two worlds can interpenetrate” (Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora [Boston: Beacon Press, 1994], 39).
15. Murphy suggests that African Diasporic religious rites are primarily oriented toward serving the community: “Diasporan spirituality can be recognized by its…reciprocity of spirit and human being, and its sharing of the spirit in the service of community” (ibid., 185).
16. Murphy frames the religions of the African Diaspora as “systems of action” rather than “systems of belief.” He notes that the major “texts” of these religions are transmitted “orally and ceremonially.” There is a “high interdependency between the idea of spirit and the actions which incarnate it. In a sense the spirit is the action of the community” (ibid., 182). He illustrates the interdependency of theory and practice in black preaching: “Nearly every witness of African American preaching has tried to convey that it is the style of the delivery of the sermon as much as the content which is important to the congregation. The preference for ceremonial precision over systematic thought indicates an alternative spirituality” (183). For an excellent analysis of the theme of embodiment in the religions of the African Diaspora, see chapter 6 in Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Also see Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
17. Robert B. Stepto explores the social and religious functions of African American ritual space from slavery to the present. His definition and description of African American ritual grounds is worth quoting at length: African American ritual grounds are “special configurations within the structural topography that are, in varying ways, elaborate responses to social structure in this world…. The slave quarters are, I think, the prototypical ritual ground, not only because they constituted the first space within social structure redefined in some measure by Afro-Americans, but also because they serve as a spatial expression of the tensions and contradictions besetting any reactionary social structure, aggressive or latent, subsumed by a dominant social structure. The grand tension is that of self-initiated mobility versus self-imposed confinement: ritual grounds…offer the exhilarating prospect of community, protection, progress, learning, and a religious life while often birthing and even nurturing (usually unintentionally) a sense of enclosure that may reach claustrophobic proportions. In short, Afro-American ritual grounds are quite frequently, in the final analysis, spatial expressions within a structured topography of the ‘double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes’ giving rise to ‘double words and double ideals’ that characterize what Du Bois describes to be the Negro’s burden of ‘double consciousness’ ” (From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991], 68–69).
18. Gregory C. Ellison II, “Late Stylin’ in an Ill-Fitting Suit: Donald Capps’ Artistic Approach to the Hopeful Self and Its Implications for Unacknowledged African American Young Men,” Pastoral Psychology 58 (2009): 485.
20. Wacquant explains Bourdieu’s “double reading” of culture: “Social facts are objects which are also the object of knowledge within reality itself because human beings make meaningful the world which makes them. A science of society thus understood as a bidimensional ‘system of relations of power and relations of meaning between groups and classes’ must of necessity effect a double reading” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation, 7).
21. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 5.