Roots, Religion and Resistance: Unpacking the Spectrum of Black Nationalist Movements

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 March 2025) | Viewed by 6412

Special Issue Editor


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Religion and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5, Canada
Interests: Cushite ethnic identity in the Hebrew bible and the ancient Near East; ethnicity and identity in biblical literature; legacies of the bible: Christian colonization; slavery and racism

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The MDPI journal Religions is pleased to invite submissions for a forthcoming Special Issue dedicated to examining Black religious identity movements. This issue will offer a comprehensive exploration of the diverse spectrum of nationalist movements within the African diaspora, including Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, Rastafarianism, African American Judaism, the Nation of Islam, and Hoteps, among others. Our objective is to dissect and understand the intricate relationships between religion, self-identity, black resistance, and the aspiration for transformative futures as envisioned by these movements.

We seek original research that provides a deep dive into the historical origins, religious underpinnings, and evolution of these movements. Contributions may address a variety of themes such as the unique histories and motivations behind each movement; the ways in which they have shaped religious, cultural, and personal identities; their political endeavors and influence; and their impact on gender and sexual identities. Furthermore, we encourage papers that discuss concepts of resistance, social nonconformity, the reframing of black worldviews, the pursuit of societal fulfillment, and the crafting of redemptive narratives in the context of Black struggle. We also welcome scholarly discourse on the potential directions that these movements might take in constructing innovative and radical futures for Black communities.

This Special Issue aims to serve as an interdisciplinary platform for scholars and practitioners to engage with these vital topics, fostering a richer understanding of the role of Black religious nationalist movements in shaping the social and cultural landscapes of the past, present, and future.

Expanded Themes and Topics:

  1. Historical Overview and Motivations: tracing the roots and evolution of these movements, emphasizing their responses to historical and contemporary forms of oppression and marginalization.
  2. Religious and Spiritual Dimensions: delving into the religious doctrines, spiritual practices, and theological frameworks that underpin these movements, exploring how they offer alternative religious and spiritual paths for black communities.
  3. Identity and Cultural Expressions: examining how these movements contribute to the formation of individual and collective identities, and the role of cultural expressions in manifesting and sustaining these identities.
  4. Black Nationalist Ideals and Resistance: analyzing how these movements articulate and advance the cause of Black nationalism, focusing on their strategies and philosophies of resistance against systemic injustices.
  5. Social Non-Conformism and Black Social Fulfillment: investigating the ways these movements challenge mainstream societal norms and promote a unique sense of social fulfillment within black communities.
  6. Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality: addressing the intersections of gender, sexuality, and other identities within these movements, and their implications for inclusivity and diversity.
  7. Reshaping the Black Worldview: exploring how these movements contribute to redefining and reshaping the global black worldview, influencing perceptions, attitudes, and understandings within and outside the black community.
  8. Redemptive Narratives and the Black Struggle: understanding how these movements place the black struggle within a redemptive framework, offering narratives of hope, liberation, and spiritual salvation.
  9. Political Implications and Activism: examining the political stance, activism, and social impact of these movements, as well as their role in addressing issues of racial inequality, social justice, and political empowerment.
  10. Visioning a Radical Future: discussing the forward-looking aspects of these movements, their visions for a radical new future for black communities, and their impact on broader societal change.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor, or to the Assistant Editor Loretta Chen (loretta.chen@mdpi.com) of Religions. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Kevin Burrell
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Pan-Africanism
  • diaspora
  • black religions
  • black nationalism
  • Garvey
  • Rastafarianism
  • black identity
  • African American Judaism
  • black resistance movements

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (8 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

13 pages, 243 KiB  
Article
“Politics Without a Party”: Interrogating RastafarI Ethics of Political (Dis)engagement (in the 21st Century)
by Anna K. Perkins
Religions 2025, 16(8), 1017; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081017 (registering DOI) - 6 Aug 2025
Abstract
This discussion explores the (dis)engagement of Jamaican RastafarI from the party political process, using RastafarI elder Mortimo Planno’s notion of “politics without a party” as a strand shaping and tying together the multiple threads of the exploration. The discussion examines how RastafarI has [...] Read more.
This discussion explores the (dis)engagement of Jamaican RastafarI from the party political process, using RastafarI elder Mortimo Planno’s notion of “politics without a party” as a strand shaping and tying together the multiple threads of the exploration. The discussion examines how RastafarI has engaged with partisan politics/political parties from Independence (1962) until today. It highlights the differing ways of approaching politics among Rastas, including the minority, who have entered representative politics in a bid to [as yet unsuccessfully] change the tribal and compromised state of Jamaican politics. The decentralized nature of the RastafarI movement allows for diverse expressions of RastafarI political thought and action, but can present challenges for unified political mobilization on a large scale. Nonetheless, with or without direct partisan involvement, RastafarI has adapted and re-presented itself in response to changes in the local and global context, thus becoming a potent political force. So, despite this general lack of engagement with “statical” matters, RastafarI is and continues to be a significant political movement on several fronts, through movements, music, and symbols rather than traditional electoral routes. Full article
15 pages, 240 KiB  
Article
Proclaiming Our Roots: Afro-Indigenous Identity, Resistance, and the Making of a Movement
by Ann Marie Beals, Ciann L. Wilson and Rachel Persaud
Religions 2025, 16(7), 828; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16070828 - 24 Jun 2025
Viewed by 496
Abstract
Proclaiming Our Roots (POR) began as an academic community-based research initiative documenting Afro-Indigenous identities and lived experiences through digital oral storytelling. Since its inception, Proclaiming Our Roots has grown into a grassroots social movement focused on self-determination, cultural reclamation, and resistance to colonial [...] Read more.
Proclaiming Our Roots (POR) began as an academic community-based research initiative documenting Afro-Indigenous identities and lived experiences through digital oral storytelling. Since its inception, Proclaiming Our Roots has grown into a grassroots social movement focused on self-determination, cultural reclamation, and resistance to colonial erasure. This paper explores Proclaiming Our Root’s evolution, from a research project to a grassroots social movement, analyzing how storytelling, relational accountability, and Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous governance have shaped its development. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and grounded in Afro-Indigenous worldviews, we examine how POR mobilizes digital storytelling, community gatherings, and intergenerational dialog to give voice to Afro-Indigenous identity, build collective consciousness, and challenge dominant narratives that erase or marginalize Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous presence. Through a sharing circle involving Proclaiming Our Roots community members, advisory council members, and the research team, in this paper we identify key themes that reflect the movement’s transformative impact: Identity and Belonging, Storytelling as Decolonial Praxis, Healing, Spirituality and Collective Consciousness, and Resistance and Social Movement Building. We discuss how these themes illustrate Proclaiming Our Roots’ dual role as a site of knowledge production and political action, navigating tensions between institutional affiliation and community autonomy. By prioritizing Afro-Indigenous epistemologies and centering lived experience, POR demonstrates how academic research can be a foundation for long-term, relational, and community-led movement-building. In this paper, we want to contribute to broader discussions around the sustainability of grassroots movements, the role of storytelling in social change for Indigenous and Black Peoples, and the possibilities of decolonial knowledge production as epistemic justice. We offer a model for how academic research-initiated projects can remain accountable to the communities with whom we work, while actively participating in liberatory re-imaginings. Full article
13 pages, 220 KiB  
Article
The Emergence of Black Jews in France
by Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot
Religions 2025, 16(6), 788; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16060788 - 17 Jun 2025
Viewed by 332
Abstract
For the past three decades, Black Jews in France have made their presence manifest. These believers identify as African, West Indian, or biracial, and are either converts or native Jews. They may either assert their faith from within the institutions of French Jewry, [...] Read more.
For the past three decades, Black Jews in France have made their presence manifest. These believers identify as African, West Indian, or biracial, and are either converts or native Jews. They may either assert their faith from within the institutions of French Jewry, or claim their Jewishness without practicing Judaism. They have widely different backgrounds, but share a common need for identity reconstruction. This paper aims to discuss this Africana minority within the broader French Jewish community, taking into account its relation to the majority. What is the positioning of Black Jews as French citizens or residents? How do they perceive themselves when reading the Torah and through the gaze of their fellow White Jews? What is their place within the global Jewish world? Such are the questions this paper will try to address, building on fifteen years of fieldwork in France and assessing their involvement in French Jewry and its impact with regard to participation, integration, legitimacy, and conflicts. Full article
13 pages, 215 KiB  
Article
Rethinking Black Rage in and with James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power
by Xavier Pickett
Religions 2025, 16(6), 675; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16060675 - 26 May 2025
Viewed by 599
Abstract
By exploring how Cone employs and emulates Black literary sources, this article argues that his theological writing can be understood as often translating and thereby making explicit the significance of the inner, emotional lives of Black folks, particularly Black rage, into Black theological [...] Read more.
By exploring how Cone employs and emulates Black literary sources, this article argues that his theological writing can be understood as often translating and thereby making explicit the significance of the inner, emotional lives of Black folks, particularly Black rage, into Black theological thought. The argument, in other words, is that Cone’s writing is an ethical performance of rage and a literary process of reforming his rage. His performance of rage is ethical in that it is morally motivated by injustice and indifference. It is not a performance for its own sake or to simply blow off steam. The performance takes a literary form and becomes the means through which his rage is reformed. The aim of this article demonstrates how his theological writing copes with and transforms rage into ethical discourse. Full article
24 pages, 322 KiB  
Article
“That Part of Us That Is Mystical”: The Paradoxical Pieties of Huey P. Newton
by Matthew W. Hughey
Religions 2025, 16(6), 665; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16060665 - 23 May 2025
Viewed by 522
Abstract
Born the seventh son of a Louisiana preacher in 1942 and becoming the co-founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, Huey P. Newton evidenced a complex, changing, and contradictory synthesis of faith and facts until his death in 1989. Focusing on 1960s’ [...] Read more.
Born the seventh son of a Louisiana preacher in 1942 and becoming the co-founder of the Black Panther Party in 1966, Huey P. Newton evidenced a complex, changing, and contradictory synthesis of faith and facts until his death in 1989. Focusing on 1960s’ U.S. Black Nationalism as materialist, Maoist, and Marxist in its appeals to objectivity, rationality, and positivist science, some scholars have presented Black Nationalist contempt for religion as pacifying and counter-revolutionary. Conversely, others have focused on the religious-like nature of formally secular 1960s’ Black Nationalism, even framing it as a “form of piety” and a “politics of transcendence”. Between these bookends, the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton have simultaneously been characterized as both “anti-religious” and as possessing an “innate spirituality”. I attempt to reconcile these divergent interpretations through an analysis of Newton’s worldviews (culled from his graduate school papers, published articles and books, and speeches and interviews). Newton frequently described aspects of the human condition as partially spiritual and in so doing, regularly married dialectical materialist variants of anti-capitalism, Black Nationalism, and ethno-racial self-determinism with “mystical” and theological aesthetics, concepts, stories, and styles from a variety of religious and philosophic traditions. These “paradoxical pieties” included, but were not limited to, the embrace and critique of spiritual existentialism and transcendentalism; deism and theosis; Christian hermeneutics; Zen Buddhism; and Vedic and Pranic Hinduism. Full article
19 pages, 251 KiB  
Article
“A Place Not Made by Hands”: Unsteady Formations of Nationalist Religiosities in Malawi
by R. Drew Smith
Religions 2025, 16(5), 616; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16050616 - 13 May 2025
Viewed by 542
Abstract
This article focuses on the Christian ecclesiastical footing and moorings of nationalist thought and pursuits within colonial Nyasaland and its postindependence iteration as the nation of Malawi. Attention is paid to foundational influences and the impact of European mission churches, beginning in the [...] Read more.
This article focuses on the Christian ecclesiastical footing and moorings of nationalist thought and pursuits within colonial Nyasaland and its postindependence iteration as the nation of Malawi. Attention is paid to foundational influences and the impact of European mission churches, beginning in the late 1800s, and three streams of American Christianity that influenced social development in Malawi: (1) historic African American Methodist and Baptist traditions; (2) Watchtower millenarianism; and (3) emerging mid-1900s expressions of predominantly white Pentecostal, charismatic, and evangelical Christianity. The article examines ways these European and American religious streams served as crucial catalysts for one or another form of African independency within the Malawi context, paying particular attention to the ways and degrees to which African innovations on Global North Christian expressions and paradigms proved disruptive to established authorities. Full article
26 pages, 407 KiB  
Article
Al-Hajj Umar Taal or El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)? Case Studies on Islam and Interreligious Pan-African Unity
by Jimmy Earl Butts
Religions 2025, 16(5), 542; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16050542 - 24 Apr 2025
Viewed by 1134
Abstract
A comparison between the function of Islam in the lives of Al-Hajj Umar Taal and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) suggests that Shabazz’s example of translating his Islamic obligations into the secular philosophy of Pan-Africanism reflects more promise toward the interest of interreligious [...] Read more.
A comparison between the function of Islam in the lives of Al-Hajj Umar Taal and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) suggests that Shabazz’s example of translating his Islamic obligations into the secular philosophy of Pan-Africanism reflects more promise toward the interest of interreligious Pan-African unity. During the nineteenth century, figures like Edward Blyden and Duse Muhammad Ali both presented the compatibility of Islam with Pan-Africanism. However, the practical examples of the steps needed to obtain interreligious unity require continued exploration. The author begins with an examination of the question of jihad and the “religious other” in Islam as understood by some. Secondly, the author focuses on Umar Taal to explore the way his understanding of Islam affected his relationship with both Muslim and non-Muslim Africans he encountered in nineteenth-century West Africa. Subsequently, the author analyzes how Malik El-Shabazz understood Islam to relate to the quest for Pan-Africanism. Using concepts from the critical theory of religion, the author will argue that Shabazz’s determinate negation of elements of his religious commitments that might hinder unity among people of African descent is instructive for the construction of an interreligious Pan-African unity. Full article
15 pages, 262 KiB  
Article
Religious Possession and Self-Repossession: The Black Nationalist Movements and the Anglophone Caribbean Ritual Plays in the 1960s–1970s
by Xin Li and Hongwei Chen
Religions 2024, 15(10), 1288; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15101288 - 21 Oct 2024
Viewed by 1389
Abstract
Since achieving political independence in the 1960s, Anglophone Caribbean nations have faced the urgent task of exploring cultural independence. In the socio-cultural sphere, Black nationalism dominated, with Pan-Africanism and Rastafarianism exerting significant influence. In literary creation, writers and intellectuals sought to unearth local [...] Read more.
Since achieving political independence in the 1960s, Anglophone Caribbean nations have faced the urgent task of exploring cultural independence. In the socio-cultural sphere, Black nationalism dominated, with Pan-Africanism and Rastafarianism exerting significant influence. In literary creation, writers and intellectuals sought to unearth local popular religions and folk traditions to produce literature that was distinctively Caribbean. In this quest, rituals—especially those involving religious possession—emerged as pivotal tools for writers to explore historical traditions and reflect on identity formation. Ritual plays, in particular, vividly represented these dynamics within the socio-cultural context. This paper examines the interaction between Black nationalist movements and ritual plays during this period, highlighting their significant role in shaping Caribbean identities. It reveals that ritual plays such as Dream on Monkey Mountain, Couvade, and An Echo in the Bone challenge Pan-Africanism promoted by Black nationalist movements. Instead, they employ ancestor possession rituals and elements from multiple religious rituals to construct a native Caribbean identity. These plays underscore the central role of Afro-Caribbean traditions while also highlighting the region’s diverse cultural heritage and the localized nature of Caribbean identity. Furthermore, they broaden the use of religious rituals in recalling and understanding traditions. Full article
Back to TopTop