With a Louisville Institute First Book Grant, I will devote my time to two book projects. First, I will finish revisions to my book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics, which traces how ideas about religion informed efforts to theorize a racial aesthetic from the New Negro era to the age of the Black Arts. Histories of black literature and culture in the twentieth century have been narrated as unconcerned with, if not opposed to, religion writ-large. However, Spirit in the Dark demonstrates that religion remained a fertile, fluid and formidable force in these debates, even as those rubrics changed over time. In fact, they reveal the influence of circulating, if shifting, definitions of the very category of “religion” on interpretations of black culture. In re-casting these aesthetic debates, I show how such categories as "church" and "spirit" provided African American artists and intellectuals with an grammar through which they interrogated such terms as “the Negro church” even as it was just gaining currency.

The second project, at least temporally, begins where the first concludes. This book will narrate the simultaneous growth of (and relationships between) Christian and black culture industries from the 1960s through the turn of the millennium. The aim of the monograph is to analyze a range of black cultural practices (i.e. film, literature, music, etc.) that bear witness to shifting discourses of race and religion in a post-Civil Rights era. However, this story cannot be told apart from an account of the re-alignment of market forces, and the development of new media technologies and institutions, which both sustain and constrain black (American) life under the sign of late capital. As such, I hope to shed light on social, cultural and economic shifts that coalesced, and the networks that developed, to create and sustain a global stage and marketplace for a diverse group of black Christian cultural workers and institutions.