The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South

Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues--requiring a shift away from understandings of "slave religion" as a gender-amorphous category.

Women responded on many levels--ethically, ritually, and communally--to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.

Author: Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 09/14/2021
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.47lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.88d
ISBN13: 9781469663593
ISBN10: 1469663597
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Slavery
- Religion | Christianity | History
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies