Questions at the Crossroads with Dr. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

A Conversation with Dr. Megan Goodwin

[This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.]

Dr. Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Her first book, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South, available through UNC Press, was named a 2022 Best First Book in the History of Religions by the American Academy of Religion. It was also awarded the 2022 Outstanding First Book Prize and the Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. The Souls of Womenfolk was a finalist for the 2022 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

What’s most important for readers to know about The Souls of Womenfolk?

What I'm saying in The Souls of Womenfolk is that Black religious culture is less an institution than a collection of practices held together by practitioners and families. And women are at the center of this collection of practices.

Intellectual giants like W.E.B. Dubois and Dr. Albert Raboteau, who of course have been hugely important to the development of Africana and African American religious studies broadly, interrogated the subject of enslaved people's religiosity because it is central to the rituals, practices, and consciousness of Black people in the United States. So much of Black religious studies draws on the work of Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and other early to mid-twentieth century thinkers who were concerned with how Black religion reflected upon Black people – specifically, the outsized role Black religious performances played in shaping access to rights and other political conversations. Consistent with their sociopolitical commitments, many prominent early scholars developed largely heteronormative and androcentric ways of theorizing Black religion, even as Hurston and other contemporaries challenged this patriarchal, heteronormative, Afro-Protestant preacher-centric approach.

The Souls of Womenfolk shows that, contrary to the androcentrism of the scholarly lineage, enslaved women were the primary architects of Black religious cultures. They were foundational. Black religion, from its inception, has been rooted in the labors and strivings of enslaved Black women.

What are you arguing in The Souls of Womenfolk?

I am arguing for a woman- and gender-centered understanding of Black religion in the slavery era. Slavery was an intensely embodied and gendered institution in terms of which experiences enslaved people had access to and the ways their lives were structured. Because slavery was an embodied and gendered experience, it stands to reason that how enslaved people understood the world, engaged the cosmos, and made decisions—particularly how they made ethical decisions—would also be heavily conditioned by gender. In this way, The Souls of Womenfolk offers a different methodological framework for the study of religion and slavery.

What is at stake in this project? Why does this work matter?

Above all, I want The Souls of Womenfolk to underscore the humanity of enslaved people generally and woman-gendered people in particular. Because enslaved women have not been a part of most conversations about religion in the slavery era, it is crucial that we talk about them in highly nuanced ways. We need to understand that they were people who were subjected to some of the most inhumane conditions that I have ever had the privilege and misfortune of trying to apprehend as a scholar.

This is why I center reproduction in The Souls of Womenfolk. Focusing on reproduction challenges scholars and others to ask different questions about human community and thriving, intimacy and hope amid situations of extreme, often unfathomable, violence. Doing so, requires those who engage the era in their thought and writing to counter the historiographical and methodological dehumanization of enslaved people that often represents them as a monolith. Methodological humanization means that we take them seriously as people who were constructing religious worlds in incredible circumstances and doing so in these remarkably nuanced and sophisticated ways. Enslaved women's gendered experiences were heavily conditioned by reproduction, because they were a part of a global economic system that relied on their fecundity to reproduce itself, especially in the lands that became the United States of America. Reproduction was not just a feature of their embodiment; it was very much a part of how they existed and arguably the primary experience that defined the parameters of what it meant to be a woman in slavery. It entailed the expectation that enslaved woman-gendered people would ensure not only the biological, but also social reproduction of the system that enslaved and inevitably killed them and their families. The Souls of Womenfolk invites scholars to contemplate how the experience of enslaved, woman-gendered humanity shapes the definitions and parameters of Black religion specifically and religion generally.

How does The Souls of Womenfolk  fit within the broader field of Black and/or African American religions?

I would like for my book to add to the lineage of scholars like Dr. Raboteau who have shown us the many facets of the phenomenon we now call “slave religion” and offered it to us as a way of thinking about the spectrum of Black humanity in the Americas. The spirit of that work injects some much needed life into the calcified portrait we have painted of an enormously diverse group of people. I see myself as someone who is writing within a Hurstonian legacy and inviting others to think about practitioners first – and not just practitioners within an institutional framework like church.

I want to shift the historiography of Black religion in the United States and Africana religions away from Afro-Protestant, androcentric, and institutional frameworks. So much of the field’s infrastructure is built on the study religion and slavery – I want to challenge us methodologically to rework the language and foundation. “Slave religion” is not as heteronormative, not as androcentric, not as institutional, and certainly not as Afro-Protestant as the canon makes it out to be. This is why I focus on things like ritual, ethics, power, and performance. These are all tools to help me access the diverse experiences to which scholars have not given our full attention in the field of religious studies, because we have prioritized institutional frameworks.

Once scholars decenter institutions and their geographical reach, we then have to open up the boundaries for study beyond the borders of the United States to include the transatlantic, transpacific, and other networks and flows of people who have contributed to Black culture and Black religion in the United States. Enslaved people were themselves highly mobile, because slavery was a global enterprise, and they were cogs within this enterprise. Many of them–not all, but many–moved between different places and brought different regional cultures and experiences with them. They were also interacting with cultures from other parts of West Africa, North America, and the Americas and cultivating practices in response to new challenges.

In the book, I put Western Africa in conversation with the lower U.S. South as a challenge to the field of Africana religions, which has historiographically and methodologically excluded Black people within the geographical borders of the United States. Whether we’re talking about Afro-Protestantism or not, we’re still talking about Africana religions. “Slave religions” as a framework challenges us to recognize the transnationality of Black religious cultures, which created this constellation of shifting and circulating practices and lexicons that are far less stationary than our methods would like them to be.

Moreover, The Souls of Womenfolk insists on centering enslaved Black women in the theorization of gender, religion, race, and violence. What does patriarchy look like when enacted by people who understand themselves as women or man-gendered people who are also enslaved? How do we write about violence when it's perpetrated between people of the same gender, race, or legal status? How should scholars theorize these frameworks of subjugation when they're so layered?

These are questions that I, like others, am still working through. But expanding our approaches historically, anthropologically, sociologically, and in other areas, while thinking intersectionally challenges scholars to rethink what constitutes Black religious experience.

Where do you see your work and the fields of Black and African American religions heading next?

My next project is thinking about the ways that the category of witchcraft itself has been used as a tool of gendered racialization. I think the historiography of witchcraft in the United States and the North American colonies has done a fantastic job interrogating gender and witchcraft. But once we move past Salem, I’m interested in the kind of racializing work that the category of witchcraft does even while accusers claim to disbelieve in the existence of the phenomenon. I’m really interested in the racialized gendered afterlives of witchcraft, because the specter of witchcraft, or witchcraft-like practices, retains a conceptual power that shapes how Black women’s religious practices are understood, practiced, and engaged by broader publics and the women themselves. 

With my co-editor Jordan Watkins, I’m also working on a Religion and Slavery documentary reader that compiles understudied sources for scholars who contend with the dispersed nature of sources about enslaved people and religion. We envision is as a guidebook for scholars, particularly graduate and undergraduate students, who are interested in working in the area, but may not have the resources to do the kind of scouting that we can do. I'm really excited to build relationships with archivists around the country and to develop a reader that will become a resource for people who want to work in the field. I’m passionate about growing the field of religion and slavery in a way that is sustainable—about creating platforms for other scholars to exchange resources, build community, and pursue intellectual interests that honor the lives and legacies of the extraordinary people who came before us.

Posted March 23, 2024