The Talking Book; African Americans and the Bible

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiv, 286, [2] pages. Slight DJ soiling. Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund and the Louis Stern Memorable Fund. Inscribed on the title page. Inscription reads 9/17/06 To Peter, In friendship and admiration. Allan Dwight Callahan. Includes bibliographical references and index, as well as chapters on African Americans--Religion and Afrocentrism, and African Americans--Religion. Includes Acknowledgments, Prologue, Postscript, Notes, Subject Index, and Scripture Index. The Bible has influenced African Americans throughout history. This book is the first to explore the Bible's role in the black experience. Using the bible as a foundation, African Americans shared religious beliefs, created their own music, and shaped the ultimate key to their freedom--literacy. Callahan highlights the intersection of biblical images with African-American music, politics, religion, art, and literature. The author tells a story of a biblically informed African- American culture, identifying four major biblical images--Exile, Exodus, Ethiopian, and Emmanuel. He brings these themes to life in a history that grows from the harsh experience of slavery into a rich culture. Slaves and their descendants discerned something in the Bible that was neither at the center of their ancestral cultures nor in evidence in their hostile American home. They found in the Bible a thread of justice antithetical to the injustice they had come to know. African Americans began to trace that thread at the very time the Founding Fathers were concluding that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness did not extend to slaves. The Talking Book casts the Bible as the central character in a vivid portrait of black America, tracing the origins of African-American culture from slavery's secluded forest prayer meetings to the bright lights and bold style of today's hip-hop artists. The Bible has profoundly influenced African Americans throughout history. From a variety of perspectives this wide-ranging book is the first to explore the Bible's role in the triumph of the black experience. Using the Bible as a foundation, African Americans shared religious beliefs, created their own music, and shaped the ultimate key to their freedom literacy. Allen Callahan highlights the intersection of biblical images with African-American music, politics, religion, art, and literature. The author is a Baptist minister, professor, and writer. Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, associate professor of New Testament, 1992-99; Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, associate professor of religious studies, 1999-2003; Seminário Teológico Batista de Nordeste, Bahia, Brazil, professor of New Testament, 2003--. With respect to The Talking Book, writing for the Black Issues Book Review, Alvelyn J. Sanders described the book as an "engaging illustration of the fluid, transcendental and eternal power of the Bible." Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Callahan examines how the music and literature of black Americans are shot through with biblical images. His opening chapter rehearses familiar history, explaining how white evangelicals introduced slaves to the Bible, and arguing that the Bible has given black Americans the resources to critique injustice. Innovatively, Callahan examines how black readers have engaged the Bible's "toxic" passages, like Genesis 9:25, which racists have read to say that dark skin is a curse. Callahan then turns to his central task: teasing out the various biblical themes that have been important to black writers and readers. He suggests that other scholars have focused too exclusively on the imagery of exodus in African-American culture. Of course, Callahan does find exodus in spirituals like "God's A-Gwinter Trouble de Water." But he also traces the theme of exile through the plays of August Wilson and the novels of James Baldwin, and he considers the central place of the name of Jesus in black folklore, belles lettres, and hip-hop. From W. E. B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison, black writers have invoked Jesus to signify "the suffering of black people." Callahan's investigations will doubtless interest students of African-American religion and a wider audience.