With a focus on the connected spiritual legacy of the black Atlantic, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality leads the way to more comprehensive trans-geographical studies of African spirituality in black art. With essays focusing on African spirituality in creative works by several trans-Atlantic black authors across varying locations in the Ameri-Atlantic diaspora, this collection reveals and examines their shared spiritual cosmology. Diasporic in scope, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality offers new readings of black literatures through the prism of spiritual memory that survived the damaging impact of trans-Atlantic slaving. This memory is a significant thread that has often been missed in the reading and teaching of the literatures of the African diaspora. Essays in this collection explore unique black angles of seeing and ways of knowing that characterize African spiritual presence and influence in trans-Atlantic black artistic productions. Essays exploring works ranging from turn-of-the-century African American figure W.E.B. DuBois, South African novelist Zakes Mda, Haitian novelists Edwidge Danticat and Jacques Roumain, as well as African belief systems such as Voudoun and Candomble, provide a scope not yet offered in a single published volume. This collection explores the deep and often unconscious spiritual and psychosocial connectedness of people of African descent in the African and Ameri-Atlantic world.Table of Contents: Chapter 1: Introduction: African Spirituality and the Ameri-Atlantic World Carol Marsh-Lockett and Elizabeth J. West Section 1: Imagining African Faith Systems in the Postmodern World Chapter 2: The Gods Who Speak in Many Voices, and in None: African Novelists on Indigenous and Colonial Religion John C. Hawley Chapter 3: Reading Spirit: Cosmological Considerations in Garfield Linton’s Voodoomation: A Book of Foretelling Melvin Rahming Chapter 4: From “Pythian Madness” to an “Inner Ethic of Self-Sacrifice”: The Spirits of Africa and Modernity in Du Bois’s Late Writings James Manigault-Bryant Chapter 5: Rituals of Remembrance: Trauma, Memory, and Spiritual Practice in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness Erica L. Still Section 2: Integrations of the African and the Western in New World Black Atlantic Writing Chapter 6: The Body of Vodou: Corporeality and the Location of Gender in Afro-Diasporic Religion Roberto Strongman Chapter 7: Hoodoo Ladies and High Conjurers: New Directions for an Old Archetype Kameelah Martin Chapter 8: From Africa to America by Way of the Caribbean: Fictionalized Histories of the Diasporic Slave Woman’s Presence in America Artress Bethany White Section 3: African Deities and Divinations as Forces in New World Black Works Chapter 9: Expressions of African-Based Spirituality in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory Beauty Bragg Chapter 10: Waiting for Olodumare: Ishmael Reed and the Recovery of Yoruba” Darryl Dickson-Carr Chapter 11: Testing and Changing: Esu and Oya ‘Making it Do What it Do’ in The Best Man Georgene Bess Montgomery Chapter 12: Cuban Utopianism and Haitian Messiah: Spiritual Provocations of Collective Catalyst in Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew Mario Chandler