Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.

When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.

Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms--ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more--to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.

Ahmad Greene-Hayes is assistant professor of African American religious studies at Harvard Divinity School at Harvard University.