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Congregating Roots: A Narrative Inquiry into Hoodoo Identities
Peace, Christopher D
Peace, Christopher D
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Abstract
Hoodoo is an African American-derived set of spiritual practices, originating from multiple African cultures and redefined by enslaved Africans and their descendants in the United States. Hoodoo has gone through many changes since its subversive, hybridized origins on American plantations, but its assemblage of Root Work, Conjuration, and ancestral veneration remain common threads that tie Hoodoo ideology and practices together. Hoodoo, along with other Afro-spiritualities, has been delegitimized under Western Protestant measurements. Popular U.S. media negatively display Hoodoo as a dark, unintelligible practice countering to Christian norms, ultimately leading to the misinformation about Hoodoo and diminishing its rhetorical influence within the origins of African American spiritual traditions. By gathering the narratives of 3 contemporary Hoodoo practitioners, I use narrative inquiry to explore the rhetorical construction of their Hoodoo identity and the social actions this identity promotes. Since identity is multi- positional and rhizomatically constructed through ways of knowing and being, this inquiry into Black spiritual practitioners’ narrative data situates the multiple ways Hoodoo identity is rhetorically complex, affecting African American ways of understanding and engaging with spirituality and spirit communication. This inquiry engages the rhetorical practices used to create Hoodoo identities through narrative restorying, highlighting connecting implications of spirit communication and the rhetorical situation. Ultimately, these narrative gatherings and analysis embrace the rhetorical engagement of identity and spirituality within African American Hoodoo.
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Date
2022-08-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Rhetoric, African American studies, Spirituality, African American rhetoric, Conjure, Hoodoo, Identity, Root Work, Spirituality