African Sacred Spaces: Culture, History, and Change

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African Sacred Spaces: Culture, History, and Change is a collection of carefully and analytically written essays on different aspects of African sacred spaces. The interaction between the past and present points to Africans continuing recognition of certain natural phenomena and places as sacred. Western influence, the introduction of Christianity and Islam, as well as modernity, have not succeeded in completely obliterating African spirituality and sacred observances, especially as these relate to space in its various iterations. Indeed, Africans, on the continent and in the Diasporas, have responded to the challenges of history, environmentalism, and sustainability with sober and versatile responses in their reverence for sacred space as expressed through a variety of religious, historical, and spiritual practices, as this volume attempts to show.

Reviews

In African Sacred Spaces the authors provide a rich harvest of African and African diaspora sacred spaces as central to the notion of individual and group identities. The volume is unique in that there is something of interest for every reader irrespective of disciplinary specialty. -- Raphael Chijioke Njoku, Idaho State University
African Sacred Spaces analyzes the extraordinary worldview of Africans that various worldsseen and unseenconverge to birth the interdependence of humans, nature and nurturethereby revealing the extraordinary uniqueness of ideas that unite men with mountains, women with the moon, and children with the sun. In the indivisible world of the spiritual and physical, the book gives cogency and urgency to the need to emote along a non-Western mode of thinking in order to reform our chaotic world. -- Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
African Sacred Spaces is an interdisciplinary book that probes key issues pertaining to African and African diasporic sacred spaces. Taken together, the twelve chapters in this volume provides a collective understanding of African spirituality in its multi-layered interactions. It is a key resource for those who want a comprehensive book focused on the intersection of African religion, culture, and history. -- Akintunde Akinyemi, University of Florida

Author Bio

BioDun J. Ogundayo is associate professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Pittsburgh. Julius O. Adekunle is professor of African history at Monmouth University.