Overview

Talking to the Dead is an ethnography of seven Gullah/Geechee women from the South Carolina lowcountry. These women communicate with their ancestors through dreams, prayer, and visions and traditional crafts and customs, such as storytelling, basket making, and ecstatic singing in their churches. Like other Gullah/Geechee women of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, these women, through their active communication with the deceased, make choices and receive guidance about how to live out their faith and engage with the living. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant emphasizes that this communication affirms the women's spiritual faith-which seamlessly integrates Christian and folk traditions-and reinforces their position as powerful culture keepers within Gullah/Geechee society. By looking in depth at this long-standing spiritual practice, Manigault-Bryant highlights the subversive ingenuity that lowcountry inhabitants use to thrive spiritually and to maintain a sense of continuity with the past.

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9780822356745

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Reviews

LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant has produced a masterful work of scholarship that not only provides a unique analysis of 'lived' history and religion in the lives of contemporary African American women but also bears witness to the power of human creativity, expressed through imagination, memory, and performance. By crafting such an adept narrative, Manigault-Bryant draws the reader into a compelling story that balances her subjective experiences with a new and productive methodological approach. --Yvonne P. Chireau, author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition

LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant has produced a masterful work of scholarship that not only provides a unique analysis of 'lived' history and religion in the lives of contemporary African American women but also bears witness to the power of human creativity, expressed through imagination, memory, and performance. By crafting such an adept narrative, Manigault-Bryant draws the reader into a compelling story that balances her subjective experiences with a new and productive methodological approach. -- Yvonne P. Chireau, author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition An interesting ethnography that is in conversation with other studies on Gullah culture, Talking to the Dead goes beyond previous scholarship by highlighting the spirituality of contemporary Gullah women. -- Margaret Washington, author of Sojourner Truth's America Talking to the Dead is an incredibly rich study, which will reward both a general readership and readers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. -- Teresa Zackodnik Feminist Review LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant's Talking to the Dead is well suited for the novice who is unaware of any of the traditions and religious practices of the Gullah/Geechee... Because of its emphasis on black women, the ethnography also has much to offer to the black feminist or black womanist scholar, especially one with an interest in African Diasporic culture or African derivative belief systems. -- Constance Bailey Western Folklore

An interesting ethnography that is in conversation with other studies on Gullah culture, Talking to the Dead goes beyond previous scholarship by highlighting the spirituality of contemporary Gullah women. --Margaret Washington, author of Sojourner Truth's America

Talking to the Dead is an incredibly rich study, which will reward both a general readership and readers from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. --Teresa Zackodnik Feminist Review (11/10/2015)

Author Information

LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College.

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