Reclaiming the Sacredness of African and Africana Religions

BY AMIE MONTEMURRO

One of the highest priorities for HDS in recent years has been expanding faculty expertise. This year, Dean Hempton welcomed Professors Tracey E. Hucks, AM ’95, PhD ’98, Terrence L. Johnson, MDiv ’00, and Ahmad Greene-Hayes to the HDS community. Their remarkable strengths as researchers and teachers will greatly enhance the School’s curricular offerings, scholarship, and support of African diasporic and African American religious studies. In collaboration with leading scholars across the School, this wave of new faculty members will have a major influence on the next generation of HDS students and the future of education.

Professor Tracey E. Hucks, a nationally known and esteemed scholar, has returned to her alma mater with a joint appointment as the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies at HDS and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Before joining the Harvard faculty this fall, Hucks served as Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Colgate University, where she was the James A. Storing Professor of Religion and Africana and Latin American Studies. She also held the inaugural Africana Studies Department chair role at Davidson College, taught for 17 years at Haverford College, and has conducted research in several countries, including Brazil, Cuba, England, France, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Trinidad. Her most recent book, Obeah, Orisa &Religious Identity in Trinidad: Volume One, was published in September 2022, with the second volume published by Dianne M. Stewart, MDiv ’93.

A graduate of Colgate University, Hucks earned one of her master’s and a doctoral degree from Harvard. She credits her academic journey to a number of influential professors, and it was her first undergraduate course in the study of religion that sparked a lifelong interest in the field. “The class was taught by Dr. Lewis Baldwin, who was most recently named among the ‘25 Influential Black Religious Studies Scholars from the Last 30 Years.’” Hucks remembers: “In my first semester, I was also taking a course with Dr. Manning Marable, who was just starting to formalize the Africana and Latin American studies program and later established the Institute for Research in African-American studies at Columbia University. So, what you see today is an intersection between religious studies and Africana studies, which became the foundation for the subfield Dr. Dianne Stewart and I would eventually name Africana Religious Studies.”

“Most of my classmates were studying the Black Church or African American religion in the United States; exploring the religions of the wider African diaspora was fairly novel back then,” says Hucks. “Those who forged the field at that time were cultural anthropologists. It was kind of a new moment in religious studies when we began to do this work of expanding the boundaries and excavating the history of religious meaning and practice across the African diaspora.”

While in Cambridge as a doctoral student, she met another influential scholar. “I am the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Africana Religious Studies, and what’s important about that distinction is that one of my mentors, Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies here at Harvard,” Hucks explains. “I was thrilled to return to Harvard for this role, and I’m honored to share that particular title with her.”

After strengthening the foundation her mentors put in place at Colgate, leaving full-time administration was not an easy decision. Yet Hucks was ready for this next step in her career. “I’m looking forward to building a world-class curriculum in Africana and Latinx religious studies. I’m looking forward to Harvard being a beacon and working with other colleagues and scholars to help support this vision. I’m looking forward

to training brilliant graduate students and researchers. And I’m looking forward to what this next phase of HDS brings to light and its impact on the future of the discipline.”

Hucks notes that Dean Hempton’s leadership—especially his commitment to multireligious education—drew her back to Harvard. “Many divinity schools or seminaries are often connected to one single Christian denomination. HDS’s pluralistic approach encourages students to see beyond that model and envision the many different traditions they can explore and the many different vocations they can pursue.”

Additionally, Harvard’s commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging align with her values and scholarly interests: “What a time to come here, when the University is launching its legacy of slavery project...what a time to be here, given the work that I do. This is a historic moment for Harvard—and I wanted to step into that historic moment and see how I could be of service to my alma mater.”

When asked about teaching and learning in a multireligious Divinity School, Hucks says that it’s precisely the respect for pluralism that HDS espouses that allows her area of study to advance. “Respect for diversity creates space to expand the boundaries and definitions of religion—to reimagine and redefine what we mean by sacred texts and practices.”

As her research shows, African and Africana traditions have all the ethos and artifacts respected in other world religions, but they were demonized by colonists and subjugated by white supremacy for centuries. Hucks’s newest book, Obeah, Orisa &Religious Identity in Trinidad: Volume One: Africans in the White Colonial Imagination, is the first half of an expansive two-volume, five-century examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. The book is a project Hucks took on with Stewart (a fellow alum) to identify the dangers of white colonial imagination and reclaim the sacredness of religions that have been marginalized throughout history.

Hucks is currently working on her next book, which will focus on the Africana healing wisdom and clandestine religious traditions practiced throughout the period of slavery and into the present day. As a historian of religion, her commitment is to excavate and rescue from obscurity those lived practices that often remain hidden in archives and Africana folk traditions.

expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume I, Obeah, Hucks traces the history of African religious repression in colonial Trinidad through the late nineteenth century. Drawing on sources ranging from colonial records, laws, and legal transcripts to travel diaries, literary fiction, and written correspondence, she documents the persecution and violent penalization of African religious practices encoded under the legal classification of “Obeah.” A cult of antiblack fixation emerged as white settlers defined themselves in opposition to Obeah, which they imagined as terrifying African witchcraft. These preoccupations revealed the fears that bound whites to one another. At the same time, persons accused of Obeah sought legal vindication and marshaled their own spiritual and medicinal technologies to fortify the cultural heritages, religious identities, and life systems of Africandiasporic communities in Trinidad.

“This meticulously researched book is a model of methodological scholarship. Its nuanced analyses of the slight traces of Obeah in the colonial archives of the Caribbean illuminate the marks of colonialism in religious and racial identities, as well as what escapes the grasp of colonial authorities. A truly extraordinary contribution!” — Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard University and President of the American Academy of Religion