Leonard C. McKinnis, II| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
I am an interdisciplinary scholar of African American religions and theology. My work explores twentieth- century diasporic religious worlds that not only deepen the narrative of Black religious life in North America but complicates it as well. My research sits at the intersection of religion, race, and the construction of Black identity. These interests concentrate on lived religion – the way everyday people interact with and perform their religion as daily practice – as the medium through with to make sense of and interpret Black religious worlds.
My research aims to expand modes of knowledge production by turning to ordinary people practicing forms of Black religion, as an analytical tool for comprehending how religion functions in the lives of practitioners. My research promotes an intellectual space whereby scholars and the broader public are informed about the rich diversity of diasporic Black religious life in North America, widening our awareness about religious worlds constructed by people of African descent in their quest to claim human dignity. My research agenda is therefore grounded in a question that animates my curiosity: ‘What is the “religion” in African American or Black Religion?’ I direct our attention to understudied traditions that illuminate manifold paths Black people have taken to build a comprehensive life and culture, inclusive of religion.
As my first book, The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a aNew Religion, demonstrated, I am interested in how believers in diasporic religions self-fashion and perform their Black identity through forging new religious movements. My current project resumes this trajectory. I am engaged in a vigorous and innovative ethnographic study on the Nation of Islam (NOI), a major new Black religion organized in 1930 by W.D. Fard Muhammad in Detroit, Michigan. My book, tentatively titled, Everyday Muslim: Religion and the Construction of Black Identity in the Nation of Islam, will offer an ethnographic analysis of the Nation of Islam, focusing our attention on the spiritual world of NOI followers. This contribution and intervention analyze the NOI from direct engagement with devotees.
