Representations of martyrs are rare in early Christian art and largely render their pain and deaths invisible. Art's unwillingness to confront devotees with images of violence and suffering contrasts with the visceral descriptions of martyrdoms in contemporaneous texts. These ekphrastic texts, some of which purport to describe violent paintings depicting the torture of saints, encouraged these same devotees to visualize and participatorily reperform the violence of these martyrdoms in their imaginations-spaces free from the dangerous interactivity and immediacy of physical vision. An examination of how these texts conceive of the (material) images they describe and the (mental) images they conjure demonstrates that representations of martyrdom varied fundamentally across text and image, as ekphrastic texts guided listeners to see beyond the literal in response to challenging physical sights. Martyrdoms were, at first, spectacles to be seen with the "eyes of the mind" and not the eyes of the body.
This article uses Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, as a case study to interpret how coloniality structured Black Protestant institution-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Washington, who was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia sometime around 1858 or 1859, was quite literally reared on a plantation, and spent most of his public career trying to work "up from slavery," as the title of his autobiography confirms. In the "afterlife of the plantation" (to borrow Jarvis McInnis' term), his Protestant social respectability, Protestant work ethic, and Protestant institution largely recapitulated the plantation system in his embrace of agriculturalism, industrialism, and in his political and ethical commitments to gendered normative order and Black sexual Victorianism. This article sifts through these entanglements to interpret their meanings for the study of Black religion in and beyond historically Black institutional contexts.
The sea serves as an epistemological orientation for understanding Afro-Cuban religious traditions that access divinities and the dead to reinforce group solidarity and produce healing. This article explores how spirit mediums and entities create historical, cultural, and ritual intersections that elucidate an ongoing worlding that carries potent political strategies for sustenance through an enactment of the waters, especially the ocean. In particular, this work looks at synergies between bodily acts like the singing of the song "Mam & aacute; Francisca," the drawing of Palo signatures for kalunga (the sea of the dead), and altar creation in honor of Yemay & aacute;. The result is a complex and fluid understanding of spiritual practices and relationships that resist flattening and slip through taxonomic rendering. Further, by continually accessing afterlives that are porous and action-oriented, Afrolatine spiritual communities create spatial and temporal conduits between the living and the dead that are full of a radical social purpose.
