Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora.

• Author: Nti, Kwaku

Casselberry, Judith, and Elizabeth A. Pritchard, eds. Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Spirit on the Move moves the scholarly interest in Pentecostalism, the fastest growing Christian denomination in Africa, forward. The authors achieve this enormous feat with a focus on women in Africa and its diaspora. The focus on these two cardinal constituencies clearly situates this book conveniently at the crossroads of Pentecostal and Black feminist studies. The authors posit that this volume's mission is to correct the gaping disconnection between the numerical strength of Black women in the various manifestations of the Pentecostal denomination and the dearth of scholarship on "their experiences, theologies, and innovations in diverse contexts" (2).

To this end, this four-part book places Black women at the center of Pentecostal scholarship as it weaves a web of connections that encapsulates gender, race, class, religion, and the nation state dynamic in substantiating their complex subjectivities. The first justification for this pivotal position of Black women is that they "constitute a substantial proportion of the world's Pentecostals" (2); and have rather paradoxically been obscured. To this end, the authors of this volume subscribe to the intersectionality theory, while rejecting the presumption of secularity that regards religion "as axis of oppression necessitating resistance on the part of emancipated subjects" (3). Second, the contributors hold the view that the diasporic dislocations of Black women shed new light on the political implications of Pentecostalism. Consequently, Spirit on the Move "signifies and expresses their [Black women's] struggles not just in cosmologies, churches... and households, but within and among nation states and... migrant corridors" (3).

The authors challenge readers to critically consider the multiple means that power pumps through Pentecostal performances succeeding in "realigning gender and race, heralding the end of the world, electrifying singers... audiences, disciplining female workers, anointing celebrities and politicians" (15). Part I examines the role of race in Pentecostal and Evangelical churches despite their insistence on the equality of all peoples.before God. In complex ways, Blackness seen differently from the points of view of men and women becomes...