The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible [Hardcover]

Allen Dwight Callahan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2006

The Talking Book casts the Bible as the central character in a vivid portrait of black America, tracing the origins of African-American culture from slavery’s secluded forest prayer meetings to the bright lights and bold style of today’s hip-hop artists.
The Bible has profoundly influenced African Americans throughout history. From a variety of perspectives this wide-ranging book is the first to explore the Bible’s role in the triumph of the black experience. Using the Bible as a foundation, African Americans shared religious beliefs, created their own music, and shaped the ultimate key to their freedom—literacy. Allen Callahan highlights the intersection of biblical images with African-American music, politics, religion, art, and literature.
The author tells a moving story of a biblically informed African-American culture, identifying four major biblical images—Exile, Exodus, Ethiopia, and Emmanuel. He brings these themes to life in a unique African-American history that grows from the harsh experience of slavery into a rich culture that endures as one of the most important forces of twenty-first-century America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this informative academic volume, Callahan (a New Testament professor at Brazil's Seminário Teológico Batista do Nordeste) examines how the music and literature of black Americans are shot through with biblical images. His opening chapter rehearses familiar history, explaining how white evangelicals introduced slaves to the Bible, and arguing that the Bible has given black Americans the resources to critique injustice. More innovatively, Callahan examines how black readers have engaged the Bible's "toxic" passages, like Genesis 9:25, which racists have read to say that dark skin is a curse. Callahan then turns to his central task: teasing out the various biblical themes that have been important to black writers and readers. He suggests that other scholars have focused too exclusively on the imagery of exodus in African-American culture. Of course, Callahan does find exodus in spirituals like "God's A-Gwinter Trouble de Water." But he also traces the theme of exile through the plays of August Wilson and the novels of James Baldwin, and he considers the central place of the name of Jesus in black folklore, belles lettres, and hip-hop. From W. E. B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison, black writers have invoked Jesus to signify "the suffering of black people." Callahan's investigations will doubtless interest students of African-American religion.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The Bible has been central to the acculturation of African Americans since slavery, providing comfort to slave and slave master alike and providing a hope for deliverance since then. Religion professor Callahan parallels biblical images of exile, exodus, and prophets as expressed in the lives of African Americans. Through history, spirituals, literature, politics, and culture, he illustrates how black figures such as Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Louis Farrakhan, among others, have evoked the biblical figure of Moses in messages of deliverance from bondage and racism. Callahan traces the use of the Bible to "civilize" slaves, admonish them to obey their masters, promote the desire for literacy, and provide a code for expressing resistance and hope for justice. He examines the various exodus movements, from the slave South to freedom in the North and various efforts to return to Africa, and the search for the faith and fortitude to remain an exiled people in America. A powerful look at the intersection of religion and African American culture. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (October 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300109369
• ISBN-13: 978-0300109368
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,036,085 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful Diagnosis, December 9, 2006

By 

Robert W. Kellemen "Doc. K." (Crown Point, IN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (Hardcover)

Callahan has thoroughly researched and insightfully diagnosed the African American use of the Bible in literature. His most startling interpretation states that some have overemphasized the African American use of the Exodus Motif. I would agree that other motifs are also central, especially the suffering Jesus, but I would also say that the Exodus motif is central to the African American Christian sense of self throughout history. In fact, it might be best to unite both motifs: the suffering Jesus as the means of African American Exodus from the land of slavery to the Promised Land.

That issue withstanding, "The Talking Book" is a searing and probing study of how African Americans have used the Bible to move beyond the suffering to a place of healing hope.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction .

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How African Americans adopted and interpreted Christianity, February 8, 2007

By 

Michael Bond (Shawnee, OK United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (Hardcover)

How African Americans adopted and interpreted Christianity

In The Talking Book, Professor Callahan presents the early African American view of Christianity as it was adopted and practiced in the early days of slavery. Many of these concepts, he writes, have shaped the faith and mindset of many descendants of those slaves up to this day. He present the material in four sections, each with a Biblical theme.

Exile - an examination of the visions of Ezekiel and the similarity of the African American slaves' exile from their home continent with that of the Jews captivity in Babylon.

Exodus - As the Israelites escaped Egypt is there or was there ever a promised land for the slaves? Was an exodus even possible? There were multiple failed attempts to return to Africa, to the nation of Liberia, but these never worked out. There is no going `home'.

Ethiopia - here, the author addresses the pan-African movement, the resistance against colonialism in Ethiopia and the common bond that African Americans share with all persons of African ancestry.

Emmanuel - finally there is a look at the view of Christ, not as a king in heaven but as a co-sufferer here on Earth. The commonality of the beating and execution of Jesus and the mistreatment of the enslaved Africans is poignant.

This book is very thought-provoking and rife with historical, literary and musical references. I did find it a bit hard to read, as it is so full of anecdotes it feels disjointed and the text doesn't `flow' well and pour out a story. But the richness of the references makes it worth the effort. The more than twenty pages of notes makes it an excellent reference too.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read, November 28, 2006

By 

montague ring "montague ring" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (Hardcover)

Callahan offers an extensive analysis of how African Americans have appropriated biblical symbols and tropes. He moves fluidly in his reading of African American interpretations of the bible in various forms from the Negro Spiritual to contemporary Hip Hop. The Talking Book is both descriptive in its historical precision and prescriptive in its final Pan-African "call to arms." If you are at all interested in the literary, musical, art, or religious history of the United States, read it. There is nothing else out there of its kind.