Tribal Talk

Will Coleman explores from a theological, historical, and literary perspective the oral traditions of African American culture, and how those oral traditions have made an impact on the composition of slave narratives. Specifically, Coleman examines the process by which religious beliefs were passed down from generation to generation. He explores the various interpretive strategies that aid in understanding both the theological and the literary nature of African American slave narratives. Ultimately, he links black theology with the language and the religious experiences of enslaved black people.

The experiences of enslaved African Americans have been recorded in writings identified as slave narratives, also called liberation narratives. Although much has been written about slave culture and slave religion from sociological and historical perspectives, Tribal Talk is the first book to study slave narratives as a source for a contemporary, constructive black theology, while also paying close attention to their literary and rhetorical value.

Will Coleman explores from a theological, historical, and literary perspective the oral traditions of African American culture, and how those oral traditions have made an impact on the composition of slave narratives. Specifically, Coleman examines the process by which religious beliefs were passed down from generation to generation. He explores the various interpretive strategies that aid in understanding both the theological and the literary nature of African American slave narratives. Ultimately, he links black theology with the language and the religious experiences of enslaved black people.

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Explores the relationship between black theology, hermeneutics, and the idiom of African American discourse, and strives to demonstrate a multivoiced praxis of storytelling and interpretation. Illustrates the multifaceted roles of imagination and language in presenting, re- presenting, preserving, and transmitting a cosmology and an epistemology that sees the religious experience of West Africans and of African Americans as both a part of the larger experience in the Americas and unique to the religious orientation of slaves. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Will Coleman is Theologian-in-Residence at First African Presbyterian Church and Co-director of the Black Kabbalah Institute, both in Lithonia, Georgia.