Marlon Rachquel Moore Boeken

The book explores various works of fiction that confront and redefine common beliefs regarding the experiences of Black individuals of faith. By analyzing diverse narratives, it highlights the complexities and nuances of identity, spirituality, and culture within the Black community. Through these stories, it encourages readers to rethink stereotypes and embrace a broader understanding of faith and its expression in literature.

Examines a range of fiction that challenges widespread assumptions about what it means to be a black person of faith. Taking up the perceived tensions between the LGBTQ community and religious African Americans, Marlon Rachquel Moore examines how strategies of antihomophobic resistance dovetail into broader literary and cultural concerns. In the Life and in the Spirit shows how creative writers integrate expressions of faith or the supernatural with sensuality, desire, and pleasure in a way that highlights a spectrum of black sexualities and gender expressions. Through these fusions, African American writers enact queer spiritualities that situate the well-known work of James Baldwin into a broader community of artists, including Bruce Nugent, Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Jewelle Gomez, Becky Birtha, and Octavia Butler. In these texts from 1963 to 1999, Moore identifies a pervasive, affirming stance toward LGBTQ people and culture in African American literary production.