The Visible Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau

Abstract

“The Visible Church” is a broad survey of the field of African American religion in the Atlantic world that has emerged in the quarter century since Albert Raboteau's seminal text, Slave Religion, first appeared. It focuses on a relatively small number of works that have fundamentally changed or conceptually displaced the three major categories of analysis—survivals, creolisation and revisionism—that have dominated the historiographical landscape since 1978.