Mermaids and Journeymen: Revival Zion and Africana Religious Futures

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Friedman, “TELL ME A STORY”.

2 Crosson, Experiments with Power, 5.

3 The song, one of his most popular tracks, written in 1992, has garnered a lot of controversy, particularly from the international human rights community because it incites violence against batty bwoys saying they should be shot in the head and killed. Banton hasn’t performed the song since 2007 and has permanently banned it from his catalog stating that he wrote it at 15 years old about a pedophile in his community who was molesting young boys. In 2019 he released a statement, “I recognize that the song has caused much pain to listeners, as well as to my fans, my family and myself … I am determined to put this song in the past and continue moving forward as an artist and as a man. I affirm once and for all that everyone has the right to live as they so choose. In the words of the great Dennis Brown, ‘Love and hate can never be friend.’ I welcome everyone to my shows in a spirit of peace and love. Please come join me in that same spirit” https://www.vibe.com/2019/03/buju-banton-why-he-removed-boom-bye-bye-from-catalog.

4 Robinson-Smith, Revivalism, 49.

5 Khytie Brown develops the concept of geospirituality in her dissertation “Afro-Queer Journeys”.

6 A journeyman in Revival is someone who, as practitioners experience spiritual trance journeys, serves as ritualist specialist guides that help to guide them in the spiritual world. As well, a journeyman is also one who travels physically in service of the religion. In the case of Bishop Marcus, he travelled across Jamaica as well as Panama in the service of Revival Zion. Additionally, during my fieldwork the term journeyman was controversial, as some ‘60 Revivalists argued that practitioners who label themselves as journeymen are hailing Freemasonry in which a journeyman is a level within a lodge. I can confirm that among Spiritual Baptists, who are Trinidadian kin to Revivalists, a few of those with whom I spoke discussed belonging to Mechanic Lodges/The Independent United Order of Mechanics https://www.iuomwh.org/.

7 “Instrument of Obeah” is described in the Obeah Act of 1898 as “anything used, or intended to be used by a person, and pretended by such person to be possessed of any occult or supernatural power” See: https://obeahhistories.org/1898-jamaica-law/.

8 Baum, “The Reformation of the Senses,” 50.

9 Hunte, “Encountering Others Across Science Fiction,” 16.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid, 18.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid, 19–20.

14 Brown, “But the Mermaid Did Not Rise Up”.

15 Hunte, “Encountering Others Across Science Fiction,” 24.

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Notes on contributors

Khytie K. Brown

Khytie Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. She is an ethnographer and scholar of African diaspora religions and African and African American studies. Her research broadly examines the intersections of religion, race, gender and sexual alterity, criminality, material culture, sensory epistemolgies and social media practices among African diasporic religious practitioners in the Caribbean, Latin America and North America. In particular, her work focuses on Revival Zion religion, an understudied African-heritage, indigenized form of Christianity originating in Jamaica. Khytie holds a Ph.D. in African and African American studies from Harvard University with disciplinary foci in religion and anthropology. She is also a research associate at the Center on Transnational Policing at Princeton University. She received a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) degree from Harvard Divinity School, with a concentration in Religion and the Social Sciences, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory University in sociology and religion. Her work has been funded by awards and fellowships including the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Global Religion Research Initiative at the University of Notre Dame and The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.