Black Sacred Arts Conference

This conference seeks to bring together scholars, practitioners, performers, and community based religious leaders to explore the Black sacred arts and related spiritual expressivities through a critical re-appraisal of the formulation of the “triple” religious heritage of Africa, studying indigenous practices in various localities in Africa, as well as religious and spiritual movements such as Christianity and Islam whose history and legacies are within, and extend beyond the continent.

The conference seeks both to interrogate and update research perspectives on these religious streams by studying their links to expressive culture, including music, visual arts, ritual and other modes of expression. Each of these religious streams are internally diverse, interacting among themselves as well as across religious and geographic boundaries. It is this complex movement of the Black sacred arts, this liminal space of religion at the crossroads, that is the focus of this conference. How have these various religious streams flowed together and split apart into new currents, new expressive means and new ways of engaging the sacred? What are the different epistemologies and ontologies—written, spoken, sung, danced, drummed, painted, carved, woven, and articulated through other modalities of sacred practice—that have informed this lived religious field? What are some new sites of evidence that explain religion and spirituality as lived, immanent and yet transcendent experience that interconnects the sacred and secular in the African quotidian? What are the dialogic exchanges between innovative religious-ritual manifestations, artistic imaginings, and performance practices? What is the legacy of the triple heritage in diasporic forms of the Black sacred arts?

Lunch will be provided each day.

Black Sacred Arts Conference Schedule

Day 1 - July 22, 2026

8:30 – 9:00 AM: Ghana Dance Ensemble - Opening Performance

9:00 – 9:15 AM: Opening Remarks

9:15 – 10:45 AM: Sacred Organology

• John Dankwa, “From Funeral Xylophone to Eucharistic Instrument: Re-inscribing the Gyil in Dagara Catholic Worship”
• Kai Mora, “The Gnawa Guinbri: In the Interstices of African Materiality and Islam”
• Kwasi Ampene, “Staging and performing sacred soundscapes: Ivory trumpeters, poetic rhetoric, and the spiritual essence of the number seven in Africa and the African Atlantic”

10:45 - 11:00 AM: Break

11:00 AM –1:00 PM: Ritual Technologies

• Collin Edouard, “Sounding Ritual Technologies: Vodou Vocality”
• Leticia Burtet, “Sound, Presence and Being-With: Umbanda Ritual Music as Embodied Sacred Practice in the Afro-Diasporic Atlantic”

• Robin Garcia, Becoming River: “Water as Method in Osun's Sacred Aesthetics”
• Yomi Folaranmi, “‘The Beauty and Vividness Is Like Nothing but Itself’: Tessellation and Ritual in Belkis Ayón’s Collography”

1:00 – 1:45 PM: Lunch

1:45 – 2:15 PM: Lecture-Demonstration, Ben Amakye-Boateng,“Agbe as Sacred Soundscape: Music, Memory, and Religious Pluralism Among the Tabom of Ghana”

2:15 - 2:25 PM: Break

2:25 – 3:55 PM: Politics and the Sacred-Secular Divide

• Peterson Kabugi, “The Rhythm of Resistance: How Benga Music Articulates Spiritual and Political Consciousness in Western Kenya”
• Michael Frishkopf, “Religious freedom, sects, musical ritual, and conflict: a comparative perspective on Sufi music in Ghana and Egypt”
• Aristedes Hargoe, “Sustaining Klama and Kple Sacred Arts Amidst Hostilities: An Ethnographic Study”

3:55 - 4:05 PM: Break

4:05 –5:35 PM: Panel 4 - Gender and the Black Sacred Arts

• Sheila Wandera, “The Sacred Cloth and Secret Pleasures: Imagining Sexuality on the Swahili Coast of Mombasa”
• Moses Nii-Dortey, “Sacred agency, performativity, and gender transformation of a chiefdom: Asafotufiam festival and the unsung heroines of Ada”
• Gayle Murchison, “The Beyoncé Mass (2018) Quod libet: Womanist/Feminist Empowerment and Black Liberation Theology of Becoming”

Day 2 - July 23, 2026

9:00 – 11:00 AM: Entangled Histories

• Eduardo Lichuge, “Missionary Soundscapes and Sonic Conversion in Colonial Mozambique”
• Sophia Kitlinski, “The Press, The Police, and Abakuá Counter-Aesthetics in Late Colonial Havana”
• Janie Cole, “Music and Ritual in the Early Modern Kingdom of Kongo: Indigenous and Afro-European Spiritualities and Performance”
• Elyan Hill, “Dancing at the Crossroads: Sacred Geographies of Domestic Enslavement in Togolese Performance”

11:00 – 11:15 AM: Break

11:15 AM – 12:15 PM: Keynote, Torgbui Gideon F. Alorwoyie

12:15 – 1:00 PM: Lunch

1:00 – 2:30 PM: Staging the Divine

• Nathalie Joachim, “The Eternal Present: Vodou, Voice, and the Regeneration of Freedom”
• Aileen Robinson, “The Stagecraft of Spirit: Fabiola Jean-Louis and Material Transmutations”
• Benson Ohihon Igboin, “Iovbodẹ Festivals among the Iuleha of Nigeria: A Study in Polyontological Preservation of Communal Memory:

2:30 - 2:45 PM: Break

2:45 – 4:15 PM: Digital and the Divine

• Oluwatosin Ibitoye, “Soundscapes of Merchandised Worship and Convivial Trends in the Digital Mediation of Selected Pentecostal Ministries in Nigeria”
• Deborah Jayeoba, “‘Digital’ Christianity and Nigerian New-age Churches: Mediatization as ‘New’ Syncretism in Lagos Pentecostal Worship”
• Ernest Jnr Frimpong and Jonathan E. T. Kuwornu-Adjaottor, “The Digital and the Divine: Opponents or Potential Partners for African Music and Art in the 21st Century”

4:15 – 6:00 PM - Lahare Kunde Shrine Event

Day 3 - July 24, 2026

8:30 - 9:00 AM: Lunsi Performance

9:00 – 11:00 AM: Performative Christianity in African Religious Meaning-making

• Patrick Oloko, “Ikon Allah and the Musical Crossroads: Gospel, Islam and the Politics of Performance”
• Anthony Okeregbe, “Rethinking Sonic Excess and Embodied Spectacle in African Christian Worship”
• Catherine Uchechukwu Nkulume, “‘Omenela ga adi, uka ga di’: Igbo Catholic Worship in a New Mediational Frame”
• Kyama Mugambi and Njane Mugambi, “Multiple Belongings in Black Sacred Art Music: The Case of Missa Amani”

11:00 - 11:15 AM: Break

11:15 –12:15 PM: Roundtable - Theology and the Arts: Challenges and Opportunities for Research and Collaboration

• Fulera Issaka-Toure, Moderator
• Joshua D. Settles
• Alfred P. Addaquay
• Frederick M. Amevenku
• Cosmas Ebo Sarbah

12:15 – 1:00 PM: Lunch

1:00 – 1:45 PM: Performance and Paper with Lunsi, Nathaniel Ash-Morgan, “Damba Festival: Indigenous Roots of a Syncretic Islamic Celebration”

1:45 - 2:00 PM: Break

2:00 – 4:00 PM: Performing Liberation: The Ritual Pursuit of Resistance, Rights, and Violence in and across the Black Atlantic?

• Albert Kafui Wuaku, “The wonder that was Little Haiti: Structural violence, the malcontents of gentrification, and Vodou practice in South Florida.”

• Genevieve Nrenzah, “Symbolic violence and divine communication in Ghana’s Indigenous religious traditions”
• Seth Tweneboah, “When traditional spirituality don jam modern technology:” rethinking secularism in Ghana’s Crime-Control Regime
• Joseph Hellweg, “Harmony of Hunting, Counterpoint to Human Rights: Dozo Eudaemonia in Côte d’Ivoire through the Songs of Dramane Coulibaly”

4:00 - 4:15 PM: Break

4:15 PM –4:45 PM: Final Discussion

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Host or Publisher Yale Institute of Sacred Music