Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans -- Author Conversation
Schedule
Thu, 28 Aug, 2025 at 07:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
184 S. Candler St. , Decatur, GA, United States, Georgia 30030 | Decatur, GA
This event takes place in person at Charis and on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Register at the link below to attend virtually. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event. Charis welcomes Ahmad Greene-Hayes in conversation with Ra Malika Imhotep for a discussion of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, a rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.
About the Author
Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes is an Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the Standing Committee for the Study of Religion and the Standing Committee on Advanced Degrees in American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. A social historian and critical theorist, Greene-Hayes is an accomplished scholar and teacher, and his research interests include critical Black Studies, Black Atlantic Religions in the Americas, and race, queerness, and sexuality in the context of African American and Caribbean religious histories.
He is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2025), and he has published essays in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, Nova Religio, GLQ, and the Journal of African American History, among others. Greene- Hayes has held prestigious fellowships from Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music and LGBT Studies program, the American Society of Church History, and Princeton’s “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures,” to name a few. In 2022, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, and in 2023, he was inducted into the historic Society for the Study of Black Religion.
About the Interviewer
Ra Malika Imhotep, ph.d (Ra/They/Them/doll) is a Black feminist writer and cultural worker from Atlanta, GA. They received their Ph.D in African Diaspora Studies and New Media Studies from the University of California Berkeley and are currently an Assistant Professor of Global African Diaspora Studies at Spelman College. Their work looks at the ways Black feminine figures across the African diaspora subvert preconceived notions about black womanhood and labor through aesthetic practice. They are the author of the poetry collection gossypiin (Red Hen Press, 2022), co-convenor of The Church of Black feminist Thought and a member of The Black Aesthetic curatorial collective.
The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.
Charis Books is a fully wheelchair accessible space with on site van accessible parking, two ramps, and additional overflow accessible parking nearby. Additional accessibility information can be found on the Accessibility page of our website.
In-person event guidelines:
- All attendees must wear a face mask during the event.
- We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.
- This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast. Register at the link below to attend virtually.
- As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.
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Please contact us at [email protected] or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions at https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10538231?hl=en. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to [email protected].
By attending our event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email [email protected].
