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Faculty

Dianne M. Diakité, Associate Professor (2001). Dianne M. Diakité is an associate professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University. She obtained her B.A. from Colgate University, her M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School and her Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Professor Diakité’s teaching and research focus upon African and African Atlantic/diaspora religious cultures. She is the author of Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience and a number of articles and essays covering a wide array of topics in African and African diaspora religious studies. She has extensive international experience in Africa, and the Caribbean, including seventeen months as a Fulbright Scholar conducting archival and ethnographic research in Democratic Republic of Congo and thirteen years of repeated travel to Trinidad to pursue research on the Yoruba-based Orisa religion.

Professor Diakité’s active research agenda includes a book project examining Local and Transnational Legacies of African Christianity in West-Central Africa and the Black Atlantic World and a co-authored book-length manuscript entitled Religious Vocabularies of Africa: Obeah, Orisa and Identity in Trinidad. She is committed to studying and teaching about African religious cultures in continental and diasporic contexts. She aims to widen conversations about the African religious heritage, religious pluralism, women’s experience, and theory and method in African and African Atlantic/diaspora religious studies, especially through interdisciplinary approaches to vernacular spiritualities, theologies and religious practices. Professor Diakité is also interested in examining the transnational dimensions of African religious formation among African peoples and their descendants in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas not only in the 20th and 21st centuries but also in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her most recent graduate courses include: “Theoretical Issues in the Study of Black Religion: African Atlantic Religious Studies,” “Global Feminisms and the Study of Women and Religon in America,” and “African Religious Traditions and Healing” (co-taught with Professor Emmanuel Lartey). Some of her most recent undergradaute courses include: “Global Black Feminisms and Womanisms: Spirituality, Epistemology and the Politics of Representation,” “African Religious Cultures in the Americas and the Caribbean,” “Introduction to Religion: African Religions and Buddhism” (co-taught with Professor Bobbi Patterson).

Books/Articles/Essays

Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience, Oxford University Press, 2005

“Collecting on Their Investments One Woman at a Time: Economic Partnerships Among Caribbean Immigrant Women in the United States,” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies 2:1 (July 2007): 35-57

“African-Derived Religions in Jamaica: Polyvalent Repertoires of Culture and Identity in the Black Atlantic,” Contours: A Journal of the African Diaspora 3:2 (Fall 2005): 74-112

“Womanist God-Talk on the Cutting-Edge of Theology and Black Religious Studies: Assessing the Contribution of Delores Williams,” in Union Seminary Quarterly Review, Vol. 58, nos. 3-4 (Fall 2004): 59-77

“Womanist Theology in the Caribbean Context: Critiquing Culture, Rethinking Doctrine and Expanding Boundaries,” in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 20, no.1 (Spring 2004): 61-82

“Authenticity and Authority in the shaping of Trinidad Orisha Identity: Toward an African-Derived Religious Theory,” co-authored with Tracey Hucks in Western Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 27, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 176-185

“African-Jamaican Religious Cultures in the Victorian Age,” Victorian Jamaica, edited by Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer, forthcoming, 2012

“Theology and Religious Pluralism,” Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, edited by Katie Cannon and Anthony Pinn, forthcoming, 2012

“Orisha Traditions in the West,” The Hope of Liberation in World Religions, edited by Miguel A. De La Torre, 239-256. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008

“Dancing Limbo: Black Passages Through the Boundaries of Place, Race, Class, and Religion” in Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanist Approaches in Religion and Society, edited by Stacy Floyd-Thomas, 82-97. New York: NYU Press, 2006

“Indigenous Wisdom at Work in Jamaica: The Power of Kumina,” Indigenous Peoples’ Wisdom and Power: Affirming Our Knowledge Through Narratives, edited by Ivy Goduka and Julian Kunnie, 127-142. London: Ashgate Publishers, 2006

“Christian Doctrines of Humanity and the African Experience of Evil and Suffering: Toward a Black Theological Anthropology,” in The Ties that Bind: African-American and Hispanic-American/Latino Theology in the United States, edited by Anthony Pinn and Benjamin Valentin, 169-183; “Response,” 200-202. New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2001

“Rethinking Gospel and Culture: A Womanist Theological Assessment of Methodist Evangelism in the Colonial British West Indies,” in Quarterly Review, 20/2 (Summer 2000): 140-154

“Women in African Caribbean Religious Traditions,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, edited by Rosemary Skinner Kellar and Rosemary Radford Ruether, 116-126. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006

“African American Religion: History of Study” co-authored with Tracey Hucks in Encyclopedia of Religion, Volume 1, 2nd edition, edited by Lindsay Jones, 73-83. Detroit: Macmillan, 2005

“African-Derived Religions,” in Encyclopedia of African & African-American Religion, edited by Stephen D. Glazier, 21-22. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Reference Works/Routledge, 2001

“African-Derived Religions in Jamaica,” in Encyclopedia of African & African-American Religion, edited by Stephen D. Glazier, 165-169. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Reference Works/Routledge, 2001