Honoring the Ancestors: An African Cultural Interpretation of Black Religion and Literature

In Honoring the Ancestors, Donald H. Matthews affirms once and for all the African foundation of African-American religious practice. His analysis of the methods employed by historians, social scientists, and literary critics in the study of African-American religion and the Negro spiritual leads him to develop a methodology that encompasses contemporary scholarship without compromising the integrity of African-American religion and culture. Exploring the works of such seminal black scholars as W. E. B. DuBois, Melville Herskovits, and Zora Neale Hurston, Matthews traces the early development of the African-centered approach to the interpretation of African-American religion.