Josef Sorett's Spirit in the Dark presents a religious history of racial aesthetics in the United States, bringing the theoretical insights of religious studies to bear on a narrative of mid-twentieth-century racial aesthetics as represented in black literature. His method is historical rather than constructive. The end result is an impressive overview of key black writers, among them novelists, poets, playwrights, and preachers, whose conversations and interactions shaped five decades of African American public intellectual discourse. The title of this text derives from a 1970 recording made by Aretha Franklin that situates a religious query in a nightclub setting: “Are you getting the spirit?” In particular, the singer, known as the “Queen of Soul,” the daughter of a well-known preacher who had established her stardom in the realm of popular music, was interrogating the possibility that the same spirit that moves the performance of the shout or holy dance in the black church can also move in the club. Sorett refrains from quoting the song lyrics at length due to copyright concerns, but here is an excerpt of the pertinent content:

Sorett's apprehension of Franklin's song and performance style frames his narration of the racial aesthetic that finds expression in a vast body of work comprising black religion, literature, and life. His project offers an illuminating genealogy of spirit linking language, culture, and politics into critical discourses of race, religion, and literature, brought into focus methodologically by the question of how religious ideas animated the literary imaginings of mid-twentieth-century black artists and intellectuals. To this end, Sorrett's book analyzes and interprets a broad variety of sources of black thought, inclusive of essays, anthologies, poems, plays, novels, song lyrics, sermons, oral histories, and news articles. Although the end notes are comprehensive and helpful, unfortunately, there is no bibliography.

Spirit in the Dark interprets the evolution of five decades of twentieth-century black literature beginning with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ending with the Black Power movement of the 1960s, all told with religion at the center of the story. His stated aim is to demonstrate the importance of the interlocking histories of religion, secularism and spirituality in the study of racial aesthetics. Chapter 1, “The Church and the Negro Spirit,” begins in the 1920s with the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement, with careful attention to the contributions of Reverdy Ransom, Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. The second chapter, “Ancestral Spirits,” explores the cultural anthropologies of Africa, the Caribbean, and the southern United States that emerged in the 1930s from the work of Nancy Cunard and Zora Neale Hurston, ending with an extensive discussion of the critical response and influence of Richard Wright. Chapter 3, “Catholic Spirits,” examines the impact of the highly acclaimed anthology of black literature, The Negro Caravan, published in 1941, and the influence of black Catholic sensibilities as represented in the writings of Claude McKay. Sorett's comparison of McKay's work with Roi Ottley's 1943 text New World A-Coming offers an insightful case study of the contested role of Protestantism in the midcentury black literary imagination. Chapter 4, “As the Spirit Moves,” cites the competing literary norms at play in the work of the most celebrated black writers of the 1940s and 1950s, including James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, Robert Hayden, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright. In the fifth chapter, “An International Spirit,” Sorett describes the global political implications of the emergent Black Arts movement. Chapter 6, “That Spirit Is Black,” continues the analysis of the Black Arts movement with a close reading of the masculinist politics and spiritual aspirations discerned in three important anthologies published in the late 1960s: Black Fire, The Black Aesthetic, and The Black Woman. The title of the seventh and final chapter, “Contrary Spirits,” signifies Sorett's concern for the contemporary relevance of the works of black writers who challenged the nationalist orthodoxy of the Black Arts movement, namely, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray. A brief epilogue acknowledges the importance of the republication in the late 1960s of Benjamin Mays's 1938 text, The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature, an analysis of the relationship between black religion and black literature. Sorett also reprises Aretha Franklin's song and journey to reassert his claims and central arguments regarding the religious history of racial aesthetics.

Sorett's text raises some compelling questions for consideration by church historians and specialists in religion and society. Did the demise of legal segregation with the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act signal the end of both black churches and black literature? Would there be no more need for the prophetic religion that Mays called for thirty years earlier? Would Negro literature disappear, as Richard Wright had speculated earlier? Did social equality bring an end to racial aesthetics? Aretha Franklin's performance addresses these queries. Her song “Spirit in the Dark” signaled a return to the black church and a definitive endorsement of a black aesthetic.

This text firmly establishes Sorett as an important interpreter of black religion and literature, to be read in conversation with the recent works of Barbara Savage, Gary Dorrien, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. My only regret is that Sorett opted not to devote more analytical attention to describing Aretha Franklin’s performance as exemplary of a trope I would denote as “of the church but not in it.” As they say in the black church tradition: “That'll preach.”