A thoughtful and thought-provoking reassessment of the relationship between twentieth-century African American religion and literature, Josef Sorett's Spirit in the Dark chronicles the complex and constructive entanglement of the leading literary and intellectual figures with their natal religious heritage as they sought to articulate identities of self and community within and against the constraints of American racism.

African American literature underwent a profound transformation in the twentieth century towards more secular concerns and frames of reference. Sorett argues that in spite of this transformation, religion continued to preoccupy the thought and artistic expression of its most influential authors. Religion didn't simply survive as a relic in their work; rather it animated that work, and provided a vital fund of ideas with which to grapple with the meaning of blackness, even if the traditional forms of religious life were at times abandoned by the proponents of a new African American aesthetic sensibility. This nuanced binary understanding is captured in the title of the book: “spirit in the dark” refers to both religious and aesthetic elements of African American art (Spirit, and spirit) and to the locations where that art took place (in the dark – in an identity of blackness, and in secular forums outside the church as a symbol of spiritual light).

Sorett structures his work around leading themes in the developing symbiosis between religion and modern African American literature: ancestral spirits, catholic spirits, the international spirit, and contrary spirits, among others. If the Harlem Renaissance can be considered representative of a new national consciousness of black (political, cultural, as well as artistic) identity, the so-called New Negro, then, as Sorett argues, religion still served to provide the conceptual language for the negotiation of that new identity. Alain Locke's definitive literary anthology The New Negro (1925), for example, includes pieces that collectively attempt to distance African American identity from the black church (as the embodiment of racial submissiveness and denigration), while at the same time acknowledging the rich aesthetic and moral resources that black Christianity had provided and still offered to new black artists. Similar estimations can be found in other leading figures as well, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Whatever the shortcomings of its history under slavery, the black church of the twentieth century also embodied the democratic, integrationist, and literate impulses of American liberalism, impulses shared by artists in their efforts to assert the exceptional value and dignity of African American culture.

Not surprisingly, one of the cultural alternatives to the African American experience of racial oppression first proposed was that of Africa itself – the clearest evidence that black peoples possessed a rich, distinctive, and native aesthetic tradition equal to any the world had produced, one that could be drawn on by African Americans in search of an identity not trammeled by the legacy of racism. Sorett argues that here too religion (via the ancestral spirits of Africa) provided a key resource for appropriating African culture. African religion, of course, had not been completely lost in the dislocations of slavery, and still existed more or less overtly, though often controversially, in the New World. This spiritual appropriation was accomplished in part by artists turning back to the heritage of the black church in the South. Considered to have preserved much of the African spirit in its religiosity, it could be mined for a more authentically African spirituality rather than being perceived as a cultural embarrassment.

Sorett performs similar analyses for other aspects of the dynamic between religion and African American literature. He considers the growing catholicity of mid-century authors, both in their attempts to cultivate and assert a universality for African American art, and in the interests of some to explore and identify with Catholicism proper, as an expression of Christianity that was seemingly less implicated in the racial polarities of American life. Partly in tension with the effort to fashion a distinct African American aesthetic, writers also made efforts to transcend perceptions that their work as such could appeal only to the black community. Anthologies such as The Negro Caravan (1941) offered their work not only as distinctively African American but also as quintessentially American contributions to literature. To some extent this aspiration was realized, as African Americans garnered national recognition by way of awards such as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For some, such as Claude McKay, the allure of racial and religious universalism led them into the Catholic Church itself, as it represented a commitment to social justice and racial equality, a conversion which found expression in their work.

Sorett shows that this conversation between religion and aesthetics continued well into the 1960s. Even at its presumably most secular and least traditionally religious moment, African American literature remained preoccupied with the constraints and the potential that religion, even its particularly Christian expression, offered for the formation of black aesthetics and identity. It is a phenomenon that still persists today; Sorett's work will no doubt open up contemporary African American literature to similar investigation and analysis.