Books
Out now – University of California Press, October 2024.
Law in Light is a groundbreaking book on the resurgence and transformation of Akan path spiritual communities in the United States and Ghana. Drawing on extensive collaborative ethnographic research, the book offers powerful portraits of priestesses, priests, and others on their spiritual journeys, their ancestral reconnections, and their everyday lives. The book spotlights a queen mother, shrine elders, priests, and priestesses of a prominent shrine house in Maryland, as well as leaders at a legendary Asuo Gyebi source shrine in Ghana. In exploring worlds of healing, empowerment, and justice, Coyle Rosen argues for the importance of two novel theoretical concepts, which she calls copresent jurisdictions and constellations of subjectivity. The book urges a broader retheorization of alternative spiritual orders within contemporary theopolitical, cosmopolitical, and post-juristocratic debate.
Editorial Reviews
“Brilliantly exploring spiritual terrains and orders, Lauren Coyle Rosen, in conjunction with Akan keepers of sacred knowledge, soul-crafts constellations for acting within and beyond legally coded worlds. Showing how West African practices of spiritual liberation address decolonial exigencies, the book actualizes new methods for grappling with conventionally incompatible domains.”
—AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture
“Erudite and world changing—a must-read! Coyle Rosen’s analysis sheds light on the multifaceted interactions between spiritual belief systems and modern legal frameworks, providing a nuanced perspective on Akan spirituality, its contemporary relevance to political and legal practice, and discourses on justice.”
—Kamari Maxine Clarke, author of Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback
“A beautiful exploration of Akan spirituality. Coyle Rosen brings us into the philosophies, practices, and everyday lives of Akan priestesses and priests in Ghana and the United States, revealing both their spiritual relationships and their theopolitical engagements. This is a tremendously powerful and deeply moving work.”
—Michael Puett, Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, Harvard University
“In this remarkable book, Coyle Rosen explores the art of healing scars that still linger in slavery’s long shadow and the suffering that unfolds daily under the banalities of postcolonial African nationhood.”
—Claudio Lomnitz, Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
“An outstanding blend of ethnographic sensitivity, theoretical acuity, and writerly poise. By documenting the spiritual trajectories of African American priests and priestesses involved in the revitalization of Akan sacred culture, Coyle Rosen provides a unique window into the principled and pragmatic ways that an African religion lays a path toward a more equitable future. A brilliant example of an anthropology of ‘sovereignty from below.'”
—Adeline Masquelier, author of Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger
“Law in Light offers a faithful and evocative picture of a circum-Atlantic religion. This vital conversation among Caribbean American, African American, and Akan practitioners will have world-changing consequences.”
—J. Brent Crosson, author of Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad
“Coyle Rosen’s beautifully rendered study of Akan spirituality and justice seeking confronts the reader with both the immediacy of radical emancipatory alterity and the limits of finding resolution within the boundaries of racialized state, legal, and political institutions. The Akan priests and priestesses whose voices, experiences, and philosophies are at the heart of Law in Light teach us to look for the spark of illumination in the deeper constellations that constitute identity, community, and meaning.”
—Mark Goodale, author of Reinventing Human Rights
“Law in Light is a captivating study of the interconnected worlds of Akan spiritualists and spirits in Ghana and the United States. It’s an impressive example of decolonial ethnography that introduces readers to the priests, priestesses, spirits, spiritual warriors, and ancestors who, alongside the author, dream, converse, write, and theorize about the Akan sacred art of healing from historical trauma and state violence.”
—Annalisa Butticci, author of African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century
“Coyle Rosen skillfully portrays how Akan practitioners collaborate with African spirits and ancestors to create new forms of politics, justice, and subjectivity that challenge understandings of what these things are and what they might become. Her compelling prose transports us directly into the concepts, arguments, and life histories of her deeply thoughtful and critical interlocutors.”
—James H. Smith, author of The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo
“A genuinely collaborative project, Law in Light offers both a collective self-portrait of African and African American Akan spiritualists and a searching exploration of alternative forms of identification, sovereignty, and cosmopolitics beyond the terms of the secular liberal settlement.”
—Stephan Palmié, author of The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion
“This ethnography of Akan priests and priestesses in the United States and Ghana explores both realms of justice constituted across the Black Atlantic and divides between the human and the divine. Its exploration of these spiritualists’ coming into the light of justice and the mysteries that unfold along the way challenges the limits of law as a site of emancipation and charts new avenues for reparation beyond those limits.”
—Carlota McAllister, Associate Professor of Anthropology, York University
“Through its deeply collaborative portrayals of Akan spiritualists practicing in Ghana and the United States, Law in Light offers an engaging and nuanced analysis of the revitalization of Akan spirituality and illuminates new pathways toward justice and flourishing.”
—China Scherz, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia
Spiritual Soundscapes of Music, Life, and Liberation (coauthored with Hannibal Lokumbe)
Out now – Columbia University Press, November 2024.
Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award.
For Hannibal Lokumbe, music is a profound source of spiritual liberation. A pathbreaking orchestral composer and visionary jazz musician, he composes resonant works that give voice to the freedom struggle of the African diaspora, the broader African American experience, Indigenous histories, and humanity. Many of his works address historical traumas, such as the Middle Passage, the Vietnam War, the disharmony of the world environment, and targeted racial violence, and focus on major figures, including Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Dr. Kim Phúc Phan Thị, and Anne Frank. This innovative book demonstrates that Lokumbe’s musical compositions, created in collaboration with his ancestors, are multisensorial spiritual soundscapes that aspire to chronicle, heal, and liberate.
This is a captivating, vital portrait and spiritual biography of Lokumbe. The cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen draws on several years of close conversations with Lokumbe, as well as his journals, to provide a powerful collaborative account of his remarkable life and work. The authors explore Lokumbe’s creative journeys and the spiritual dimensions of his art. They trace Lokumbe’s entire career, from his early years in the Texas and New York City jazz scenes to his widely acclaimed orchestral compositions. The book also addresses Lokumbe’s work in prisons and schools with the Music Liberation Orchestra, founded in the 1970s. Illuminating his philosophies of music, spirituality, justice, and freedom, this book immerses readers in Lokumbe’s many revelatory worlds.
Editorial Reviews
“An instant classic. This book is a must read for all ages and those who hunger for truth, understanding, and justice. It is a balm for the sin-sick-soul and a testimony layered with musical, lyrical poeticism, and wisdom of the sages. The maladies of this American nation and conversely this world are provided a diagnosis by Hannibal on how to spark a communal resurrection for future generations to cure.”
– Steve Prince, Muscarelle Museum of Art, William & Mary University
“Holy.”
—Sonia Sanchez, poet and author
“Hannibal Lokumbe: Spiritual Soundscapes of Music, Life, and Liberation is the beautifully written, inspiring, compelling, and transformative account of the living journey of a spiritually evolved human being. He (like I) has faced demons and realizes that in this existence there is no place for the burdens of fear or anger; only forgiveness and hope can sustain humanity. His iconic music attributes to that testament. Hannibal, thank you for it.”
—Dr. Kim Phúc Phan Thị, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace and “the girl in the picture”
“Hannibal Lokumbe is quite an amazing entity! May this book go forth to inspire as does his music, and may he and his work live forever.”
—Audrey N. Glickman, shofar player and author of Pockets: The Problem with Society is in Women’s Clothing
“This book is a treasure for anyone interested in the transformative power of music, the history of the African diaspora, and the ongoing struggle for justice and liberation. It is a powerful reminder that music can be more than just entertainment—it can be a pathway to understanding, healing, and profound social change.”
—Rock and Roll Highway
(Further information is available on the book’s page on the Columbia University Press website.)
Fires of Gold is a powerful ethnography of the often shrouded cultural, legal, political, and spiritual forces governing the gold mining industry in Ghana, one of Africa’s most celebrated democracies. Lauren Coyle Rosen argues that significant sources of power have arisen outside of the formal legal system to police, adjudicate, and navigate conflict in this theater of violence, destruction, and rebirth. These authorities, or shadow sovereigns, include the transnational mining company, collectivized artisanal miners, civil society advocacy groups, and significant religious figures and spiritual forces from African, Islamic, and Christian traditions. Often more salient than official bodies of government, the shadow sovereigns reveal a reconstitution of sovereign power—one that, in many ways, is generated by hidden dimensions of the legal system. Coyle Rosen also contends that spiritual forces are central in anchoring and animating shadow sovereigns as well as key forms of legal authority, economic value, and political contestation. This innovative book illuminates how the crucible of gold, itself governed by spirits, serves as a critical site for embodied struggles over the realignment of the classical philosophical triad: the city, the soul, and the sacred
Editorial Reviews
“Fires of Gold demonstrates what cultural anthropology has to offer to the analysis of the contemporary–in Africa and elsewhere. In her account of a world where gold is valorized in terms that vacillate between the immanent and the transcendent, Lauren Coyle Rosen shows how conflicts between financial and industrial capitalism, and the improvisational forms of artisanal mining, are implicated in a profound reworking of both political economy and sovereignty. What emerges is both a critique of older political theoretical pieties and a dazzling description of a shadow world where new forms of power arise in the spectral bodies of the old, and where law in its many forms vanishes and reappears as a force of justice for those whom the state has otherwise failed.”
―Rosalind C. Morris, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
“A striking, novel contribution to sovereignty theory and to studies of African modernity in a Ghanaian gold mining town. Contemporary West Africa–with its land and labor imbroglios, its obsession with gold and capital accumulation, its forceful religiosities and spiritual encounters–shimmers with life and death in Coyle Rosen’s lively, smart reading. An urgent read for critical scholars of the continent today.”
―Charles Piot, professor at Duke University and author of Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War and The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles
“Lauren Coyle Rosen’s compelling ethnography of a Ghanaian gold-mining city centers on the value of gold. But, as in those early modern mercantile encounters, it is also about the very logics of religion and ritual that place conflicting understandings of the value of exchange at the center of political struggles. Fires of Gold masterfully theorizes the dynamics of “liberalization,” which have occurred not just in Ghana but across the world since the late 1980s, as altered early modern ideas about the free market have reformed postcolonial welfare states.”
―Religiology
“Coyle Rosen convincingly describes the flattening of sovereignty between a diversity of actors in Obuasi that parallels a conflictual verticalisation of spiritual authorities spurred by the growth in monotheist practice. Ghana’s praised success as a liberal democracy should be read in the context of the spiritual and pragmatic violence that reshapes the state in what the author describes as ‘a re-spiritualization, or re-enchantment, of sovereignty and political life.'”
―Journal of Modern African Studies
“Coyle Rosen’s ethnography provides important insights into the force field that structures life around Obuasi’s gold mines and goes beyond mere political and legal analysis by revealing the different forms of power, violence, and activism that complicate the success story of Ghana’s gold industry and rule-of-law system.”
―Allegra Laboratory
“Beautifully written … a dense, compelling and well-constructed ethnography that enriches the growing literature in the anthropology of resource extraction and uses an entry point on mining-related conflicts to bring together issues of labor struggles and existential precarity, spiritual controversies and religious change, political authority under constant contestation and redefinition, all ultimately shaping the uncertain future of a bustling but crisis-ridden one-company town.”
―Cahiers D’études Africaines
Forthcoming Book:
Goddess, by Lauren Coyle Rosen (Henry Holt / Mudlark / AW Bruna)
