“A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.
When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.
Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an antiblack world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.”
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2026 Finalist, Book Prize for Best New Book in African American History and Culture from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
2026 Finalist, Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History from the African American Intellectual History Society.
Reviewed in Church History; American Religion; Journal of Southern History; Reading Religion.
“Top Religion Titles Bestsellers,” The Christian Century (May 2026)
“Descending into the Underworld,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2025.
New Books Network Podcast Interview, July 18, 2025: Apple, Spotify
“Phoning It In: (Re)making Race and Religion in Zora Neale Hurston’s New Orleans Underworld,” Religion Dispatches, May 29, 2025.