Leonard Cornell McKinnis II

Leonard C. McKinnis is Assistant Professor of African American Religions and Black Studies. His research and teaching sits at the intersection of Black religion, Black theologies of liberation, New Religious Movements, and ethnographic approaches to the study of religion.  Prof. McKinnis’s current manuscript , Divine Blackness: Race, Religion, and Imagination Among Black Coptic Believers (NYU Press, 2023), contributes to an on-going effort to salvage the scholarly narratives of African American religion from their primary focus on mainline Protestant groups.  Moreover, this volume aims to broaden the category of African American religion; one that speaks to the multiplicity of imaginations that are part and parcel of the religious world of African Americans as they have sought to make sense of their place in the world that denied their being.  In this text, Dr. McKinnis introduces a theme that grounds his theoretical intervention: performative imagination.  He introduces performative imagination as a question: ‘What might it mean to rescue imagination from the abstract and from a world of ideas such that imagination becomes a human and religious performance?’  In this book, the question can be stated as, ‘what might it mean to imagine and perform Blackness otherwise?’ The Black Coptic Church offers the occasion to think through this question and intervention. 

Divine Blackness is the product of a 10-year ethnographic study and oral history of the Black Coptic Church, a religious movement characterized by a hybridity of Black spiritual, Black Hebrew, and Black protestant traditions rooted in Ethiopianism.  The book contemplates the intersection of religion and the construction of identity in the Black Coptic Church. Drawing upon new ethnographic research that engages the Black Coptic Church, a Great Migration new religious movement, his research considers the function of fugitive thought and “performative imagination” in the process of re-constructing Black identity.  Dr. McKinnis’ book argues for a more elastic understanding of Black religion and pursues to demonstrate how Ethiopianism performs a fugitive function in the process of identity retrieval and re-construction in the Black Coptic Church, such that the construction of an imagined homeland seeks to de-stabilize notions of the citizen.