Religious Studies at MSU

Department of Philosophy and Religion

Visiting Speaker Series

APRIL 11, 2023 4-6 PM

OLD MAIN 3130

Dr. Leonard McKinnis

University of Illinois

Black Queens in Chicago: Imagination and Self-Fashioning among Black Coptic Followers

Dr. McKinnis will offer insight from his forthcoming book, The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion, (NYU Press, 2023), an ethnographic study of the Black Coptic Church, a Great Migration new religious movement rooted in Ethiopianism. This talk considers the ways in which self-fashioning and fugitive spirituality manifest among Black Coptic followers who, upon conversion, enter a regal community whereby followers adopt royal ecclesial titles. In their pursuit to imagine and perform Blackness otherwise, Black Coptic followers, asserts McKinnis, rely on royal titles not merely as a form of social compensation, but rather to construct a heroic identity that, for believers, repudiates given identities while connecting them to their "true" and "divine" identity.