Although history suggests that conjure is a practice hidden from plain view, Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographies unearthed the pervasive and varied ways Black people throughout the diaspora—and Black women especially—used conjure to create a new reality or to disrupt the existing one. In this essay, we revisit Hurston's ethnographic and folkloric study Mules and Men to consider the question: What does it mean for Black women in America to conjure in modernity? We use ethnographic examinations of two contemporary locales—one of Florida's fantasy corridors and the South Carolina lowcountry—to unearth how contemporary Black women draw from the conjure tradition Hurston documented eighty years ago. When viewed through Hurston's ethnographic history, contemporary Black women's richly layered conjure practices disrupt the widely destructive effects of modernity.

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Africana Sociology' begins with a reappraisal of the 'image of Africa' in the form of sociology's theoretical narrative about modernity's spatial and temporal order. Early sociologists, like Auguste Comte and Lester Ward, conceived sociology as a secular discourse, although it transmitted Protestant values that reduced people of African descent to fetish objects. In the work of Charles H. Long, the 'image of Africa' appears in the African American religious imagination because it -more than the land in which Blacks were enslaved -authenticated their origins. In my appropriation of the concept, it is a semiotic device that, through its dialectical relationship with the 'image of involuntary presence', structures sociology's narrative form. Like in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, the image of Africa designates the American nation as a site of crisis, while imbuing Black subjectivity with a wider consciousness of modernity.

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In this article, I reflect on a series of interviews I conducted with Rev. Rod Sterling, an African American minister with whom I have been in contact for over a decade, to consider Max Weber's conceptualization of charisma. Instead of relying on Weber's writings that explicitly outline the meaning of charisma, I focus on a passage in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he positions Richard Baxter, the seventeenth-century Presbyterian pastor, as a ministerial figure beyond the bounds of modernity's time. Locating Baxter in a different temporality presents for Weber a means of mapping how Baxter's theology becomes secularized into the infamous “Protestant work ethic.” Likewise, Reverend Sterling's experiences of racism in the Presbyterian Church push him out of time and make him a figure of charisma.