Studying black religion : contacts/exchanges and continuities/discontinuities -- The age of discovery and the emergence of the Atlantic world -- The imagination of matter in the Atlantic world's political economy -- Being, nothingness, and the "signification of silence" in African American religious consciousness -- Epistemologies opaque : conjuring, conjecture, and the problematic of Nat Turner's Biblical hermeneutic -- The mulatto as material/sexual site of modernity's contacts and exchanges -- "The signification of silence" revisited : African American art and hermeneutics -- The meaning of the moan and significance of the shout in Black worship and culture and memory and hope -- The salsa/jazz/blues idiom and Creolization in the Atlantic world.