What does conservative Islam reformism look like in Yemen? In South Asia? In Egypt? In the United States? Do they differ in significant ways? Or, is Islamic reformism an unstoppable transnational religious force that erases all signs of local adaptation and innovation in its wake? In this essay I present a mosaic approach to assessing global Islamic reformism as a way to balance the contestation and agreement between translocal and local expressions of Islamic neofundamentalism worldwide.
As is evinced by the above paper on Islam, approaches are important. The "Black Atlantic" is a diverse and wide-ranging, trans-Atlantic, and multi-hemispheric discipline that requires careful thought and various approaches to apperceive the various religious currents at work across it. In this paper, I examine four approaches to religion in the Black Atlantic, paying special attention to Candomblé, Umbanda, sorcery/witchcraft, and Vodou.