My current work examines the world of ritual and revival and its meaning for political awakening in black refugee or "contraband camps" of the American Civil War. These refugee camps were known as "contraband camps" because African Americans were considered to be between slavery and freedom as "confiscated contraband property" in U.S.-controlled territory across the South. My book traces the migrations and settling patterns of African Americans. It elucidates the cross-cultural encounter that took place in the camps not only between white and black but also between black southerners of different cultural backgrounds. My work examines the political work of revival and reenvisions Emancipation as a religious event, as that was how most freedpeople themselves saw it. What then does that do to our current understandings of the political narrative of black freedom? Black sacralizations of freedom in Civil War refugee camps were at the core of self-emancipation. This project reckons with the possibilities and complications of black spiritual creativity in these camps for kinship formation and postwar political participation. It reckons with religion as a dynamic and precarious mediating force between the enslaved and the state at the end of slavery. And it penetrates the question "Who belongs and how?" for those negotiating statelessness and peoplehood in the midst of their self-emancipation.