Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World
Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World

Author: Solimar Otero

Publisher: University Rochester Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1580463266

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Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World explores how Yoruba and Afro-Cuban communities moved across the Atlantic between the Americas and Africa in successive waves in the nineteenth century. In Havana, Yoruba slaves from Lagos banded together to buy their freedom and sail home to Nigeria. Once in Lagos, this Cuban repatriate community became known as the Aguda. This community built their own neighborhood that celebrated their Afrolatino heritage. For these Yoruba and Afro-Cuban diasporic populations, nostalgic constructions of family and community play the role of narrating and locating a longed-for home. By providing a link between the workings of nostalgia and the construction of home, this volume re-theorizes cultural imaginaries as a source for diasporic community reinvention. Through ethnographic fieldwork and research in folkloristics, Otero reveals that the Aguda identify strongly with their Afro-Cuban roots in contemporary times. Their fluid identity moves from Yoruba to Cuban, and back again, in a manner that illustrates the truly cyclical nature of transnational Atlantic community affiliation. Solimar Otero is Associate Professor of English and a folklorist at Louisiana State University. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature and ethnography. Dr. Otero is the recipient of a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund grant (2013), a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program (2009 to 2010), and a Fulbright award (2001).

Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World
Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World

Author: Solimar Otero

Publisher:

Published: 2013-07

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 9781580464734

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A study of the interchange between Cuba and Africa of Yoruban people and culture during the nineteenth century, with special emphasis on the Aguda community.

The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World
The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World

Author: Toyin Falola

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2005-05-02

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0253003016

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This innovative anthology focuses on the enslavement, middle passage, American experience, and return to Africa of a single cultural group, the Yoruba. Moving beyond descriptions of generic African experiences, this anthology will allow students to trace the experiences of one cultural group throughout the cycle of the slave experience in the Americas. The 19 essays, employing a variety of disciplinary perspectives, provide a detailed study of how the Yoruba were integrated into the Atlantic world through the slave trade and slavery, the transformations of Yoruba identities and culture, and the strategies for resistance employed by the Yoruba in the New World. The contributors are Augustine H. Agwuele, Christine Ayorinde, Matt D. Childs, Gibril R. Cole, David Eltis, Toyin Falola, C. Magbaily Fyle, Rosalyn Howard, Robin Law, Babatunde Lawal, Russell Lohse, Paul E. Lovejoy, Beatriz G. Mamigonian, Robin Moore, Ann O'Hear, Luis Nicolau Parés, Michele Reid, João José Reis, Kevin Roberts, and Mariza de Carvalho Soares. Blacks in the Diaspora -- Claude A. Clegg III, editor Darlene Clark Hine, David Barry Gaspar, and John McCluskey, founding editors

Archives of Conjure
Archives of Conjure

Author: Solimar Otero

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 0231550766

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In Afrolatinx religious practices such as Cuban Espiritismo, Puerto Rican Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, the dead tell stories. Communicating with and through mediums’ bodies, they give advice, make requests, and propose future rituals, creating a living archive that is coproduced by the dead. In this book, Solimar Otero explores how Afrolatinx spirits guide collaborative spiritual-scholarly activist work through rituals and the creation of material culture. By examining spirit mediumship through a Caribbean cross-cultural poetics, she shows how divinities and ancestors serve as active agents in shaping the experiences of gender, sexuality, and race. Otero argues that what she calls archives of conjure are produced through residual transcriptions or reverberations of the stories of the dead whose archives are stitched, beaded, smoked, and washed into official and unofficial repositories. She investigates how sites like the ocean, rivers, and institutional archives create connected contexts for unlocking the spatial activation of residual transcriptions. Drawing on over ten years of archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, Otero centers the storytelling practices of Afrolatinx women and LGBTQ spiritual practitioners alongside Caribbean literature and performance. Archives of Conjure offers vital new perspectives on ephemerality, temporality, and material culture, unraveling undertheorized questions about how spirits shape communities of practice, ethnography, literature, and history and revealing the deeply connected nature of art, scholarship, and worship.

Electric Santería
Electric Santería

Author: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-09-08

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0231539916

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Santería is an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion long stigmatized as witchcraft and often dismissed as superstition, yet its spirit- and possession-based practices are rapidly winning adherents across the world. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús introduces the term "copresence" to capture the current transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Drawing on eight years of ethnographic research in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, Beliso-De Jesús traces the phenomenon of copresence in the lives of Santería practitioners, mapping its emergence in transnational places and historical moments and its ritual negotiation of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and religious travel. Santería's spirits, deities, and practitioners allow digital technologies to be used in new ways, inciting unique encounters through video and other media. Doing away with traditional perceptions of Santería as a static, localized practice or as part of a mythologized "past," this book emphasizes the religion's dynamic circulations and calls for nontranscendental understandings of religious transnationalisms.

Brazilian-African Diaspora in Ghana
Brazilian-African Diaspora in Ghana

Author: Kwame Essien

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2016-10-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1628952776

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Brazilian-African Diaspora in Ghana is a fresh approach, challenging both pre-existing and established notions of the African Diaspora by engaging new regions, conceptualizations, and articulations that move the field forward. This book examines the untold story of freed slaves from Brazil who thrived socially, culturally, and economically despite the challenges they encountered after they settled in Ghana. Kwame Essien goes beyond the one-dimensional approach that only focuses on British abolitionists’ funding of freed slaves’ resettlements in Africa. The new interpretation of reverse migrations examines the paradox of freedom in discussing how emancipated Brazilian-Africans came under threat from British colonial officials who introduced stringent land ordinances that deprived the freed Brazilian- Africans from owning land, particularly “Brazilian land.” Essien considers anew contention between the returnees and other entities that were simultaneously vying for control over social, political, commercial, and religious spaces in Accra and tackles the fluidity of memory and how it continues to shape Ghana’s history. The ongoing search for lost connections with the support of the Brazilian government—inspiring multiple generations of Tabom (offspring of the returnees) to travel across the Atlantic and back, especially in the last decade—illustrates the unending nature of the transatlantic diaspora journey and its impacts.

Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas
Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas

Author: Benjamin Hebblethwaite

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2023-06

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1496236475

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Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas explores spirit-based religious traditions across vast geographical and cultural expanses, including Canada, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. Using interdisciplinary research methods, this collection of original perspectives breaks new ground by examining these traditions as typologically and historically related. This curated selection of the traditions allows readers to compare and highlight convergences, while the description and comparison of the traditions challenges colonial erasures and expands knowledge about endangered cultures. The inclusion of spirit-based traditions from a broad geographical area emphasizes the typology of religion over ethnic compartmentalization. The individuals and communities studied in this collection serve spirits through rituals, song, instruments, initiation, embodiment via possession or trance, veneration of nature, and, among some Indigenous people, the consumption of ritual psychoactive entheogens. Indigenous and African diaspora practices focused on service to ancestors and spirits reflect ancient substrates of religiosity. The rationale to separate them on disciplinary, ethnic, linguistic, geographical, or historical grounds evaporates in our interconnected world. Shared cultural, historical, and structural features of American indigenous and African diaspora spirit-based traditions mutually deserve our attention since the analyses and dialogues give way to discoveries about deep commonalities and divergences among religions and philosophies. Still struggling against the effects of colonialism, enslavement, and extinction, the practitioners of these spirit-based religious traditions hold on to important but vulnerable parts of humanity’s cultural heritage. These readings make possible journeys of recognition as well as discovery.

Pan-Africanism, and the Politics of African Citizenship and Identity
Pan-Africanism, and the Politics of African Citizenship and Identity

Author: Toyin Falola

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1135005192

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There is no recent literature that underscores the transition from Pan-Africanism to Diaspora discourse. This book examines the gradual shift and four major transformations in the study of Pan-Africanism. It offers an "academic post-mortem" that seeks to gauge the extent to which Pan-Africanism overlaps with the study of the African Diaspora and reverse migrations; how Diaspora studies has penetrated various disciplines while Pan-Africanism is located on the periphery of the field. The book argues that the gradual shift from Pan-African discourses has created a new pathway for engaging Pan-African ideology from academic and social perspectives. Also, the book raises questions about the recent political waves that have swept across North Africa and their implications to the study of twenty-first century Pan-African solidarity on the African continent. The ways in which African institutions are attracting and mobilizing returnees and Pan-Africanists with incentives as dual-citizenship for diasporans to support reforms in Africa offers a new alternative approach for exploring Pan-African ideology in the twenty-first century. Returnees are also using these incentives to gain economic and cultural advantage. The book will appeal to policy makers, government institutions, research libraries, undergraduate and graduate students, and scholars from many different disciplines.

The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World
The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World

Author: Danna Levin Rojo

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 923

ISBN-13: 019934177X

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This Handbook integrates innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the production of Iberian imperial borderlands in the Americas, from southwestern U.S. to Patagonia, and their connections to trade and migratory circuits extending to Asia and Africa. In this volume borderlands comprise political boundaries, spaces of ethnic and cultural exchange, and ecological transitions.

The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World
The Oxford Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World

Author: Danna A. Levin Rojo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-11-06

Total Pages: 923

ISBN-13: 0197507719

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This collaborative multi-authored volume integrates interdisciplinary approaches to ethnic, imperial, and national borderlands in the Iberian World (16th to early 19th centuries). It illustrates the historical processes that produced borderlands in the Americas and connected them to global circuits of exchange and migration in the early modern world. The book offers a balanced state-of-the-art educational tool representing innovative research for teaching and scholarship. Its geographical scope encompasses imperial borderlands in what today is northern Mexico and southern United States; the greater Caribbean basin, including cross-imperial borderlands among the island archipelagos and Central America; the greater Paraguayan river basin, including the Gran Chaco, lowland Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia; the Amazonian borderlands; the grasslands and steppes of southern Argentina and Chile; and Iberian trade and religious networks connecting the Americas to Africa and Asia. The volume is structured around the following broad themes: environmental change and humanly crafted landscapes; the role of indigenous allies in the Spanish and Portuguese military expeditions; negotiations of power across imperial lines and indigenous chiefdoms; the parallel development of subsistence and commercial economies across terrestrial and maritime trade routes; labor and the corridors of forced and free migration that led to changing social and ethnic identities; histories of science and cartography; Christian missions, music, and visual arts; gender and sexuality, emphasizing distinct roles and experiences documented for men and women in the borderlands. While centered in the colonial era, it is framed by pre-contact Mesoamerican borderlands and nineteenth-century national developments for those regions where the continuity of inter-ethnic relations and economic networks between the colonial and national periods is particularly salient, like the central Andes, lowland Bolivia, central Brazil, and the Mapuche/Pehuenche captaincies in South America. All the contributors are highly recognized scholars, representing different disciplines and academic traditions in North America, Latin America and Europe.