An examination of the Anagó language of Cuba. Based on over 25 years of field research in Cuba, Venezuela and the United States. The Anagó language is used in Lucumí religious ceremonies and celebrations in Cuba and throughout the diaspora. Includes a historical and linguistic overview along with examples of Anagó from academic, folkloric and religious context.
In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.
This new three-volume encyclopedia features over 4,000 entries on more than 40 regions in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1920 to the present day.
The text celebrates the academic achievements of Professor Olasope Oyelaran. It brings together over 20 papers by an international group of scholars on African diaspora languages, literatures and culture, representing four generations, all of whom have been influenced by Oyelaran’s work in one way or another. Edited by three African scholars in the USA, UK, and Nigeria, the volume presents current research on topics in applied- and socio-linguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, oral and written literature, and Yoruba language and culture in African diasporas in Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad. The constellation of topics presented here will enlarge the reader’s understanding of a number of issues in the field of African and African diaspora languages, literatures, and cultures today. As such, the book makes an important contribution to the expanding work on the linguistic and cultural interface of Africa and its Brazilian, Cuban, and Trinidadian diasporas.
In songs, dance and drama the fame of the Yoruba of Nigeria is firmly established and universally acknowledged. Also an established writing and literary tradition, the Yoruba have asserted themselves as a dominant force in the world of creativity. Such stars are represented here, as in the works of Wole Soyinka and Zulu Sofola. The future of language in the making of new idioms and dictionaries is also examined in an attempt to position the Yoruba and their cultures in the ever-changing world of cultural inventions.
While Fernando Ortiz's contribution to our understanding of Cuba and Latin America more generally has been widely recognized since the 1940s, recently there has been renewed interest in this scholar and activist who made lasting contributions to a staggering array of fields. This book is the first work in English to reassess Ortiz's vast intellectual universe. Essays in this volume analyze and celebrate his contribution to scholarship in Cuban history, the social sciences--notably anthropology--and law, religion and national identity, literature, and music. Presenting Ortiz's seminal thinking, including his profoundly influential concept of 'transculturation', Cuban Counterpoints explores the bold new perspectives that he brought to bear on Cuban society. Much of his most challenging and provocative thinking--which embraced simultaneity, conflict, inherent contradiction and hybridity--has remarkable relevance for current debates about Latin America's complex and evolving societies.
Evelyn Picon Garfield has chosen selections from the prose works of twelve female authors representing seven Latin American countries to create a collection which speaks to a variety of issues and exhibits a pastiche of richly varied artistic styles. Containing short stories, a one-act play, and excerpts from novels, the volume touches on such topics as political commitment and persecution, regional ethnicity of African and Indian cultures, social issues between classes and races, misogyny, the complexities of the human psyche, and female solidarity. Garfield includes works from the six authors she interviewed for her Women's Voices from Latin America, and has added selections from six other writers including Isabel Allende and Clarice Lispector.
Many twentieth-century Spanish American writers sought to give voice to their countries' native inhabitants. Drawing upon anthropology and literary theory, this book explores the representation of orality by major Spanish American anthropologist-writers: Lydia Cabrera, Jose Maria Arguedas, and Miguel Barnet. These writers played a quintessential role of the Spanish American writer from colonial times to the present: they inscribed the mythical world of a vanishing Other by creating a poetic effect of orality in their ethnographies and narratives. This book argues that supposed differences between oral and written culture are rhetorical devices in the elaboration of literature, specifically modern fiction in Spanish America. Fictionalization of the oral requires adherence to the theory of a great divide between orality and literacy. Because the texts considered here are predicated on the ideality of speech, a contradiction underlies their shared desire to salvage oral tradition. This book explores how anthropologist-writers have addressed this compelling dilemma in their anthropological and narrative writings. at Tufts University.
