The anthropology and history of African American religious formations has long been dominated by approaches aiming to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic continuities linking such traditions to identi able African source cultures. While not denying such continuities, the contributors to this volume seek to transcend this research agenda by bracketing “Africa” and “African pasts” as objective givens, and asking instead what role notions of “Africanity” and “pastfulness” play in the social and ritual lives of historical and contemporary practitioners of Afro-Atlantic religious formations. The volume’s goal is to open up contextually salient claims to “African origins” to empirical scrutiny, and so contribute to a broadening of the terms of debate in Afro-Atlantic studies.
Author(s): Stephan Palmié
Series: Studies on Religion in Africa
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2008
Language: English
Commentary: scantailor + ocrmypdf
Pages: 408
City: Leiden
Tags: afro-atlantic religion;transculturation
Africas of the Americas
Contents
Introduction: On Predications of Africanity (Stephan Palmié)
On Leaving and Joining Africanness Through Religion: The “Black Caribs’ Across Multiple Diasporic Horizons (Paul Christopher Johnson)
From Igbo Israeli to African Christian: The Emergence of Racial Identity in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narratwe (James Sidbury)
Governing Man-Gods: Spiritism and the Struggle for Progress in Republican Cuba (Reinaldo L. Román)
Divining the Past: The Linguistic Reconstruction of 'African' Roots in Diasporic Ritual Registers and Songs (Kristina Wirtz)
Ecué's Atlantic: An Essay in Methodology (Stephan Palmié)
Dona Preta's Trek to Cachoeira (Brian Brazeal)
Transatlantic Dialogue: Roger Bastide and the African American Religions (Stefania Capone)
Peasants, Migrants and the Discovery of African ‘Traditions: Ritual and Social Change in Lowland Haiti (Karen E. Richman)
African Accents, Speaking Child Spirits and the Brazilian Popular Imaginary: Permutations of Africanness in Candomble (Elina Hartikainen)
Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions (J. Lorand Matory)
Index
