Andrew Apter
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226506388
- eISBN:
- 9780226506555
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226506555.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
This book challenges the seasoned trend of disavowing Africa in the Black Atlantic, showing how Yoruba cultural frameworks from West Africa remade black kingdoms and communities in the Americas. ...
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This book challenges the seasoned trend of disavowing Africa in the Black Atlantic, showing how Yoruba cultural frameworks from West Africa remade black kingdoms and communities in the Americas. Highlighting revisionary strategies and regenerative schemes that are grounded in the dialectics of ritual renewal, it revisits classic topoi in Afro-American studies such as Herskovits’s syncretic paradigm, the petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, the historical conditions of orisha cult clustering, re-mappings of gender in plantation societies, and the rise of Lucumí and Nagô houses in Cuba and Brazil, in each case offering new interpretations based on cognate dynamics in Yorubaland. The book thereby argues for a critically reformulated culture concept, in this case distinctively “Yoruba,” which designates something real, somewhat knowable, eminently historical, and even indispensable for locating Africa in the Black Atlantic.Less
This book challenges the seasoned trend of disavowing Africa in the Black Atlantic, showing how Yoruba cultural frameworks from West Africa remade black kingdoms and communities in the Americas. Highlighting revisionary strategies and regenerative schemes that are grounded in the dialectics of ritual renewal, it revisits classic topoi in Afro-American studies such as Herskovits’s syncretic paradigm, the petwo paradox in Haitian Vodou, the historical conditions of orisha cult clustering, re-mappings of gender in plantation societies, and the rise of Lucumí and Nagô houses in Cuba and Brazil, in each case offering new interpretations based on cognate dynamics in Yorubaland. The book thereby argues for a critically reformulated culture concept, in this case distinctively “Yoruba,” which designates something real, somewhat knowable, eminently historical, and even indispensable for locating Africa in the Black Atlantic.
Andrew Apter
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226506388
- eISBN:
- 9780226506555
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226506555.003.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
Does Yoruba culture exist, and if so, where and when is it located in West Africa and the Americas? This is the question posed in the introduction, which argues for a critically reformulated culture ...
More
Does Yoruba culture exist, and if so, where and when is it located in West Africa and the Americas? This is the question posed in the introduction, which argues for a critically reformulated culture concept that accounts for Yoruba-Atlantic trajectories without reifying culture as a fixed tablet of tradition. Yoruba culture should be neither essentialized nor disavowed as the source of its New World manifestations. Rather it can be reformulated as a regenerative framework that was not merely produced by historical actors, but shaped New World Creole societies in significant ways.Less
Does Yoruba culture exist, and if so, where and when is it located in West Africa and the Americas? This is the question posed in the introduction, which argues for a critically reformulated culture concept that accounts for Yoruba-Atlantic trajectories without reifying culture as a fixed tablet of tradition. Yoruba culture should be neither essentialized nor disavowed as the source of its New World manifestations. Rather it can be reformulated as a regenerative framework that was not merely produced by historical actors, but shaped New World Creole societies in significant ways.
