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This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the innovative blues quatrains of Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge (1995), explaining how both poems exemplify an embattled “Afro‐modernist” tradition. The chapter then analyzes Tolson's 1953 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia via the documentary evidence of his appointment as Liberian Poet Laureate. As a late modernist epic about an oligarchic state led by freed slaves, Libretto witnesses a crucial overlapping of the narratives of diasporic nationalism and African “local imperialism.” The chapter concludes by explaining how the poetic form of Libretto registers the schism between the modernizing statecraft of the Liberian elite and the transgressive “countermodernity” of Pan‐Africanism.

This chapter looks thematically at cultural and diasporic issues in the Akan experience in North America and at the uneven dialogue between diasporic Africans and Akan people from Ghana. The claims to which both diasporic Africans and Akan people make to culture and diaspora constitute the crux of that internal dialogue. Diasporic Africans such as Nana Yao Dinizulu and Nana Kwabena Brown have adopted and preserved elements of Akan spiritual practices since the 1960s, showing the endurance of an Akan spiritual culture and the role to which diasporic Africans may play in its furtherance. They have claimed a culture worth preserving and have rooted their cultural identity and praxis in it. Diasporic Africans have also problematized the “slave castles” of Ghana, whose dungeons have become contested sites at a crossroads in which diasporic Africans are adopting Akan cultural and spiritual practices and seeking an home, while Akan persons in Ghana are increasingly undergoing Christianization and are leaving for North America and parts of Europe. These phenomena associated with the Akan diaspora suggest that the study of a composite African diaspora must be one of ongoing movement in specific and shared dialogue among Africa‐based and African‐descended communities.

The introduction lays out the methodology for the study and explains its key terms. If autochthonomy is the practice of intra-subjective exchanges girded by mobile, local practices, cultural expressions or beliefs that form the intra-diasporic bridge between cultures of African descent, then lakou or yard consciousness is the virtual space in which such exchanges take place. This imagined locus is composed of autochthonous beliefs and practices preserved, reformulated, or syncretized over time, which form the basis for communication because of their importance to the identities of those peoples who have continued to practice them, however modified, to subsist and to persist. This space is one in which filiation and affiliation also become redefined cultural features or markers of association.

This chapter examines the intersections of race, ethnicity, and slavery in Spanish America and the African Diaspora by focusing on the development of African Diasporic ethnicity in Mexico City to 1650. Drawing on marriage records from early seventeenth-century Mexico City, it considers how Africans constructed multiple new ethnic and community identities in Spanish America. Through an analysis of selection patterns of testigos (wedding witnesses) alongside marriage choice, the chapter highlights the networks of social relations formed by slaves. It shows that ethnic Africans tended to marry and form communities of association with Africans from the same general catchment areas. It argues that the foundations of the ethnic communities under formation were not intact African ethnicities, pan-African identities, or race-based identities. Rather, slave marriages in Mexico City point to the creation of African diasporic ethnicities that were spontaneously articulated in the Diaspora. Africans formed new ethnic identities based upon Old World backgrounds and commonalities while in Diaspora.

The conclusion summarizes the study’s main findings and re-centers the argument that narrow limits of interpretation, when it comes to African Diasporic texts, leads to the persistence of hierarchal models of power relations based on constructions of race, guaranteeing the persistence of racist constructions and consequences upon lived lives. One of the consequences of such misreadings and categorizations also means that the fields of analyses in which these texts circulate replicate interpretive incompetencies. The conclusion summarizes how the study has sought to demonstrate that there are other means of reading African Diasporic texts, such that analyses and critical assessments of such texts are in conversation with and responsive to their interpretive communities.

This chapter examines the development of African diasporic identities in colonial Peru by focusing on the case of Ana de la Calle. In 1719, Ana de la Calle paid a notary in the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo to compose her will. She identified herself as a free morena of casta lucumí from the Yoruba-speaking interior of the Bight of Benin. Before deconstructing the terms “lucumí” and “morena” as used together by Ana de la Calle, this chapter first provides an overview of slavery and freedom in colonial Peru. It then considers lucumí as an elite status, as well as how Ana de la Calle's claim to be free and Lucumí made her unique and perhaps isolated her from other free women of color in colonial Trujillo. By analyzing why Ana de la Calle used morena and lucumí together, this chapter shows how casta terms were harnessed by both enslaved and free people of the African Diaspora.

The condemnation of “animal sacrifice” continues to undergird religious intolerance across the globe. Why have fervent meat-eaters been so concerned about a relatively small number of animals killed under ritualized conditions of purity that seek to minimize their suffering? The answer in this chapter is that attitudes toward “animal sacrifice” are more concerned with the moral and racial limits of religion than with animal welfare. These attitudes foreground how religion is a race-making project in Western modernity, which has taken shape through the projection of violence onto not-religion. The story of liberal secularism presents itself as the separation of moral religion from instrumental force, whether in separations of religion and magic or church and state. Yet this supposed deritualization of killing has authorized violent rites of intolerance and celebrations of state violence. In Trinidad, the daily violence of the security state against lower-class populations can even occasion moral praise. It is not the scale of violence or the species killed that determines which acts are legitimate, but distinctions of religion, class, and race. In this chapter I show how intergenerational disavowals of obeah and animal sacrifice by Hindus and Christians employ these distinctions to separate tolerable religion from intolerable not-religion.

This chapter examines Candomblé musical performance, the role of drummers in Candomblé, and the influence of Candomblé musicians as popular music icons in their communities. It explains that the role and significance assigned to the drum in the African and African diasporic experience reflects various types of beliefs, social and cultural practices, and religions within diverse historical contexts. The chapter also suggests that Candomblé musicians have “performative power,” are catalysts for axé music, and can be considered as major players in a dramatization of the spiritual world.

This chapter explores the "electrical ethics" of spiritual workers to make a turn away from certain tendencies in conceptions of religion and ethics. The notion that religion is a realm of duty ethics, enforcing taboos or shared moral rules, is a popular idea that has been given various points of origin. In more recent studies, a turn away from duty ethics toward virtue ethics has led to an alternate image of religious practices as ethical disciplines that allow pious subjects to embody the virtues of a tradition. In either estimation, religion is primarily devoted to reinforcing shared, normative conceptions of the good. This chapter shows how spiritual workers elaborated an alternative conception of religion and ethics, in which an appropriate balance between “bad” and “good” was a virtue. In some situations, particularly cases of injustice, spiritual workers often avowed that bad could be particularly good. The police shootings at my field site represented one particularly acute case of such injustice, and this chapter focuses on the ethical debates that this and other situations of justice-making occasioned. Rather than a shared norm, an “electrical ethics” of balance between opposing polarities provoked disagreement amongst practitioners of African religions at my field site.

The epilogue examines the 2011 human rights march in Buenos Aires on the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice (Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia), the anniversary of the start of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). It analyzes the author’s participation with Oduduwá Danza Afroamericana (Oduduwá Afro-American Dance), a group that brought together scores of volunteers to perform choreography based in Orishá dance. Orishá dance’s Yoruban origins and connection to the African diaspora made it an unexpected addition to the demonstration given the construction of Argentina as exceptionally white among Latin American nations. The group strove to connect Orishá dance’s link to the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade with Argentina’s history of political disappearance, as well as the country’s own violence against Afro-Argentines. Oduduwá’s project reiterates the importance of dance as both a political practice and one linked to memory.