Matthew Hart
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390339
- eISBN:
- 9780199776191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390339.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Kwasi Konadu
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390643
- eISBN:
- 9780199775736
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390643.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Myriam J. A. Chancy
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252043048
- eISBN:
- 9780252051906
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043048.003.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Kwasi Konadu
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390643
- eISBN:
- 9780199775736
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Discontinued
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390643.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
Since the Herskovits‐Frazier debate of the 1940s, African diasporic research in the Americas has been marked not only by an uninterrupted focus on West Africa but also by an equally incessant neglect ...
More
Since the Herskovits‐Frazier debate of the 1940s, African diasporic research in the Americas has been marked not only by an uninterrupted focus on West Africa but also by an equally incessant neglect of the Akan. Accounting for 10 percent of the total number of African captives who embarked for the Americas, the Akan diaspora not only shaped and brought into sharp relief the diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom but also complicated these themes in that the displaced Akan created their own social orders based on foundational cultural understandings. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Akan never constituted a majority among other Africans in the Americas, yet their leadership skills in warfare and political organization, medicinal knowledge of plant use and spiritual practice, and composite culture as archived in the musical traditions, language, and patterns of African diasporic life far surpassed what their actual numbers would suggest. The book argues that a composite culture calibrated between the Gold Coast (Ghana) littoral and the forest fringe made the contributions of the Akan diaspora possible. That argument calls attention to the historic formation of Akan culture in West Africa and its reach into the Americas, where the Akan experience in the former British, Danish, and Dutch colonies is explored. There, those early experiences foreground the contemporary movement of diasporic Africans and the Akan people between Ghana and North America. Indeed, the Akan experience provides for a better understanding of how the diasporic quilt came to be and is still becoming.Less
Since the Herskovits‐Frazier debate of the 1940s, African diasporic research in the Americas has been marked not only by an uninterrupted focus on West Africa but also by an equally incessant neglect of the Akan. Accounting for 10 percent of the total number of African captives who embarked for the Americas, the Akan diaspora not only shaped and brought into sharp relief the diasporic themes of maroonage, resistance, and freedom but also complicated these themes in that the displaced Akan created their own social orders based on foundational cultural understandings. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Akan never constituted a majority among other Africans in the Americas, yet their leadership skills in warfare and political organization, medicinal knowledge of plant use and spiritual practice, and composite culture as archived in the musical traditions, language, and patterns of African diasporic life far surpassed what their actual numbers would suggest. The book argues that a composite culture calibrated between the Gold Coast (Ghana) littoral and the forest fringe made the contributions of the Akan diaspora possible. That argument calls attention to the historic formation of Akan culture in West Africa and its reach into the Americas, where the Akan experience in the former British, Danish, and Dutch colonies is explored. There, those early experiences foreground the contemporary movement of diasporic Africans and the Akan people between Ghana and North America. Indeed, the Akan experience provides for a better understanding of how the diasporic quilt came to be and is still becoming.
Myriam J. A. Chancy
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252043048
- eISBN:
- 9780252051906
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043048.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Ingrid Monson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195128253
- eISBN:
- 9780199864492
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195128253.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, this book traces the complex relationships among music, politics, ...
More
An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, this book traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. It illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, its arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far-reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence. Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, the book considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world of the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, the book explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anticolonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such as Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African diasporic aesthetics. It explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences—African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world music—through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, it presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity.Less
An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, this book traces the complex relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot button racial and economic issues of the time. It illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians to take action. Throughout, its arguments show how jazz musicians' quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led to fascinating and far-reaching musical explorations and a lasting ethos of social critique and transcendence. Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance, the book considers the discursive, structural, and practical aspects of life in the jazz world of the 1950s and 1960s. In domestic politics, the book explores the desegregation of the American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects of anticolonialism and African nationalism on the politics and aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the interaction of jazz musicians such as Art Blakey and Randy Weston with African diasporic aesthetics. It explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of stylistic and cultural influences—African American music, popular song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other world music—through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, it presents a fresh interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse racism, and authenticity.
Frank “Trey” Proctor
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036637
- eISBN:
- 9780252093715
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036637.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, African Studies
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Myriam J. A. Chancy
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252043048
- eISBN:
- 9780252051906
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043048.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Autochthonomies is an intellectual project that engages readers in an interpretive journey: it engages and describes a process by which readers of texts created by artists and actors of African ...
More
Autochthonomies is an intellectual project that engages readers in an interpretive journey: it engages and describes a process by which readers of texts created by artists and actors of African descent might engage such texts as legible within the context of African Diasporic historical and cultural discursive practices. It argues that there is a cultural and philosophical gain to understanding these texts not as products of, or responses only to, Western hegemonic dynamics or simply as products of discrete ethnic or national identities. By invoking a transnational African/Diasporic interpretive lens, negotiated through a virtual “lakou” or yard space in which such identities are transfigured, recognized, and exchanged, the study demonstrates how to best examine the salient features of the texts that underscore African/Diasporic sensibilities and renders them legible, thus offering a potential not only for richer readings of African Diasporic texts but also the possibility of rupturing the Manichean binary dynamics through which such texts have commonly been read. This produces an enriching interpretive capacity emphasizing the transnationalism of connections between subjects of African descent as the central pole for undertaking such investigations. Through the use of the neologism, autochthonomy, the study argues further that, despite colonial interruptions, critics of such works should seek to situate them as part of an intricate network of cultural and transnational exchanges.Less
Autochthonomies is an intellectual project that engages readers in an interpretive journey: it engages and describes a process by which readers of texts created by artists and actors of African descent might engage such texts as legible within the context of African Diasporic historical and cultural discursive practices. It argues that there is a cultural and philosophical gain to understanding these texts not as products of, or responses only to, Western hegemonic dynamics or simply as products of discrete ethnic or national identities. By invoking a transnational African/Diasporic interpretive lens, negotiated through a virtual “lakou” or yard space in which such identities are transfigured, recognized, and exchanged, the study demonstrates how to best examine the salient features of the texts that underscore African/Diasporic sensibilities and renders them legible, thus offering a potential not only for richer readings of African Diasporic texts but also the possibility of rupturing the Manichean binary dynamics through which such texts have commonly been read. This produces an enriching interpretive capacity emphasizing the transnationalism of connections between subjects of African descent as the central pole for undertaking such investigations. Through the use of the neologism, autochthonomy, the study argues further that, despite colonial interruptions, critics of such works should seek to situate them as part of an intricate network of cultural and transnational exchanges.
Donald Martin Carter
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816647774
- eISBN:
- 9781452945927
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816647774.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, African Cultural Anthropology
Investigating how the fraught political economy of migration impacts people around the world, this book raises important issues about contemporary African diasporic movements. Developing the notion ...
More
Investigating how the fraught political economy of migration impacts people around the world, this book raises important issues about contemporary African diasporic movements. Developing the notion of the anthropology of invisibility, it explores the trope of navigation in social theory intent on understanding the lived experiences of transnational migrants. The book examines invisibility in its various forms, from social rejection and residential segregation to war memorials and the inability of some groups to represent themselves through popular culture, scholarship, or art. The pervasiveness of invisibility is not limited to symbolic actions, the book shows, but may have dramatic and at times catastrophic consequences for people subjected to its force. The geographic span of this analysis is global, encompassing Senegalese Muslims in Italy and the United States and concluding with practical questions about the future of European societies. The book also considers both contemporary and historical constellations of displacement, from Darfurian refugees to French West African colonial soldiers.Less
Investigating how the fraught political economy of migration impacts people around the world, this book raises important issues about contemporary African diasporic movements. Developing the notion of the anthropology of invisibility, it explores the trope of navigation in social theory intent on understanding the lived experiences of transnational migrants. The book examines invisibility in its various forms, from social rejection and residential segregation to war memorials and the inability of some groups to represent themselves through popular culture, scholarship, or art. The pervasiveness of invisibility is not limited to symbolic actions, the book shows, but may have dramatic and at times catastrophic consequences for people subjected to its force. The geographic span of this analysis is global, encompassing Senegalese Muslims in Italy and the United States and concluding with practical questions about the future of European societies. The book also considers both contemporary and historical constellations of displacement, from Darfurian refugees to French West African colonial soldiers.
Antonio Lopez
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814765463
- eISBN:
- 9780814765487
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814765463.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This book uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic ...
More
This book uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. It shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O'Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the United States and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the Unuted States, provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.Less
This book uncovers an important, otherwise unrecognized century-long archive of literature and performance that reveals Cuban America as a space of overlapping Cuban and African diasporic experiences. It shows how Afro-Cuban writers and performers in the U.S. align Cuban black and mulatto identities, often subsumed in the mixed-race and postracial Cuban national imaginaries, with the material and symbolic blackness of African Americans and other Afro-Latinas/os. In the works of Alberto O'Farrill, Eusebia Cosme, Rómulo Lachatañeré, and others, Afro-Cubanness articulates the African diasporic experience in ways that deprive negro and mulato configurations of an exclusive link with Cuban nationalism. Instead, what is invoked is an “unbecoming” relationship between Afro-Cubans in the United States and their domestic black counterparts. The transformations in Cuban racial identity across the hemisphere, represented powerfully in the literary and performance cultures of Afro-Cubans in the Unuted States, provide the fullest account of a transnational Cuba, one in which the Cuban American emerges as Afro-Cuban-American, and the Latino as Afro-Latino.
Rachel Sarah O’Toole
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036637
- eISBN:
- 9780252093715
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036637.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, African Studies
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
J. Brent Crosson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226700649
- eISBN:
- 9780226705514
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226705514.003.0009
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Religion
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Clarence Bernard Henry
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604730821
- eISBN:
- 9781604733341
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604730821.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Ethnomusicology, World Music
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Jeanne Dubino
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474448475
- eISBN:
- 9781474496070
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474448475.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter traces the presence of Woolf in sub-Saharan Africa from 1929 to the present day. The historic trajectory starts with the final decades of the British Empire’s colonial rule in ...
More
This chapter traces the presence of Woolf in sub-Saharan Africa from 1929 to the present day. The historic trajectory starts with the final decades of the British Empire’s colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Kenya (1929–59); continues through the half-century of the postcolonial era (1960–2010); and concludes with the age of globalisation (2011–). For the first part, I examine how Woolf, through the narrator in A Room of One’s Own, asserts that (white) Englishwomen do not have the same urge as their white brothers to possess and to convert someone into imperial property. At the time she wrote this claim, there were real-life white European women who were walking by and writing about Black women in Kenya. In the postcolonial era, when the English Departments in anglophone sub-Saharan African countries were influenced by Leavisism, Woolf’s works would not have been taught. I show how colonialism and its institutional legacies, including university curricula, libraries, and publishing, militate against Woolf’s broader appeal to sub-Saharan Africa-based writers. Finally, in the present day, through online references to A Room, one can see how Woolf’s idea of a room is transformed, throughout anglophone Africa, into a virtual writers’ workshop.Less
This chapter traces the presence of Woolf in sub-Saharan Africa from 1929 to the present day. The historic trajectory starts with the final decades of the British Empire’s colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on Kenya (1929–59); continues through the half-century of the postcolonial era (1960–2010); and concludes with the age of globalisation (2011–). For the first part, I examine how Woolf, through the narrator in A Room of One’s Own, asserts that (white) Englishwomen do not have the same urge as their white brothers to possess and to convert someone into imperial property. At the time she wrote this claim, there were real-life white European women who were walking by and writing about Black women in Kenya. In the postcolonial era, when the English Departments in anglophone sub-Saharan African countries were influenced by Leavisism, Woolf’s works would not have been taught. I show how colonialism and its institutional legacies, including university curricula, libraries, and publishing, militate against Woolf’s broader appeal to sub-Saharan Africa-based writers. Finally, in the present day, through online references to A Room, one can see how Woolf’s idea of a room is transformed, throughout anglophone Africa, into a virtual writers’ workshop.
J. Brent Crosson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226700649
- eISBN:
- 9780226705514
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226705514.003.0007
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Religion
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
Victoria Fortuna
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190627010
- eISBN:
- 9780190627058
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190627010.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, Ethnomusicology, World Music
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.