Author: Eugenio Matibag
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 1947372610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429
Get Book Here
Book Description
The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida’s long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists’ sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.
Author: Matthew Pettway
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496825004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Get Book Here
Book Description
Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido) were perhaps the most important and innovative Cuban writers of African descent during the Spanish colonial era. Both nineteenth-century authors used Catholicism as a symbolic language for African-inspired spirituality. Likewise, Plácido and Manzano subverted the popular imagery of neoclassicism and Romanticism in order to envision black freedom in the tradition of the Haitian Revolution. Plácido and Manzano envisioned emancipation through the lens of African spirituality, a transformative moment in the history of Cuban letters. Matthew Pettway examines how the portrayal of African ideas of spirit and cosmos in otherwise conventional texts recur throughout early Cuban literature and became the basis for Manzano and Plácido’s antislavery philosophy. The portrayal of African-Atlantic religious ideas spurned the elite rationale that literature ought to be a barometer of highbrow cultural progress. Cuban debates about freedom and selfhood were never the exclusive domain of the white Creole elite. Pettway’s emphasis on African-inspired spirituality as a source of knowledge and a means to sacred authority for black Cuban writers deepens our understanding of Manzano and Plácido not as mere imitators but as aesthetic and political pioneers. As Pettway suggests, black Latin American authors did not abandon their African religious heritage to assimilate wholesale to the Catholic Church. By recognizing the wisdom of African ancestors, they procured power in the struggle for black liberation.
Author: Miguel Barnet
Publisher: Ian Randle Publishers
ISBN: 9789766370541
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Get Book Here
Book Description
Regla de Ocha promotes worship of the Orisha (gods), and uses traditional oracles that originated in the old Yoruba city of Ile-Ife. The Regla de Palo Monte came from the Congo area. The term palo refers to the ritual use of trees and plants, which are believed to have magical powers.".
Author: David H. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000124371
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 870
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ever since its emergence in colonial-era Cuba, Afro-Cuban Santería (or Lucumí) has displayed a complex dynamic of continuity and change in its institutions, rituals, and iconography. Originally published in 2003 Santería Enthroned combines art, history, cultural anthropology, and ethnohistory to show how Africans and their descendants have developed novel forms of religious practice in the face of relentless oppression. Focusing on the royal throne as a potent metaphor in Santería belief and practice it shows how negotiations among ideologically competing interests have shaped the religion’s symbols, rituals, and institutions from the nineteenth century to the present. Rich case studies of change in Cuba and the United States, including a New Jersey temple and South Carolina’s Oyotunji Village, reveal patterns of innovation similar to those found among rival Yoruba kingdoms in Nigeria. Throughout, the book argues for a theoretical perspective on culture as a field of potential strategies and "usuable pasts" that actors draw upon to craft new forms and identities – a perspective that will be invaluable to all students of the African Diaspora.
Author: Solimar Otero
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 1580463266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World explores how Yoruba and Afro-Cuban communities moved across the Atlantic between the Americas and Africa in successive waves in the nineteenth century. In Havana, Yoruba slaves from Lagos banded together to buy their freedom and sail home to Nigeria. Once in Lagos, this Cuban repatriate community became known as the Aguda. This community built their own neighborhood that celebrated their Afrolatino heritage. For these Yoruba and Afro-Cuban diasporic populations, nostalgic constructions of family and community play the role of narrating and locating a longed-for home. By providing a link between the workings of nostalgia and the construction of home, this volume re-theorizes cultural imaginaries as a source for diasporic community reinvention. Through ethnographic fieldwork and research in folkloristics, Otero reveals that the Aguda identify strongly with their Afro-Cuban roots in contemporary times. Their fluid identity moves from Yoruba to Cuban, and back again, in a manner that illustrates the truly cyclical nature of transnational Atlantic community affiliation. Solimar Otero is Associate Professor of English and a folklorist at Louisiana State University. Her research centers on gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature and ethnography. Dr. Otero is the recipient of a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund grant (2013), a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program (2009 to 2010), and a Fulbright award (2001).
Author: Kristine Juncker
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055024
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book profiles four generations of women from one Afro-Cuban religious family. From a plantation in Havana Province in the 1890s to a religious center in Spanish Harlem in the 1960s, these women were connected by their prominent roles as leaders in the religions they practiced and the dramatic ritual artwork they created. Each woman was a medium in Espiritismo—communicating with dead ancestors for guidance or insight—and also a santera, or priest of Santería, who could intervene with the oricha pantheon. Kristine Juncker argues that, by creating art for more than one religion, these women shatter the popular assumption that Afro-Caribbean religions are exclusive organizations. Most remarkably, the portraiture, sculptures, and photographs in Afro-Cuban Religious Arts offer rare glimpses into the rituals and iconography of these religions. Santería altars are closely guarded, limited to initiates, and typically destroyed upon the death of the santera, while Espiritismo artifacts are rarely considered valuable enough to pass on. The unique and protean cultural legacy detailed here reveals insights into how ritual art became popular imagery, sparked a wider dialogue about culture inheritance, attracted new practitioners, and enabled the movement to explode internationally.
Author: Stephan Palmié
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022601973X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 373
Get Book Here
Book Description
Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World. Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely by relying on the notion of an aboriginal African past, and by claiming to authenticate these religions via their findings, anthropologists—some of whom have converted to these religions—have exerted considerable influence upon contemporary practices. Critiquing widespread and damaging simplifications that posit religious practices as stable and self-contained, Palmié calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.
Author: Milton Martinez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781706555568
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 422
Get Book Here
Book Description
The purpose of this book is to bring into context and greater accessibility the knowledge of the plants used in the Santeria Religion. Many books have been written about said plants, but there seems to be no standardized version where the plant in question can be narrowed down to a more common name and proper scientific taxonomy. When I say that this book is "Ewe for the New Diaspora" it is because we are now in a "New Diaspora". The first great diaspora that occurred was when the natives from Africa were brought to the "New World" as slaves of the Spanish, Portuguese, English, etc. These natives brought with them a very ample religious macrocosm and an intimate knowledge of the plants that surrounded them. This knowledge was used in the "New World" by their ability to find equal or similar plants that had been used in Africa. Although people have moved between the United States and countries of Central and South America for centuries; the coming of Fidel Castro in Cuba caused a massive outflow of people and their religious beliefs. Since then, other nationalities have emigrated to the United States causing what can be called a "New Diaspora". With this "New Diaspora", unknown religious beliefs have been brought to the shores of the United States. Now, it is not unusual to find "Botanicas" (stores that cater to the Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs) in most big cities in the United States (or the world). Since the basis of this book is "El Monte" by Lydia Cabrera, most of the plant listings are from there with an updating as to the uses, the name of the Orisha that is the tutelary owner of the herbs/plants, the Odun from Ifá associated with it, and the names and usage in Brazil (with tutelary Orisha in the different sects). It should be noted that I have not offered an opinion on the tutelary Orisha or the usage of any of these plants. This is just a compilation of available information on each of these plants from available sources. It is the responsibility of the person using this book to get guidance from their elders as to what is the proper use of these plants and the tutelary Orisha it belongs to.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047432703
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Get Book Here
Book Description
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 identifiable 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: Paul Christopher Johnson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520249704
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Get Book Here
Book Description
"I'm extremely impressed by Johnson's book. Diaspora Conversions offers an outstanding combination of theoretical acuity, erudition, and ethnographic prowess. It is bound to become highly influential in the study of religion in motion."—Manuel A. Vasquez, co-author of Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas "Johnson's work bursts through the present conversations on African diaspora and brings us onto entirely new ground, shattering simplistic ideas and replacing them with critical distinctions. This smart and talented ethnographer succeeds in combining detailed and rich ethnographic fieldwork with an unrelentingly critical and sophisticated analysis. Johnson's work brings to life one of the most central, perhaps the most central, classic question of African American anthropology: "How is Black culture constituted, even through dislocation and displacement?"—Elizabeth McAlister, author of Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora "Diasporic Conversions convincingly breaks new ground by showing how the meaning of 'homeland' is fundamentally a product of historically situated and contested forms of collective imagination. What will make Johnson's book a benchmark in the study of the African diaspora, and diasporic situations more generally, is that it is not just a richly documented and rigorously argued ethnography, but a genuine anthropology of historical consciousness."—Stephan Palmié, author of Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition
