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Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas explores spirit-based religious traditions across vast geographical and cultural expanses, including Canada, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. Using interdisciplinary research methods, this collection of original perspectives breaks new ground by examining these traditions as typologically and historically related. This curated selection of the traditions allows readers to compare and highlight convergences, while the description and comparison of the traditions challenges colonial erasures and expands knowledge about endangered cultures. The inclusion of spirit-bas...
Offers an insider's account of Vodou's private, mystical, interior practice, discussing the author's own initiation and education in the religion.
Richly ethnographic and a compelling read, After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy is a study of carnival, politics, and the musical engagement of ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians in contemporary Haiti. The book explores how the self-declared president of konpa Sweet Micky (Michel Martelly) rose to the nation's highest office while methodically crafting a political product inherently entangled with his musical product. It offers deep historical perspective on the characteristics of carnivalesque verbal play-and the performative skillset of the artist (Sweet Micky) who dominated carnival for more than a decade-including vulgarities and polemics. Yet there has been profound resistance to...
Drawing on the collected archives of distinguished twentieth-century Black woman writers such as Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, Marina Magloire traces a new history of Black feminist thought in relation to Afro-diasporic religion. Beginning in the 1930s with the pathbreaking ethnographic work of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and ending with the present-day popularity of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices among Black women, she offers an alternative genealogy of Black feminism, characterized by its desire to reconnect with ancestrally centered religions like Vodou. Magloire reveals the tension, discomfort, and doubt at the h...
This book deconstructs androcentric approaches to spacetime inherited from western modernity through its theoretical frame of the chronotropics. It sheds light on the literary acts of archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage by twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers to restore a connection to spacetime, expanding it within and beyond the region. Arguing that the chronotropics points to a vocation for social justice and collective healing, this pan-Caribbean volume returns to autochthonous ontologies and epistemologies to propose a poetics and politics of the chronotropics that is anticolonial, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and non-anthropocentric. This is an open access book.
"The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. In this book, Myriam Chancy encourages us to look at Haiti and to continue to examine the historical and present structures that have resulted in Haiti's post-earthquake conditions. And as Haiti is newly recovering from another 7.2 magnitude earthquake from August 2021, the questions that Chancy seeks to answer and the stories she aims to document seem all the more urgent. Originally prese...
Jana Evans Braziel examines how Haitian diaspora writers, performance artists, and musicians address black masculinity through the Haitian Creole concept of gwo nègs, or "big men." She focuses on six artists and their work: writer Dany Laferrière, director Raoul Peck, rap artist Wyclef Jean, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, drag queen performer and poet Assotto Saint, and queer drag king performer Dréd (a.k.a. Mildréd Gerestant). For Braziel, these individuals confront the gendered, sexualized, and racialized boundaries of America's diaspora communities and openly resist "domestic" imperialism that targets immigrants, minorities, women, gays, and queers. This is a groundbreaking study at the intersections of gender and sexuality with race, ethnicity, nationality, and diaspora.
This edited collection examines the diversity of the Haitian experience in diaspora to ask how we might situate and conceptualize community in view of increased scholarly attention to transnational processes.
This book offers insights into the thinking of majority world practical theologians and introduces the reader to faith realities previously unknown in a quest to create a more inclusive and welcoming practical theological network. Practical theologians are situated in all corners of the globe attempting to make sense of their lived experiences and of those around them from a faith perspective. Historically, practical theology tended to be constructed from academics situated in the West and indirectly marginalized those in and from the majority world. Against this backdrop, this book is a deliberate attempt to empower practical theological voices from the further corners of the global village...
"Hey-Colón considers the central role of water within the writings and imaginations of Latinx and Caribbean women writers and artists. Water is seen as a political border with the United States, but also symbolically as a carrier of knowledge, place of transmutation, and an embodiment of the Afro-diasporic religious figure of Yemayá, the orisha who is most directly tied to water. Oceans, seas, and rivers are the crux of narrative applications by writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa in her seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which likens the Rio Grande to an open wound "where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds," and thus the locus of trauma, but also of proce...