African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
138 p, Description and analysis of the two most important religions of African descent in Cuban spiritual life: the first of Yoruban origin; the second of Congo-Bantu origin
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
282 p, A popular exposition of the theology of the Rastafarians. Attempts to allow the Rasta to explain their doctrines in their own words, examining all key doctrines in different chapters.
An essay is presented which discusses the religious history and identity of the Caribbean Area and Africa from the Haitian Revolution through the 2010s, with a particular focus on Islam and voodooism. African and Caribbean identities, including the role that cosmopolitanism plays in identity formation, are discussed. An overview of the religious identity of the Muslim Haitian Revolution leader Dutty Boukman is provided.
The article focuses on the interactions between anglophone blacks, black Caribbeans, and indigenous southern Mesoamericans during the second half of the 18th century. The author discusses the history of race relations between Europeans, Africans, and Indians within the British and Spanish empires, examines the relationship between Mayas and Spanish colonists, and analyzes the role of religious differences within their encounters.
243 p, "Explores the Rastafari movement and the Nation of Islam as institutions that provide a group-identity for their adherents. The study seeks to determine the characteristics of the identity that is institutionalized by each movement, and the nature of the institutionalization process. The research was conducted primarily in South Florida where both movements exist... Both movements were found to be millenarian in nature, essentially because of the significant utility of the concept that their members would rise to prominence through God's grace. Additionally, both movements were identified as expressive social movements, since they were determined as being primarily concerned with changing the attitudes of their members rather than effecting structural social change." (author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
202 p, "The Quest for the Cuban Christ, the most recent work of Miguel A. De La Torre, is an exceptionally concise exploration of the ways in which Cubans have both conceived and perceived religion in general and Jesus Christ in particular, over the last five centuries. Specifically, the author examines religion and spirituality from the point of view of both subaltern and dominant groups throughout the history of Cuba. The real focus, however, is on the role of faith in the formation of the identity of Cubans resident and in exile that have been historically subordinated to the interests of hegemonic powers like Spain, the United States, and successive Cuban (including revolutionary) governments." (Jason M. Yaremko, H-LatAm [October, 2003]))
The month of March sees thousands of West Indians in the U.S. and abroad in colorful celebration of their Phagwa holiday- the origin of which is almost mythical and its exact time of origination is not known
"En Martinique, lors des décennies qui précèdent l'abolition de l'esclavage, tous les groupes sociaux redoutent les sorts et les maléfices qui peuvent leur être jetés. Les colons ont peur des nègres empoisonneurs, les esclaves et les affranchis sont terrorisés par les pratiques magiques qui les menacent. Certes la religion catholique prétend protéger, mais lui est souvent préférée l'intervention d'un sorcier désenvouteur." (author)
Special Religion issue, Includes Martha Ellen Davis, "Diasporal dimensions of Dominican folk religion and music"; Loren Y. Kajikawa, D'Angelo's voodoo technology: African cultural memory and the ritual of popular music consumption"; Joseph M. Murphy, "'Chango 'ta vein'/chango has come': Spiritual embodiment in the Afro-Cuban ceremony, bembé"; Teresa L. Reed, "Shared possessions: Black Pentecostals, Afro-Caribbeans, and sacred music"; and Rebecca Sager, "Transcendence through aesthetic experience: Divining a common wellspring under conflicting Caribbean and African American religious value systems."
Can musical sounds reveal history, or collective identity, or new notions of geography, in different ways than texts or migrating people themselves? This essay offers the idea that the sounds of music, with their capacity to index memories and associations, become sonic points on a cognitive compass that orients diasporic people in time and space. Explores grassroots religious musical productions to show that Afro-Caribbean groups can stake out multiple diasporic identities in overlapping diasporic spaces through the various political registers of tribe, kingdom, and nation.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
399 p, Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them.
"The Spanish expression--la cultura cura (culture heals)--is an affirmation of the potential healing power of a variety of cultural practices that together constitute the ethos of a people"
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published by Paria Publishing Company Limited, 1955., 43 p, Documents Carr’s research and findings, during time spent with the Antoine family, at their Belmont Valley compound. The material Carr collected in the early 1950s remains the most detailed source of information about the beginnings of the Belmont group. Carr interviewed diverse Belmont inhabitants, but most important, he spoke at length with Henry Antoine, the son of Robert, the founder. Henry provided Carr with details about his father's life in Africa prior to his coming to Trinidad and about his establishment as a Rada leader at Belmont.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
p. 150
Notes:
This project was designed to raise the consciousness of members of the African-Bahamian church through a series of lectures which focused upon the particularities of the African experience
Garvey's work caused him to become a prophet to Rastafarians and a national hero in Jamaica. The article is reprinted in Rex Nettleford's Caribbean Quarterly monograph: Rastafari (Kingston: Carribean Quarterly, University of the West Indies, 1985)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
309 p, Using the stories of ordinary people, Block illustrates how engaging with the powerful rhetoric and rituals of Christianity was central to survival. Isobel Criolla was a runaway slave in Cartagena who successfully lobbied the Spanish governor not to return her to an abusive mistress. Nicolas Burundel was a French Calvinist who served as henchman to the Spanish governor of Jamaica before his arrest by the Inquisition for heresy. Henry Whistler was an English sailor sent to the Caribbean under Oliver Cromwell's plan for holy war against Catholic Spain. Yaff and Nell were slaves who served a Quaker plantation owner, Lewis Morris, in Barbados. Seen from their on-the-ground perspective, the development of modern capitalism, race, and Christianity emerges as a story of negotiation, contingency, humanity, and the quest for community.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
216 p, A history of the Black Church as it developed both in the United States and the Caribbean after the arrival of enslaved Africans. Examines the parallel histories of these two strands of the Black Church, showing where their historical ties remain strong and where different circumstances have led them down unexpectedly divergent paths.
Hume,Yanique (Editor) and Kamugisha,Aaron (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Language:
English; Some texts translated from French and Spanish.
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
623 p., Places classic texts in Caribbean Cultural Thought in dialogue with contemporary interrogations and explorations of regional cultural politics and debates concerning identity and social change; colonialism; diaspora; aesthetics; religion and spirituality; gender and sexuality and nationalisms. The result is a reader that presents a distinctive Caribbean voice that emphasizes the long history of critical writings on culture and its intersection with political work in the Caribbean intellectual tradition from within the academy and beyond.
"There is evidence that religion and spirituality affect psychosocial adjustment to cancer. However, little is known about the perceptions and meanings of religion and spirituality among Black and minority ethnic groups living with cancer in the UK. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 Black Caribbean and 19 White British patients living in South London boroughs with advanced cancer to explore how religion and spirituality influenced their self-reported cancer experience. Twenty-five Black Caribbean patients and 13/19 White British patients volunteered views on the place of religion or God in their life. Spirituality was rarely mentioned." (authors)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
., 335 p., Contains the theoretical basis for understanding African spirituality organized in biblical format, sacred texts, philosophical and historical African tradition. In the first part the author focuses on the traditions and knowledge of the ancient African regions of Congo, Uângara, Takrur and Senegambia, Ethiopia and Zambezia. The second part of the book covers Brazil, the Caribbean, Suriname and the United States.
The article introduces various reports published within the issue, including two on the book "Jesus is Dread," one on Black Pentecostalism and black theology, and one on biblical hermeneutics in the Caribbean region.
"This essay argues that there are deep religio-cultural factors that underpin the varied ways in which many communities read and interpret the Bible. In this essay, I argue that by using a hermeneutical tool that is termed a 'A Black religio-cultural approach,' one can assist faith communities, in this case, African Caribbean communities in Britain, to have greater cognisance of the reasons why they interpret the Bible and particular sections of it in certain, distinctive ways." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
Pointed out the temptation of historians to set aside religious motivations for mission because 'we live in an era that is not thus motivated'. Rejects social upgrading as a motivation for missionaries
Taylor, Patrick (Editor) and Case, Frederick Ivor (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
2 vols. (1144 p.), Considers religious traditions such as Vodou, Rastafari, Sunni Islam, Sanatan Dharma, Judaism, and the Roman Catholic and Seventh-day Adventist churches. Detailed subentries present topics such as religious rituals, beliefs, practices, specific historical developments, geographical differences, and gender roles within major traditions. Also included are entries that address the religious dimensions of geographical territories that make up the Caribbean.
Blanes,Ruy Llera (Editor) and Espirito Santo,Diana (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2014
Published:
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
305 p., By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities--with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions--providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents.
85 p., This thesis examines the practice of Obeah--an Afro-Caribbean system of healing, harming, and divination through the use of spiritual powers--within two slave communities in Berbice and Demerara (British Guiana). This study is based primarily on legal documents--including testimony from more than a dozen slaves--generated during the criminal trials of two men accused of practicing Obeah in 1819 and 1821-22. In contrast to most previous studies of Obeah, which have been based largely on descriptions provided by British observers, this project takes advantage of this complex, overlapping body of evidence to explore the social dynamics of Obeah as experienced by enslaved men and women themselves, including Obeah practitioners, their clients, and other witnesses. This study reveals that Obeah rituals could be extremely violent, that Obeah practitioners were feared as well as respected among their contemporaries, that the authority of Obeah practitioners was based on demonstrable success, and that slave communities in general were complex social worlds characterized by conflict and division as well as by support and unity--conclusions that combine to produce a fresh, humane vision of Afro-diasporan culture and community under slavery.
117 p., Literary scholars frequently analyze the allusions to Western Christianity apparent in Toni Morrison's novels, but these studies overlook the ways in which some of her novels are informed by a Caribbean presence. This study argues that Rastafari themes, symbols, and ideologies are recurrent in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, Beloved, and Song of Solomon. Rastafari is a social movement primarily concerned with restoring the image of Africa to a holy place. A Rastafari analysis of these texts broadens the literary spectrum to suggest that these novels highlight Morrison's attempt to write about the multifaceted element of the black community, which remains deeply connected to its American, African, and Caribbean roots.
327 p., "This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation. My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests, herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized-evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom , "rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge" (2005:4). This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions." --The Author.
186 p., Preacher's Cave, an archaeological site in North Eleuthera, Bahamas, is arguably one of the most important historical places in that country. This large cave, isolated in a natural setting, has long been associated in the popular imagination with the first English colonists who shipwrecked in the Bahamas in 1648 and laid the foundation for the modern nation. Before the present work, no systematic scientific archaeological work had ever been conducted at this site. These excavations, in conjunction with the written record, also suggest that the area surrounding the site is the location of the first free black community in the country.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
330 p., Explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá , on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. Analyzes the texts Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998), Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000), and Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966). The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together.
178 p., This dissertation is about the role that conservative religious notions of racial ideology played in the historical origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. Focuses on the writings of an African Caribbean, Edward Blyden, as the centerpiece of the study. Blyden, a native of Saint Thomas (Virgin Islands) and considered one of the "fathers" of both pan-Africanism and African nationalism, was a particularly complex diasporic intellectual. Traveling first to the United States in the pre-Civil War period, then to Africa and Britain at the height of the European imperial venture - and Christian missionary efforts - Blyden served as a conduit between the West (the United States and Britain) and both a traditional and a Muslim Africa. He saw his role as one of mediating (critiquing/translating) these divergent voices and ideologies with the object of constituting a "modern," pan-African subject.
Glen reviews "The History of Early Methodism in Antigua: A Critique of Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood's Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Carribean to 1830 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).;
Goldschmidt,Henry (Author) and McAlister,Elizabeth A. (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2004
Published:
New York: Oxford University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
338 p, Includes Elizabeth McAlister's "The; Jew in the Haitian imagination: a popular history of anti-Judaism and proto-racism"; John Burdick's "Catholic Afro mass and the dance of eurocentrism in Brazil"; and Kate Ramsey's "Legislating 'civilization' in postrevolutionary Haiti"
Gossai,Hemchand (Author) and Murrell,Nathaniel Samuel (Author)
Format:
Monograph
Publication Date:
2000
Published:
New York: St. Martins Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
320 p, The Bible is the most widely read and influential book in the Caribbean. It seems to be everywhere and in every thing. The Bible has been used to name, claim, oppress, and exploit natives and the diaspora populations in the Caribbean, and it continues to define Caribbean reality and morality in the 21st century. In this anthology, scholars analyze the most fundamental assumptions and practices derived from different readings of the Bible at different epochs in Caribbean history. It tells a gripping tale of the struggle of ethnic peoples to find meaning, “existence,” and reality in a world they did not create; Includes a chapter that analyzes the songs of reggae singers Bob Marley and the Wailers for theological content, and another that examines the poetry of Ras Benjamin Zephaniah for biblical allusions
301 p., In many of the francophone Caribbean's most influential texts, a black messiah conquers his enemies and takes over the land. This man is a superman, who hears the cry of his people and delivers them from slavery and the Code Noir (a black code). He draws strength from Voodoo and Roman Catholicism to set his people free or die trying. Argues that scholars have not studied the extent to which the messiah figure dominates French Caribbean fiction and how this trend colors our perceptions of black leadership. After presenting messianism in the history of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, the author considers key messianic passages in francophone literature and highlight where rhetorical devices and figurative language transcribe metaphysical beliefs. These close readings correct the misconception that the French Caribbean and its religions are not messianic.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
374 p., This volume's transnational mixture, along with its use of creative analytical approaches, challenges existing paradigms and summons new models for studying women, religions, and diasporic shiftings across time and space. Includes "É a senzala: slavery, women, and embodied knowledge in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé" by Rachel Elizabeth Harding, "'I smoothed the way; I opened doors': women in the Yoruba-Orisha tradition of Trinidad' by Tracey E. Hucks, and "Joining the African diaspora: migration and diasporic religious culture among the Garifuna in Honduras and New York" by Paul Christopher Johnson.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
75 p.
Rastafari: the background of the movement, the emergence and development movement, lifestyle, Rastafari: the background of the movement, the emergence and development movement, lifestyle.
Rastafari: the background of the movement, the emergence and development movement, lifestyle
Rastafari: the background of the movement, the emergence and development movement, lifestyle
Rastafari: the background of the movement, the emergence and development movement, lifestyle
196 p., Argues that practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe in the city of Santiago de Cuba construct a religious genealogy inclusive of spirits to affirm their sense of an "African" identity in contemporary Cuba. Demonstrates that these practitioners' sense of being African includes an understanding that they are the ritual descendants and stewards of the blended spiritual knowledge created by sixteenth and seventeenth century AmerIndian Taíno and Kongolese inhabitants of eastern/Oriente, Cuba.
251 p., Analysis of characteristic traits of Afrodescendants in the Atabaque and the Conférence Haïtienne des Religieux et Religieuses research work. These publications are used to bring to light the Afro-Brazilian and Haitian theological reflection as an expression of their commitment to multicultural and mestizo Brazil as well as black Haiti. Based on the comparative study of the content of these theologies developed in Brazil and in Haiti, highlights two separate currents from 1986 to 2004 in theological databases. This delimitation corresponds to the phase of publication of results of three consultations about black theologies in Brazil in 1986, in 1995 and 2004. The CHR's works date from 1991 to 1999. This study aims to trace their practice of the Christian faith, as well as their development and their evolution.
Chicago: Chicago School of Professional Psychology
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
107 p, This research attempts to understand the way Jamaican immigrants conceptualize psycho-spiritual illness in the socio-cultural context of Obeah, a West African religious tradition sharing an affinity with Vodou. In particular, this research will examine Jamaican immigrants' knowledge of, or experience with Obeah and how they construe psycho-spiritual illness in light of indigenous beliefs.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
353 p, Historians and anthropologists consider how marginalized spiritual traditions—such as obeah, Vodou, and Santería—have been understood and represented across the Caribbean since the seventeenth century. In essays focused on Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the wider Anglophone Caribbean, the contributors explore the fields of power within which Caribbean religions have been produced, modified, appropriated, and policed.
237 p., Arrivé en Haïti avec les Noirs d'Afrique aux 15e et 16e siècles, le vodou est depuis ce temps un élément de la culture haïtienne. Il y a aujourd'hui une coexistence des catholiques, des protestants avec les vodouisants d'où le problème de syncrétisme qui caractérise le vodou. Le silence entretenu à son sujet, dans divers milieux et pour. différentes raisons, renforce les préjugés vieux de plusieurs siècles et rend difficile l'évangélisation. Évangéliser la personne vodouisante suppose de bien connaître sa perception de Dieu et les valeurs véhiculées par le vodou. Un sondage auprès des jeunes et d'adultes a enrichi mes connaissances sur le vodou et les moyens d'une évangélisation en Haïti.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
251 p., Explores how Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdés (also known as Plácido) appropriated Hispanic literature to inscribe an African descendant subjectivity in 19th century proto-nationalist Cuban discourse. Revises Mary Louise Pratt's notion of "intercultural texts" and Angel Rama's "literary transculturation", proposing "transculturated colonial literature" to trace the contradictions, re-significations, silences and shifts in the aesthetic and ideological function of Manzano and Plácido's texts. As such, 19th century Afro-Cuban literature is analyzed as an active space of negotiation and exchange disputing racial and religious hierarchies to inscribe an Afro-Cuban religio-cultural subject. The author concludes that both Manzano and Plácido disrupted the aesthetic and ideological norms of the colonial status quo by producing the first instance of literary transculturation in Cuba.
