Chabela Ramírez, the black singer and activist born in Montevideo in 1958, is a singular personality of candombe, the only multi-form Afro-Uruguayan musical genre. Retracing her trajectory leads us through the history of Uruguay's black community (10% of the total population) and candombe, with particular attention on how this musical expression went from devalued practice to national heritage in a country deeply marked by a Eurocentric ideology. Ramírez founded and gave voice, with Afrogama, the choir and dance group that she leads, to a unique aesthetic thought that brought meaning to candombe via the field of Afro-religions (Umbanda and Batuque).
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:
219 p., Explores current trends in the interdisciplinary study of literature and theology. Includes Fiona Darroch's "Re-imagining the sacred in Caribbean literature."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
259 p, Reúne textos e ilustrações que propõem-se a comentar e mostrar certos aspectos do culto aos orixás em seus lugares de origem, na Africa (Nigéria, Angolo e Togo) e no novo mundo (Brasil e Antilhas), para onde foram levados, em séculos passados, pelos escravos.;
