African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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
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3 pp., Argues that religion in the Caribbean and Latin America embody "gender ideology," the dialectical contradictions expressed in moments of patriarchal dominance and feminism and women’s liberation. These influence and guide the action of a particular class or social group in its own interest.
Discusses the popular notions of sexuality that lay behind the women's bodily displays during Trinidad Carnival, the iconic Carnival experience in the region, and contrasts these to some Christian notions of the body and sexuality, which see the body ('the flesh') and sexuality, as problematic even sinful.
Discusses the ways in which Santeria gatherings produce an alternative use of otherwise stigmatized language for 'gay' practitioners. Through the use of distinctive language to reference all of these populations, we may rethink the relationship between identities and practices, and within that, gender presentations vis a vis identities.
The article reviews several books including "Black Puerto Rican Identity and Religious Experience," by Samiri Hernández-Hiraldo, "Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Bahia, Brazil," by Stephen Selka, and "Conversion of a Continent: Contemporary Religious Change in Latin America," edited by Timothy J. Steigenga and Edward L. Cleary.
La Habana Vieja, Ciudad de La Habana, Cuba: Casa Editora Abril
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African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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204 p., Comentado e ilustrado sobre los números y leyendas cubanas afrodescendientes. Sus entradas léxicas muentran deidades, mitos y leyendas, con sus significado, caracterización, así como la impronta africana, europea y cubanas en sus interrelaciones y transculturaciones.
Existing knowledge of supplementary education, that is education organized and run by political, faith or ethnic groups outside of formal schooling, is patchy. This article is an exploration of the histories of supplementary education in the 20th century. Presents some new historical evidence concerning African Caribbean and Irish supplementary education.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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.
