African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
309 p., Examines how African religions display themselves in the contemporary world, particularly in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. It studies their continued dynamism and relationship with other religious traditions, and contributes to the ongoing debate on syncretism. Includes Stephen D. Glazier's "Contested rituals of the African diaspora," pp. 105-119.
Writer Zora Neale Hurston notes the identity and culture of the Africans in the U.S., in which there is struggle in resisting with violence against the slave societies and racial discrimination to maintain the culture. Mentions the association of black ritual practices on Hurston's writings, "Mules and Men" and "Moses, Man of the Mountain," where slavery is considered as factor of spreading the folk arts.
233 p., Analyzes three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their respective muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. Maps the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto's As mulheres de Tijucopapo / The Women of Tijucopapo , Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker , and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
