WOMEN AND RELIGION IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA: KNOWLEDGE, POWER, AND PERFORMANCE edited by R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage

I examine the staging of time, justice and performance in The Trial of Governor Eyre, investigating what this site-specific performance reveals about the experience of time in the context of colonial violence. In doing so, I show that the work’s discourse on temporality reflects a vital sense of performativity within an Afro-diasporic context. The work’s use of temporality, besides reflecting a cultural adaptation, allows for a remoulding of forms, coupling law and theatre in confronting Eyre’s mass executions of 1865. This remoulding of forms (law as theatre, theatre as law) provides a potential for postcolonial witnessing not available when either performance protocol is used on its own. Using Blazevic’s and Cale Feldman’s concept of ‘misperformance’, I argue that this play-trial arises out of a Benjaminian sense of historicity, providing an experience of inchoate justice that finds fulfilment in the present. The Trial of Governor Eyre points, more broadly, to a new ‘problem-space’ in African diaspora political theory, where resistance against colonial structures of oppression is increasingly mounted on the ground of justice itself and through which the legal apparatuses of colonialism become a site of critical memory. Through the play’s deployment of ritual and its plastic moulding of time, 1865 is enlisted as a key historical conjuncture for thinking through the cultural disenchantment of race, but also of the formalist, creative resources that can be mobilised for reimagining humanness in the contemporary moment.

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The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses ◽

10.1177/0008429810373321 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 39 (3) ◽

pp. 379-403 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Terry Rey ◽

Karen Richman

Keyword(s):

African Diaspora ◽

Atlantic World ◽

Religious Communities ◽

Ethnographic Research ◽

African Religion ◽

Body And Soul ◽

Religious Syncretism ◽

National Boundaries ◽

And Performance

The convergence of African religion and Christianity in the Atlantic world has inspired some of the most significant and most analyzed examples of syncretism in the study of religion. Scholarly discussions of these phenomena, however, tend to portray religions like Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil as mergers of various Euro-Christian and ‘‘traditional’’ African elements that chiefly result from processes of cognitive ideation, thereby blurring the integrative somatic dimensions of religious syncretism. Modes of embodying knowledge, power, and morality are thus largely absent from the discussion of religious syncretism in Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, as well as other contact-cultural religions, whose congregational and performance spaces now span national boundaries. Drawing upon the historiography of Kongolese and Haitian religion, and on our multi-site ethnographic research among religious communities in Haiti, to think about religious syncretism in the African diaspora, this paper focuses on two key metaphors of mimetic knowledge and embodiment, mare and pwen (tying and point), arguing that they are both fundamental processes in Haitian religious syncretism and essential tropes for understanding Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, processes that are of predominantly Central African, and especially Kongolese, origin.

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Habeas Ficta

Afro-Fabulations ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479856275.003.0008 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 166-184

Author(s):

Tavia Nyong'o

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

African Diaspora ◽

Black Feminist Theory ◽

Black Feminist ◽

Recent Developments ◽

And Performance

This chapter engages recent developments in black feminist theory, in particular those that emphasize the pornotroping of the flesh, in order to outline a new theory of fictive ethnicity. Noting how black ethnicity has emerged as an issue in film and performance, the chapter suggests that a fabulation of ethnicity (as well as race) is critical to an understanding of angular socialities in the contemporary African diaspora.

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The Being and Becoming of African Diaspora Art

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875813000091 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 405-416

Author(s):

JACQUELINE FRANCIS

Keyword(s):

Material Culture ◽

San Francisco ◽

African Diaspora ◽

African Descent ◽

Black Body ◽

West African ◽

Social Formation ◽

Cultural Consciousness ◽

National Belonging ◽

And Performance

By and large, “African diaspora art” is a generic label, presently applied with the purpose of broadly situating modern and contemporary artwork by people of African descent in discussions of African art, most often in connection with “traditional” West African ritual sculpture, installation, and performance. I focus on the work that this term has done or has been summoned to do in the US since the late twentieth century. This essay considers several artistic projects and critical and institutional missions linked to African diaspora art and culture: (1) a 1960s essay by art historian Robert Farris Thompson that organizes nineteenth-century material culture under this heading, (2) the black body as icon of the African diaspora in in the work of US artist David Hammons from the 1970s, and (3) the founding of the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco in 2002. We are in the process of institutionalizing African diaspora art, situating it as a cultural consciousness that supersedes other identifications and narratives of association. We value and celebrate this epistemological construct, and, in doing so, reveal that it is also a social formation driven by doubts about racial and national belonging and the desire for a transformative signification and new, organizing logics of being.Cultural identity … is a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being.”Stuart Hall1By and large, “African diaspora art” is a generic label, often summoned to broadly situate modern and contemporary artwork by people of African descent and to connect it to “traditional” West African ritual sculpture, installation, and performance.2 It is a valued and celebrated epistemological construct; it is also a social formation driven by doubts about racial and national belonging and the desire for a transformative signification and organizing logics of difference. We are in the process of institutionalizing African diaspora art, situating it as a cultural consciousness that is meant to supersede other powerful identifications and narratives of political association.

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Africanness in Action

10.1093/oso/9780197549551.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Juan Diego Díaz

Keyword(s):

Case Studies ◽

African Diaspora ◽

African Ancestry ◽

Symphony Orchestra ◽

Northeastern Brazil ◽

African Continent ◽

African Music ◽

Music Culture ◽

Big Band ◽

And Performance

This book discusses how musicians from Bahia, an emblematic African diasporic location in northeastern Brazil, think about, discuss, compose, rehearse, perform, and stage music inspired by what they perceive to be their own African ancestry. It argues that these musicians assert Afro-Brazilian identities and connect to the African continent and other diasporic places by creatively engaging essentialized notions about African music and culture: instead of mechanically reproducing these tropes, they emphasize them or downplay them. The book theorizes these preconceived notions about African music, culture, and performance as tropes of Africanness, emphasizing that they exist in two interrelated realms: as essentialist ideas in discourse and as concrete practices and sounds. Six commonly encountered tropes of African music are analyzed: the notions that its most important parameter is rhythm and that it is dominated by percussion; that it is meant to be danced to or deeply embodied rather than intellectualized; that it always touches on the sacred; that it is spontaneous and improvisatory; and that it reflects communalism rather than individualism. Through four case studies from Bahia (a jazz big band called Orkestra Rumpilezz, a symphony orchestra called the Orquestra Afrosinfônica, and two berimbau orchestras led by capoeira practitioners), the book demonstrates the nuances of musical creation in the African diaspora, acknowledging the genuine impact that essentialisms have on Bahian music while showing that they may not be an essential part of the musicians’ African roots.

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Femme Migritude

Minnesota Review ◽

10.1215/00265667-8128421 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2020 (94) ◽

pp. 67-84

Author(s):

Vanita Reddy

Keyword(s):

African Diaspora ◽

South Asian ◽

Global South ◽

Black Atlantic ◽

Spoken Word ◽

Prose Poem ◽

Global North ◽

And Performance

This article examines the queer feminist Afro-Asian poetics and politics of spoken word and performance artist Shailja Patel’s 2006 onewoman show and 2010 prose poem, both titled Migritude. Patel’s migritude poetics resonates with and departs from much contemporary migritude writing, particularly with respect to the genre’s focus on a global-North-based, black Atlantic African diaspora. The article draws attention to a “brown Atlantic,” in which Africa is the site both of diaspora and of homeland. More important, it shows that Patel’s queer femininity unsettles a diasporic logic of racial exceptionalism. This logic aids and abets a (black) native/(South Asian) migrant divide in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. Patel’s femme migritude, as I call it, draws on nonequivalent histories of black and Asian racialized dispossession to construct a mode of global-South, cross-racial political relationality.

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Women and Religion in the African Diaspora

10.1353/book.3246 ◽

2006 ◽

Keyword(s):

African Diaspora ◽

Women And Religion

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Dominican Women’s Refracted African Diasporas

Colonial Phantoms ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479850457.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 153-180

Author(s):

Dixa Ramírez

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

African Diaspora ◽

White Supremacist ◽

Cultural Expressions ◽

And Performance ◽

Dominican Women ◽

The U.S

This chapter engages the creative and anti-hegemonic apertures that become possible from a diasporic space and imaginary by analyzing the cultural expressions, including literature, music, and performance, of several diasporic Dominican women. Building on black diasporic feminist theory, the chapter explores how diasporic Dominicans engage with, adopt, or refuse definitions of blackness as they predominate in the U.S. through the writings of Chiqui Vicioso and the performances of musical artists Amara la Negra and Maluca Mala. Because they all resist to some extent the white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies that govern dominant paradigms throughout the hemisphere, the chapter locates improper behavior as the primary vehicle in which these artists invert and/or refuse the gendered, classed, and raced scripts expected from Dominican women. Together, these diasporic subjects (in the sense of the Dominican and the African diaspora) evince the prismatic nature of the African Diaspora.

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