Imagining Religions in a Trinidad Village: The Africanity of the Spiritual Baptist Movement and the Politics of Comparing Religions

The Herskovitses went to Trinidad in search of continuities between African and Trinidadian social life, but wrote that Trinidadians they met were indifferent to the existence of such continuities. Their questions of African origins struck chords in a larger web of contestations over the colonial definition and repression of certain religious practices and communities on the island, in particular the so-called “Shouters,” or Spiritual Baptists. Through a close reading of the Herskovitses’ field notes, rather than indifference to connections with Africa, this article tries to flesh out what people were interested in, and what was at stake in emphasizing or marginalizing differences, similarities, or connections between religions (African or otherwise) given who was speaking to whom in what context.

Book reviews

A World Among these Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America, by Roberto Márquez (reviewed by Peter Hulme) Caribbean Reasonings: The Thought of New World, The Quest for Decolonisation, edited by Brian Meeks & Norman Girvan (reviewed by Cary Fraser) Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, by Paul B. Miller (reviewed by Kerstin Oloff) Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze, by Maria Cristina Fumagalli (reviewed by Maureen Shay) Who Abolished Slavery: Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques, edited by Seymour Drescher & Pieter C. Emmer, and Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R . Peterson (reviewed by Claudius Fergus) The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery, by Gustav Ungerer (reviewed by James Walvin) Children in Slavery through the Ages, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers & Joseph C. Miller (reviewed by Indrani Chatterjee) The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, by Peter T. Leeson (reviewed by Kris Lane) Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah, by Keith Sandiford (reviewed by Elaine Savory) Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul, edited by Jennifer Rahim & Barbara Lalla (reviewed by Supriya M. Nair) Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (reviewed by Lyndon K. Gill) Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, by Kaiama L. Glover (reviewed by Asselin Charles) Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature, by Néstor E. Rodríguez (reviewed by Dawn F. Stinchcomb) The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, edited by Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt & Emma Smith (reviewed by Leah Rosenberg) Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba, by Todd Ramón Ochoa (reviewed by Brian Brazeal) El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader, by Araceli Tinajero (reviewed by Juan José Baldrich) Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959, by Gillian McGillivray (reviewed by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio) The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i, by Christine Skwiot (reviewed by Amalia L. Cabezas) A History of the Cuban Revolution, by Aviva Chomsky (reviewed by Michelle Chase) The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, by Todd F. Tietchen (reviewed by Stephen Fay) The Devil in the Details: Cuban Antislavery Narrative in the Postmodern Age, by Claudette M. Williams (reviewed by Gera Burton) Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance during the Cold War, by Hector Amaya (reviewed by Ann Marie Stock) Perceptions of Cuba: Canadian and American Policies in Comparative Perspective, by Lana Wylie (reviewed by Julia Sagebien) Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, by Frank Andre Guridy (reviewed by Susan Greenbaum) The Irish in the Atlantic World, edited by David T. Gleeson (reviewed by Donald Harman Akenson) The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Walton Look Lai & Tan Chee-Beng (reviewed by John Kuo Wei Tchen) The Island of One People: An Account of the History of the Jews of Jamaica, by Marilyn Delevante & Anthony Alberga (reviewed by Barry Stiefel) Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname, by Wieke Vink (reviewed by Aviva Ben-Ur) Only West Indians: Creole Nationalism in the British West Indies, by F.S.J. Ledgister (reviewed by Jerome Teelucksingh) Cultural DNA: Gender at the Root of Everyday Life in Rural Jamaica, by Diana J. Fox (reviewed by Jean Besson) Women in Grenadian History, 1783-1983, by Nicole Laurine Phillip (reviewed by Bernard Moitt) British-Controlled Trinidad and Venezuela: A History of Economic Interests and Subversions, 1830-1962, by Kelvin Singh (reviewed by Stephen G. Rabe) Export/Import Trends and Economic Development in Trinidad, 1919-1939, by Doddridge H.N. Alleyne (reviewed by Rita Pemberton) Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal, by Colin Clarke & Gillian Clarke (reviewed by Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy) Poverty in Haiti: Essays on Underdevelopment and Post Disaster Prospects, by Mats Lundahl (reviewed by Robert Fatton Jr.) From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, by Millery Polyné (reviewed by Brenda Gayle Plummer) Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, edited by Martin Munro (reviewed by Jonna Knappenberger) Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, by Margarita A. Mooney (reviewed by Rose-Marie Chierici) This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto, by Carol B. Duncan (reviewed by James Houk) Interroger les morts: Essai sur le dynamique politique des Noirs marrons ndjuka du Surinam et de la Guyane, by Jean-Yves Parris (reviewed by H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen & W. van Wetering)