Afro-American Religions

O Vodu haitiano é um sistema de crenças surgido do encontro e hibridismo, realizado em condições de forças muito assimétricas, entre o catolicismo e as crenças dos africanos transportados à força para o trabalho escravo na parte francesa da Ilha da Hispaniola. Ele possui uma série de similaridades com o culto aos voduns da África Ocidental e de sua recriação no nordeste brasileiro e em outras regiões americanas, mas também uma série de especificidades que têm a ver com a incorporação em sua mitologia e práticas das relações políticas e religiosas próprias da história do Haiti, região marcada principalmente pelo seu original processo de independência, surgido de uma rebelião escrava, animado pelos ideais republicanos das Revoluções Americana e Francesa, muito estimulado pela peculiar religiosidade local e alvo de uma sistemática sabotagem da parte dos demais países ocidentais. O Vodu haitiano é organizado ao redor do culto aos loa, espíritos de diversos tipos, que se manifestam entre os seres humanos através de atos prodigiosos ou da incorporação em determinados médiuns, em cerimônias especificamente destinadas a isso. Os loa são organizados em nações e linhagens, reunidos de acordo com sua origens, relações e personalidades. Uma destas linhagens é a das Èrzulie, espíritos femininos muito populares e importantes no sistema vodu, bons para se pensar como este funciona e como se conjugam em seu interior elementos históricos e religiosos de procedências diversas. O objetivo desta oficina é, partindo de uma breve caracterização da história do Haiti e do Vodu, e fazendo um breve inventário sinóptico dos loa Èrzulie, tratar de algumas questões referentes às relações entre história e religião.

This chapter identifies a substratum of self-titled "professors of Oriental and African mystic science" who collaborated with each other and created new identities in the context of the marketplace, the Marcus Garvey movement, Orientalism, and influences as diverse as occultism, Spiritualism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, Anglo-Israelism, Judaism, and
Islam. The specter of African Americans adopting and using Orientalism puts a different twist on the concept.  The discourse of civilization was rarely simply rejected or resisted outright; rather it was recycled and reformulated. For at least some African Americans, adopting Orientalist identities could express anti-imperialist political sympathies, expand personal freedom, and even allow criticism of the West's conceit to be more civilized and technologically superior to the rest of the world.

Black Orientalists triangulated between dark and light by reaching outside of America, in an attempt to overcome American racism and criticize the dominant discourse of civilization.  The work shows that Harlem's networks of religious practitioners used religious, magical, and ideological systems to help create Black Israelism, Rastafarianism, Father Divine's movement, and some early forms of Black Islam. Orientalism is a construct that can help us to reconceptualize and reconnect many of the "Black Gods of the Metropolis."  Read in the larger contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the migration of rural
peoples into the quickened pace of Northern cities, this approach suggests that there was a rich substratum of working class cultural creativity that deserves to be read into the history of the literary and artistic Harlem Renaissance.  It challenges us to think of working class African Americans not merely as workers or migrants, but as organic intellectuals capable of voicing their own dreams, mysticism and religions that were articulate responses to the key concerns of the age.

The current practice of the cult of María Lionza is one of the most important and yet unexplored religious practices in Venezuela. Based on long-term fieldwork, this book explores the role of images and visual culture within the cult. By adopting a relational approach, A Goddess in Motion shows how the innumerable images of this goddess—represented as an Indian, white or mestizo woman—move constantly from objects to bodies, from bodies to dreams, and from the religion domain to the art world. In short, this book is a fascinating study that sheds light on the role of visual creativity in contemporary religious manifestations.

This paper analyses the role that European Spiritism plays in the religious history of Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico and compares it to the influence of American Spiritualism on the religious landscape of New Orleans. The picture is very similar in Brazil and Cuba, with Spiritist groups and churches on the one hand and Spiritist elements in African-derived religions on the other, the former covering a range from “white” organisations—who, as a rule, see themselves as “philosophies” rather than “religions”—to “white-washed” African-derived religions (like Brazilian Umbanda). As to Puerto Rico, purely African derived religions are rather imported than autochthonous. In all those places, the religions in question focus strongly on healing. Black Spiritual Churches in New Orleans are—as a rule—a later development, and their origins as well as the degree of “African” elements they include are still discussed among scholars.

Buenas Tardes Amig@s:

Aquell@s amig@s que estén interesados en mi libro titulado “Vudú en Puerto Rico” pueden obtenerlo a través de Amazon.com por medio electrónico “Kindle”, su precio es de $7.94 y si tiene “Kindle Unlimited” lo puede leer gratis…

¡Saludos!

O presente artigo visa analisar o conceito de “religião” e suas implicações concetuais para a observação das religiões africanas, partindo do caso dos yorùbá da África Ocidental e visitando o candomblé, religião brasileira de matriz africana fecundada com o comércio de escravos. Pretende-se, então, traçar um roteiro diferente para a concetualização da experiência religiosa africana nos enfoques anteriores, procurando oferecer alternativas face às categorias clássicas de “monoteísmo”, “politeísmo” e “panteão” e observando simultaneamente o que constitui a atitude religiosa no caso yorùbá e seu descendente candomblé, a partir da ideia de que a religião nos presentes estudos de caso se faz.

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This paper aims to focus on the concept of “religion” and its conceptual implications to the observation of African religions taking the Yorùbá religious attitudes and beliefs, as well as candomblé’s, as case studies. It is our intention to trace a new itinerary in the conceptualization of African religious experiences taking the native structures as the scenery for theory. Having present the idea that religion in those contexts is made, it is intended to present alternative categories to the classic “monotheism”, “polytheism” and “pantheon”.

Building on the suggestion by the editors of the Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011) to re-frame the fi eld of literary studies from a global and transnational perspective, this article suggests a new approach to the concept of ‘contact literature’. Reading American literature as ‘contact literature’ assumes that even if an American literary text is written in English, the other languages of the ‘contact zone’ in which the text originated and/or to which it alludes also impacted the writing process and therefore need to be included in the analysis. This new approach to the analysis of American literature is applied here to Sojourner Truth’s famous slave narrative, published in 1850. Since Truth spent the first 30 years of her life as a slave in a
predominantly Dutch-speaking environment in the Hudson Valley, analyzing her narrative as ‘contact literature’ implies a focus on Dutch cultural traces. This is done in two chapters — one dealing with Dutch language and literature, the other with Dutch Pietism and the slave narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw — that present new perspectives on the impact of Dutch culture on Truth’s Narrative.

This papers aims to observe the concept of ‘religion’ and its conceptual implications observing African religions. The Yorùbá people of Western Africa will be taken as a case-study. It is our intention to prove that the long historical discourse around a conceptual model of ‘religion’ results from the application of a ‘methodological eurocentrism’. This is expressed through the application of occidental scientific categories and through the dichotomy between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’. Thia paper intends to draw a different route for the conceptualization of the African religious experience taking the yorùbá religion as case-study, among who the word for ‘religion’,  ẹsin, refers to “duty” or “obligation”. Lastly we will be thinking about the meaning of theology among the Africans, giving an alternative theoretical framework to the study of African religions.

The most important recent development in the history of Afro-American religions is their expansion across ethnic and national barriers. The diffusion of these religions has created networks of ritual kinship that now span national boundaries giving rise to transnational communities of worshippers. The paper argues that there are stages in the formation of these transnational communities that are related to the religious careers of the practitioners, since the different religious variants they encounter in this path have different implications for their development. In this process of increasing transnationalization, the nationality of origin of the different Afro-American religious variants remains important and must be dealt with in different ways throughout the individual’s religious career. It is argued that the re- Africanization processes that have been observed in practically all Afro-American variants in their new settings constitute the latest stage in the development of these religions and that they are instrumental in the creation of a world religion and of a truly multifarious transnational community of worshippers.

En la actualidad, no se podría comprender el desarrollo histórico de América Latina sin tener en cuenta el proceso que tuvo lugar en el periodo que abarca desde la esclavitud a la independencia. Esto se debe a  los quince millones de africanos que acabaron en América.  Con ellos entraría en el Nuevo Mundo otra cosmovisión, que se sumaría al acerbo cultural americano. Hoy en día la afluencia africana ha pasado a formar parte del imaginario colectivo de América. La esclavitud ha constituido un paradigma importante en la conformación de la identidad de América Latina.  el objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar la progresión que va desde la esclavitud hasta la Independencia y la forma en que se fue vertebrando la identidad afro-americana. Para ello se analizará el caso de Haití durante los siglo XVIII y XIX. Este trabajo se centra en los antecedentes y la revolución de 1804, que tanto impacto tuvo en la política americana, pues Haití fue el primer país de Latino-América en independizarse y mostrar una identidad nacional propia.